The Yes Men have struck again! In a brilliant performance on June 15, Yes Men Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno posed as oil executives at the GO-EXPO - Canada's largest oil industry trade show which was held at Stampede Park in Calgary, Alberta. This year’s conference attracted more than more than 20,000 visitors and exhibitors from around the world.
Posing as ExxonMobil and National Petroleum Council (NPC) representatives, the Yes Men introduced Vivoleum to a 300+ crowd of oil execs. Vivoleum, they explained, was human flesh converted into oil, a future oil product that will capitalize on the catastrophe of global warming and the many deaths that it will cause.
The speech was accompanied by a 3-D rendering of the process of creating vivoleum.
During the presentation, candles were distributed throughout the crowd and attendees were asked to light the candles – supposedly made of Vivoleum -- in memorium to Reggie, a former ExxonMobil janitor. As the suit-clad listeners set about lighting their candles, the Yes Men played a video tribute to Reggie the Janitor.
It was the video that finally tipped-off organizers. As security guards ushered the Yes Men away from the stage they were swarmed by journalists to whom they continued to explain the process of rendering human flesh into oil.
"We're not talking about killing anyone," Andy Bichlbaum said to reporters, "we're talking about using them after nature has done the hard work. After all, 150,000 people already die from climate-change related effects every year. That's only going to go up - maybe way, way up. Will it all go to waste? That would be cruel."
The Yes Men were taken into custody by Calgary police and later released without charges.
Check out the photographs and press coverage at their website.
These guys are heroes!
Originally by Marisa Olson from Rhizome.org.
Posted by Michael Lithgow on June 18, 2007 in
Art as resistance describes in short form the cultural territory where Art Threat has pitched its tent. So too with the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, an online and print journal out of Los Angeles, CA that bills itself as a “weirdo thinktank” but thoughtfully carves a path for contemplating the form (rather than function) of rebellion.
The third issue was released in May. Topics covered include: Building the Temporary TV Studio: Experimental Media for Feminist Trespass (by Emily Forman), Physiognomy of the Oppressed (by Dave Murphy), Temporary Public Spaces (by Ashley Hunt), Quasi-cinemas and Hand Grenades (by Mariana Botey), Re-enacting Stonewall (by Matt Wolf).
Back issues are archived on their website -- highlights include articles on: CIRCA The Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army, Imagination as an Instrument of Survival, Activist Art and the Counter-Public Sphere, Deescalation Tactics for Outraged SUV Drivers, Decolonizing the Revolutionary Imagination – and much more. It’s a fascinating and excellent bid to deepen the conversation about the relationship between art and social change.
William Butler Yeats wrote “Beauty is truth” (and “truth beauty, that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know’”) ... ‘Beauty is truths’, perhaps rings more clearly to postmodern sensibilities. Art as a refuge for truth(s) is an energetic and expanding cultural space in the fin de siecle of Western Empire.
Posted by Michael Lithgow on June 12, 2007 in
Where do the evolutionaries stand on issues of public concern? Thanks to Norm Magnusson and a whole whack of aluminum and acrylic, the answer to this question and a host of others is now in plain sight. Drawing on the historical markers that have traditionally pointed out a careful selection of people and events that have shaped history, Magnusson has created a series of signs reflecting the faces and places of today. By posting the concerns of contemporary individuals who "on this site stood", the artist unexpectedly draws our attention to the social and political controversies of the present.
A new set of markers has been created especially for an upcoming exhibition by the Aldrich Contempoary Art Museum, who will install Magnusson's signs along Main Street in Ridgefield, Connecticut from June 24 to August 12. One of these signs reads as follows: On this site stood Jane Kino, whose white male coworkers earn 39% more than she does for doing the same job. And another: On this site stood Ian Wikno. Joined the army reserve to pay for college, sent to Iraq March 2005, has not yet returned.
Magnusson firmly believes that signage has the power to shape ideas. "Historical markers are an inherently interesting vehicle for socially pointed thoughts. The types of people who stop to read them are collectively defined more by their curiosity about the world around them than they are by any shared ideological leanings, which makes them a perfect audience for a carefully-crafted message."
For more information, visit the website of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum,
Posted by Rob Maguire on May 28, 2007 in
FLOWINSTITUTE | Addiction Liberators | Products by the FLOWinstitute at the Danish Museum of Design. Photo: Todd Lappin.
Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet. (Mark Twain)
Posted by Rob Maguire on May 8, 2007 in
Estonia isn't in the news much, but after the government decided to implement a controversial law to move a Soviet memorial to soldiers who died fighting the Nazis, and unearth the bodies of several soldiers buried near the monument--which is referred to in the Estonian press simply as pronkssõdur, or bronze soldier--an international furor has ensued, with German, US, Russian and other governments weighing in.
In response, hundreds of--one assumes--members of Estonia's sizable Russian community have rioted in the streets, "clashed," as they say, with police, and looted stores and kiosks downtown.
The most important thing to know about the riots is... apparently, how hilarious some Estonians find them, even as the Estonian Ambassador is attacked by a Putin-backing "youth movement" in Moscow and their country is receiving more international coverage than it has in years.
And that leads to the second most important thing, which is that everyone in Estonia born before, say, 1982, remembers the Soviet occupation. More than likely, they have family members or at least know of people who were shipped off to Siberia or Russia and didn't come back. In a country of 1.5 million, 42,000 is a lot of people to have shipped off, especially with a 60 per cent survival rate. I won't make a list of the other forms of oppression and suppression, but suffice to say that such lists exist.
In my view, Estonians are, at least in principle, entirely justified in removing such a symbol from the downtown of their capital city.
What makes the situation more complicated is the situation of the Russian-speakers who were brought in during the Soviet Era, and more recent Russian-speaking immigrants. Many of them don't have citizenship, and from what I can tell, form the bulk of Estonia's underclass. While the country has become relatively economically successful, inequality is also on the rise, and thousands of people live in third world conditions, in squats and (literally) crumbling apartments...
FULL STORY + COMMENTS
Posted by Dru Oja Jay on May 3, 2007 in
Feeling a little semiotic overload? Advertising imagery and political propaganda spreading in your brain like rust? The folks at subvertr want to give you a chance to fight back. In this Roland Barthes inspired project, the online community is invited to subvert the semiotic power of the images that dominate our cultural landscapes.
The project is based on the observation that our cultural systems are not created by the whole community, but rather are defined by a much smaller “semiotic elite” within processes based on marketing and the desire for profit. The idea is to take these symbols and reassign them new meaning, to invert the traditional one-way relationship of symbol-consuming to symbol-creative. The hope is that this inversion will allow users to create new cultural contexts for well-known symbols and to “regain” symbols that belong to the “collective media imaginary”.
My experience at the site was hit and miss – seemed like a lot of search tags that I tried drew blanks (i.e. consumerism, patriarchy, copyright), and not all of the images make the kind of semiotic leaps that might give an unsuspecting Lilliputin shivers.
A picture of the Pope on a book about fellatio is pretty powerful, as was the “Intifada” coca-cola sign. The potential, however, for a collaboratively created database of culture jamming imagery to be shared and spread around the net – now that gives this Lilliputin shivers… check it out. Invert the semiotic tyranny!
Posted by Michael Lithgow on April 16, 2007 in
A fresh yellow street sign silently instructs Toronto's pedestrians to demonstrate a respect that has long been absent from sidewalk's of Canada's largest city. Homeless sleeping: QUIET, reads the metallic notice, freshly bolted to a downtown lamppost.
The creative genius of Ontario College of Art and Design student Mark Daye, this sign is one of many he designed and erected in downtown Toronto, subverting official signage to draw attention to the city's homelessness crisis. The others sport similar messages: "Homeless warming grate. Please keep clear." "Please have change ready for the homeless." "Homelessness has nothing to do with lack of shelter."
In an interview with the Toronto Star, Daye explained his rationale behind the project. "I started thinking about the way sign systems work. There's official signage. There's advertising. So I thought, what would happen if I used official-looking signage, but I put an unofficial message in it?"
Simple, subtle, effective--just enough to draw the ire of government officials. Lacking both a sense of humor and compassion, the City of Toronto has been feverishly removing the unapproved messages in a bid to cleanse the city of any subversive signage.
"You can't do that," city spokesperson Brad Ross told the Star. "We have an encroachment bylaw, so we've been removing them as we come across them. The signs that the city (has) are way-finding and also letting people know what the restrictions are with respect to parking and stopping and turning and those kinds of things. They're strictly for motorists to understand what the bylaws are on the roads." By this rationale city workers should parade around town removing billboards for cologne and car dealerships.
Although Daye's signs will not last long on the streets of Hogtown, they are already being immortalized online. For more photos of the signs, follow these links: [1], [2].
(Photo: Toronto Star)
Posted by Rob Maguire on April 8, 2007 in
RON ENGLISH | New World Order | A Guernica-inspired billboard hangs along a street in Spain. (Photo: Pedro Carvajal)
Tired of drowning in the semiotic soup of racist and sexist advertising imagery? The folks at Geek Graffiti have created a printable cold sore that anyone can download and, ahem, place lovingly onto the corporate face of beauty.
Large outdoor advertising is a trespass of public space, and it monopolizes the authoring of public messages into the hands of a few large companies. Interventions like this allow the public in on the game, and lets the advertisers know what we think of their messages.
To print out culture jam cold sores and for more info go here.
Posted by Michael Lithgow on March 28, 2007 in
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