The Interventionists Chapter 3:
Quotes:
The Yes Men: “We hope that people who see this stuff will be as shocked and outraged as we were when we experienced it ourselves. We want the viewer to come away from the experience wanting to act, needing to help effect progressive political change. We also want them to laugh… they must become laughing revolutionaries”
YOMANGO: “In their words, YOMANGO, ‘ like all other major brand names, is not so much about selling as about promoting a lifestyle. In this case, the YOMANGO lifestyle consists of shoplifting as a form of social disobedience and direct action against multinational corporations.”
Project: YOMANGO Bag (2004)
The YOMANGO bag is a series of sewing patterns of the aforementioned bag, made as “clothing for civil disobedience.” In an email from YOMANGO to writer Nato Thompson, “This magic bag makes objects disappear. It’s ergonomically designed to be the ultimate shoplifting utensil. It is simple to make and is based on the same principles as the device used by magicians and other tricksters. YOMANGO converts going to the mall into a magical experience.” In a Beautiful Trouble article, the project is not a celebration of stealing from people, “but from large transnational corporations that show no respect for workers’ rights, the environment, or anything other than their bottom line.”
https://beautifultrouble.org/toolbox/tool/yomango/
Quotes:
CAE: “Our work has been quite focused on how surveillance will act as a means of body invasion- that every strand of DNA in our bodies, every molecule will be visualized, mapped, and ordered to better serve capitalist interest.”
subRosa: “There is also the promise of ‘putting death to death,’ of ‘rejuvenating’ and ‘revivifying’ orhans, aging bodies, and the like, not to mention ‘saving lives’ and ‘extending life indefinitely.’ Then, we are also very concerned with capitalist science’s practices of privatization and patenting of intellectual property, biological processes, knowledge production and life materials. We have talked with scientists and lab researchers in both private commercial (corporate-supported) and academic (usually also corporate-supported) institutions and have often heard them complain about the constraints that privatization and patenting put on their research and the exchange of knowledge and materials with other scientists.”
Project: Free Range Grain (2004)
In 2004, Critical Art Ensemble used an on-site laboratory to call into question the European Union’s border-control policies, and the bureaucratic claims of those policies keeping GMOs (Genetically Modified Organisms) out of public consumption. Visitors would bring in foods they suspected of being “contaminated” by GMOs, and CAE would test it, and looking at the group’s page on the project, I found that they stated “While we will not be able to say conclusively that a given food is genetically modified (although we can offer strong probability as whether it is), we can test for conclusive negatives,” The questions of food purity and what the definitions of “natural” and “organic” are in today’s day and age are interesting ones.
http://critical-art.net/free-range-grain-2003-04-cae-beatriz-da-costa-and-shyh-shiun-shyu/
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