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Rigged elections are widespread throughout Africa,
and not just in Zimbabwe.
A New Detente?
The Bush administration cozies up to China.
Disinformation follies.
Marriage proposal.
No evidence, but a Missouri inmate is facing
execution.
Britain passes measures to elect more women.
Seeds of Destruction
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Bad Math
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Greens.
HMOs aim to stop even modest reform in its
tracks.
BOOKS: Israel, the occupation and
"apartheid."
Disasters in Waiting
BOOKS: Ahmed Rashid on more impending
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Play It Again, Sam
MUSIC: How multiple reissues keep record labels
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FILM: The moral dilemmas of
Storytelling.
An interview with ®™mark's Frank Guerrero.
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March 1, 2002
The Art of Confusion
An Interview with ®™ark's Frank Guerrero
Anti-corporate saboteurs ®™ark have been causing trouble since 1993,
when they started off as an Internet bulletin board. They have grown and
developed to such an extent that they are now at the forefront of “culture
jamming”—subverting the language of corporate and advertising culture to
point out what is brewing beneath the surface. ®™ark operates somewhere in
the gray area between activism and performance art, or what Hakim Bey once
referred to as “poetic terrorism.” In These Times spoke with Frank Guerrero via e-mail to discuss
what ®™ark had been up to, specifically the Voteauction.com project (“The
only election platform channelling ‘soft money’ to the democracy
consumer”) and the “Yes Men” project. The first part of this interview, in
which Guerrero discusses the group’s mission and tactics, is condensed
from an interview conducted for Sandbox Magazine #7: Art vs.
State. ORIGINS OF ®™ark From looking at your Web site (www.rtmark.com), it seems there’s a
certain amount of ambiguity about whether a specific project should be
taken as a joke or a really serious act of sabotage. A lot of the projects do use humor as a means for slipping under the
radar of social acceptability. Now just because a lot of the projects are
funny doesn’t mean that ®™ark’s mission isn’t serious. It is a serious
system that means, through a combination of real actions and theater, to
criticize and hopefully undermine the role that corporations are taking in
supplanting democratic or social processes of governments. This is our
main reason for being. We feel very strongly that corporations have been slowly but surely
supplanting and subverting the processes of government that were put into
place so that the people could have some sort of say in their political
and social destiny. It seems like this is an important moment in
globalization—with all these international borders coming down—at least
for capital, though not necessarily for people. We see it as a real
problem that’s boiling over. So ®™ark is a way to attack that system from within using primarily
theatrical and pedagogical means. We’re there to destabilize the system in
such a way that people might get a little entertainment and at the same
time have those projects ask a few questions of them. How did you develop from your original structure as a bulletin
board? When the bulletin board went up in 1993, it was a networking tool that
worked mostly through word of mouth. But ®™ark changed and is now coming
into its own by using the Web as an open-ended networking and databasing
tool. We have a database that lists basically three things: the project idea,
a funding amount and, lastly, workers. So you can come to the site and
read through the list of ideas. If you see one that you like, you can
offer to sponsor the project with some money or you could offer to perform
the project. If it’s an idea, let’s say, to change a gas tank in a
production automobile so that the gas tank can only hold two gallons of
gas instead of 20, and you happen to be working on a production line where
they’re installing gas tanks, you might volunteer your services. It’s an open-ended system, and you can come to it with money, or you
can come to it as a worker with an idea looking for money. … That’s
probably the most common thing. … People submit ideas they want to carry
out themselves but need to raise some capital to do it. So ®™ark is a facilitator? Yes, ®™ark is a facilitator, and ®™ark’s primary reason for existing is
to use the corporate veil as a way to permit people to offset their
liability for participating in these projects, many of which fall into the
gray areas of the law. … [Some] of these projects receive cease-and-desist
letters and legal attacks. As a corporate entity, ®™ark is able to take these projects and provide
a corporate umbrella for them, absorbing some of the liability and
displacing it from the workers and the funders. This is the way the
business world works anyway. If you form a corporation, your corporation
can go bankrupt or, in the case of Union Carbide, have a major avoidable
accident that kills 8,000 people, and yet the corporation stays in
business despite having these crimes on the record. We feel that in this
way ®™ark can highlight what we see as a double standard for corporations
and people with the limited liability potential of corporations. Voteauction.com One of your projects caused quite a stir during the U.S.
presidential elections last year. Voteauction.com, a site created by James
Baumgartner, was described as a project “devoted to combining the American
principles of democracy and capitalism by bringing the big money of
campaigns directly to the voting public. We provide a forum for campaign
contributors and voters to come together for free-market
exchange.” The site used parody to point out that elections are influenced by
the amount of money poured into the process by large corporations.
Voteauction.com was closed by Network Solutions without any kind of notice
after the Chicago Board of Elections filed an election fraud lawsuit
against the domain. The New York State Board of Elections also told
Baumgartner that they could press charges against him. Having received this threat, Baumgartner closed his site, selling it
to Hans Bernhard, an Austrian businessman who took the site outside of
U.S. jurisdiction. What was your involvement in this project? We helped with the Voteauction launch by putting James in touch with a
worker (a publicist who could help him get the word out), and by procuring
a small investment to help him pay for some of his hosting costs and phone
bills. … Later on, when James was under attack, we helped negotiate the
sale of the site to ubermorgen.com in Austria. To what extent was this intended to be a parody? It seems like some
well-meaning people took it at face value, as a genuine subversion of the
electoral process. Many famous satires have been taken seriously by some of the public.
Even things like Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” despite being completely
unbelievable, made people genuinely angry about eating babies. … But
perhaps the lesson here is that even something as outrageous as suggesting
babies as food isn’t that outrageous, given the past relationship between
the English government and the Irish, and the circumstances of the potato
famine. And in the case of Voteauction, it really isn’t that outrageous
for a company to be selling votes, given the way that elections work in
this country today. Was the project a success? It was extremely successful because it was seen by millions of people
and became a subject of public debate around the world. I think in many of
those news stories it successfully demonstrated just how corrupt our
so-called democracy has become. YES MEN AT WTO The Yes Men at WTO is another fine example of creating confusion and
certainly one of ®™ark’s funniest projects. It is summarized on the ®™ark
site: “In early 2000, ®™ark transferred Gatt.org—which people sometimes
mistake for the World Trade Organization's official Web site—to a group of
impostors known as the Yes Men. ... In May 2000, the Yes Men received an
e-mail inviting Mike Moore, Director-General of the WTO, to discuss the
WTO at a conference on international trade matters [hosted by the Center
for International Legal Studies in Salzburg, Austria]. The Yes Men decided
to do the ethical thing … and to try their best to fulfill the request. In
late October, one Dr. Andreas Bichlbauer—the substitute “Moore” decided to
send—spoke at the conference. His lecture described the WTO's ideas and
ultimate aims in terms that were horrifyingly stark—suggesting, for
example, the replacement of inefficient democratic institutions like
elections with private-sector solutions like an Internet startup selling
votes to the highest corporate bidder. None of the lawyers in attendance
expressed dismay at Dr. Bichlbauer's proposals.” The only people who seemed to react to Bichlbauer’s outlandish
remarks were some Italian delegates who were offended by his statement
concerning the impossibility of a merger between KLM and Alitalia due to
the basic laziness of the Italian worker. Posted on the ®™ark site is a hysterically comical series of letters
and e-mail correspondence between Dr. Bichlbauer, Professor Campbell (the
conference organizer), “Mike Moore” and his administrative assistant,
Alice Foley. Through the series of letters, memos and e-mails, we see the
farce unfold. The whole thing really goes over the top when the Yes Men prolong
the hoax by announcing that their representative has been “pied,”
contracting a grave illness from a bacterial infection. (Was the pie
intentionally poisoned? Possibly by an offended Italian delegate?) Dr.
Bichlbauer is promptly disposed of and a memorial service announced. The
hoax is revealed as messages expressing both sadness and confusion pour
in. Finally, a conversation takes place concerning the point of the
exercise. So what was the point? The Yes Men use affirmation to make their point. It is an unusual
rhetorical strategy, almost a reverse-psychology approach. Instead of
debating their opponents, they assume their opponents’ identities and
enthusiastically affirm their adversaries’ beliefs. It’s an unorthodox
approach, but hardly new or original. In fact, I think something like
Swift's “Modest Proposal” also falls into this category, in a
sense. The point of this Salzburg action was to enhance the legibility of the
WTO’s policies. To that end, the Yes Men gave a kind of uncensored version
of the WTO’s positions. … There was an audience of legal experts who
basically did not object to Andreas Bichlbauer (real name: Andy Bichlbaum)
explaining that the WTO believed in doing away with all cultural
differences (for example, siestas) that get in the way of free
trade. Since the expert audience agreed that Voteauction.com was a model for
making elections more efficient and opening new markets, it appears that
the Yes Men failed to cause any revelations at the event. However, clearly
this should be a wake-up call to all of us who care about our votes … or
any kind of representative government reflecting social interests. So why did Bichlbauer's offensive remarks not cause a
stir? I think it reveals that belief in late capitalism runs so deep that
even an audience of specialists in trade and law refuse to see a
fundamentally antisocial, if not fascist, message in the text. When that
happens, people can only be blind to their complicity in an oppressive
system. CONFUSION Although you claim to use pedagogical means, it seems that creating
confusion is one of your preferred tactics, and this is one of the
recurrent criticisms made of your methods. Don't you think that this might
just result in preaching to the converted and antagonizing the other side,
further polarizing the debate? ®™ark is one of only a few organizations who try to support these
bizarre projects, so I think that is why we become known for confusion. …
Try to find a “legitimate” funding organization interested in the value of
confusing people, and I think the list will be pretty small. And yet, if
we sample history, I think we will see that confusion is a very important
aspect of human communication, one that is as useful and prevalent as a
more didactic approach. You attack corporations and large international organizations, yet
you get reviewed in Artforum. Are you artists, activists,
anarchists or a little of all three? Do you care how people perceive
you? All of the above. Most importantly, we are people. We see all media
outlets as potential sites for communication and dialogue to a wider
audience. … If we end up in art mags, so be it. We also like to be able to
express ourselves in business publications, sports rags, etc. We do care
about how people perceive us; we hope that through ongoing outreach we can
contribute to the growing movement against unfettered global capitalism.
Sylvie Myerson is the editor of Sandbox Magazine, a nonprofit arts magazine whose forthcoming issue is titled “Incarceration & Surveillance.” She can be reached at sandbox@echonyc.com |