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On January 25, Etoys, one of the giant
corporate Internet shopping centers, dropped its spurious but deeply
pocketed Santa Monica–filed lawsuit against tiny Swiss art group
etoy, whose Web site has been named etoy.com since 1995 — two years
before the online toy store had even registered its name in America.
The unlikely victory in this David-and-Goliath scenario was due, in
no small part, to the systematic “tactical embarrassment strategies”
of another “art” group, a shadowy collective with a vivid and
distinct corporate identity known as ®™ark. Operating in the
venerable tradition of media pranksterism trailblazed by Joey Skaggs
and Jeffrey Vallance, ®™ark (pronounced “artmark”) is decidedly of
the Abbie Hoffman strain of creative arts, directing the tools of
savvy sensationalist media pandering toward a general critique and
specific active interruptions of the global corporate juggernaut.
Its Web site (http://www.rtmark.com/) functions
as both a clearing-house for information about the group’s
activities and as a broker matching investors with saboteurs,
resulting in “cultural dividends” such as the restoration of etoy’s
Web domain.
Using FloodNet, a “dispersed disruption of server” program that
overwhelms a Web site’s communication lines with more requests than
it can handle, ®™ark and other online activists interrupted activity
on eToys with a “virtual sit-in” during the Christmas rush, as well
as calling for the more traditional boycotts and divestment. While
®™ark may not be responsible (as it claims) for a $4 billion drop in
eToys’ value over the holiday season, it at the very least
orchestrated an uncomfortably warm glow of media attention on the
inequity of the dispute, and stirred disquiet among the online
corporate giants that was proved justified by the high-powered
denial-of-service assaults on Yahoo, Amazon, eBay and others in
early February. Previous to the etoy controversy, ®™ark managed to
incur the wrath of the Bush machine by using the Internet domain of
gwbush.com to mount an elaborate and hilarious faux– Bush campaign
site, which looked legitimate at first glance but contained a
profusion of damning scuttlebutt. In 1996, ®™ark allegedly paid a
$5,000 bonus to a fired software designer for hacking homoerotic
content into the macho helicopter-rescue video game SimCopter. Other
high-profile ®™ark stunts have included the Internet-marketed
Deconstructing Beck CD, which pushed intellectual-property
buttons in the manner of John Oswald’s notorious Plunderphonics
CD and Negativland’s high-profile tussle with U2, while making
Beck’s already sample-heavy pastiches sound like somebody playing a
leaf-blower.
The deliberate use of the media’s hunger for good stories has
been a part of the artistic process at least since Stravinsky
started throwing vegetables at the premiere of his own Le Sacre
du Printemps in order to ensure a history-making riot. Both the
Dada and Surrealist movements suffered when their respective
ministries of propaganda outstripped the actual activities of the
original artists. Andy Warhol’s entire career may be seen as a
series of calculatedly newsworthy shifts in strategy — painting to
silk-screen to foil balloons to film to conversation. But it wasn’t
until the late ’70s that artists actually began to widely recognize
the Media as a medium, cheap, abundant and awaiting manipulations —
with a built-in audience that no gallery could hope to rival. The
Bay Area’s Billboard Liberation Front (BLF) is credited with
spearheading a widespread underground network of politically
motivated collagists who transform public advertising into a
self-reflexive glitch in the commercial landscape. Jeffrey Vallance
took a more indirect approach, initiating postal tie-exchanges with
world leaders and appearing on Sam Yorty’s television show to
present a portrait of the ex-mayor surrounded by moths. Media
critics like the aforementioned Skaggs and comedian Alan Abel set up
elaborate front companies to question the credibility of
journalistic authority by luring reporters into covering
ridiculously fake stories. Negativland coined the term “culture
jamming,” and cultural critics began writing theses. Anonymous
artists blanketed the 1980 Republican Convention with copies of J.G.
Ballard’s typically extreme short story “Why I Want To Fuck Ronald
Reagan” carefully typeset to mimic an official GOP press release.
This last tactic was widespread in the post-punk age of cheap design
and reproduction technology, and is reflected exponentially in the
vast amount of creative pranksterism on the Net, as well as in the
growing percentage of gifted young artists who choose to devote
their talents to projects such as Adbusters’ high-profile parodies
of — or ®™ark’s double-edged mimicry of — corporate culture
itself.
®™ark traces its origin to the impromptu sponsorship of the San
Diego–based Barbie Liberation Organization’s 1993 consumer
intervention, which swapped the speech chips of a few hundred
shoplifted talking Barbies and GI Joes before returning them
discreetly to store shelves. Although it was an idea that seemed to
have been in the air for a while, the BLO’s masterful
video-press-release package resulted in a torrent of media coverage,
including the pinnacle of subversive pop-cultural recognition — a
reference on The Simpsons. It is, in fact, in the arena of
mass-media infiltration that ®™ark may be said to operate. Its
mastery over both the Internet and the little-known medium of the
video news release — basically an advertisement for a product shot
and packaged in a manner that can be easily re-configured as a
television “news” story (“a small company outside Bakersfield is
making it easier for parents to conduct drug tests on their children
at home!”) — is self-evident in its videotape Bringing IT to
YOU!, distributed by Seeland, the distributor run by
Negativland. Mimicking the dorky state-of-the-art 3-D animation and
generic up-tempo jazz-rock lite of corporate promotional spots,
Bringing IT to YOU! was the centerpiece of an ®™ark
presentation at MOCA a couple of weeks ago. Presented midway through
the "net.net.net" series organized by CalArts, ®™ark’s lecture was
delivered via a Personal Roving Presence (or ProP) — a boxy,
immobile robot with a computer-generated face given to seemingly
random slo-mo hebephrenic facial tics and the projectile emission of
subversive fortune-cookie tickets saying things like “Take what is
not rightfully yours.” In addition to introducing the video, this
entity, channeling the voice of ®™ark operative Frank Guererro “from
an undisclosed location,” emphasized the surprisingly clear agenda
of Chomskyesque critique underlying the organization’s Yippie-style
burlesque. Registered as a corporation, ®™ark operates on the
assumption that the same legal structure that allows some
corporations to maim with impunity also protects ®™ark clients —
both the initiators of sabotage and investors in the mutual funds
that finance and motivate their realization — from punishment. It
even seems that ®™ark’s more flamboyant activities are mere bait (as
well as excellent entertainment) leading to the time when this basic
premise gets challenged in court by some Giant Corporate Squid
PR-challenged enough to bite. In the meantime, surreal episodes like
the ProP’s lurching flamenco duet with Spanish dog-poo activists La
Fiambrera (
www.sindo minio.net/fiambrera/) in front of a blurry slide of
some shrubs in Seville keeps the hip & wired segment of the art
world guessing what exactly ®™ark is doing.
Whatever it is, ®™ark is doing it right. Both the Bringing IT
to YOU! video and the ®™ark Web site are included in the Whitney
Biennial, which opens this week in New York. Curiously, the bestowal
of institutional approval from the therapeutic crown-jewel display
cases of the very rich has not rendered the members of ®™ark
appropriately docile. Their first act, announced at the MOCA
lecture, was to put their four tickets to the gala opening reception
up for sale on eBay, their page reading in part, “Offered: artist
ticket (for two) to the Whitney Biennial’s exclusive VIP party for
patrons, curators, and Biennial artists only. This is one of
the only shortcuts we know of to being the honored artist at this
most important of American art exhibitions. For the duration of the
event, you, as artist, will be able to speak with an array of
influential curators, wealthy patrons, and other important artists.”
The bidding topped out at over $2,000 each. (The high bidder then
claimed to want only to purchase the artist’s identity and, that
done, instructed ®™ark to offer the tickets to the next highest
bidders — gratis.) Most spectacularly, though, in an attempt to
circumvent a request to remove all active links from its site for
its inclusion in the Whitney, ®™ark has created another shortcut to
Whitney status by turning its own site into a Trojan horse, rotating
a library of uncurated Web sites, allowing anyone who submits a URL
to ®™ark to be included in the prestigious venue. I’m there (http://pages.about.com/dghrvy/index.html).
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