Experimental Humanities Program Presents
Creative Activism in the Post Factual Age: A Talk by The Yes Men
Tuesday, May 8, 2018
Campus Center, Weis Cinema
6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
For over two decades, The Yes Men have staged multifarious hoaxes and actions that have revealed the mechanisms of corporate and governmental power. They have impersonated corporate executives and created fake versions of news sources, like the New York Times, that present public statements and stories contrary to official ones, among other activities. Their stunts hijack print, the Web, and television to enact what they call “identity correction,” a tactic that exposes the latent exploitative operations of companies and governments. For example, in 2004, Andy Bichlbaum, one of the Yes Men, impersonated a Dow Chemical representative in an appearance on the BBC. During the performance, Bichlbaum issued an apology for the 1984 Bhopal nuclear plant disaster (a toxic chemical gas leak in a Union Carbide plant that led to thousands of deaths and severe health hazards) and promised immediate reparations that resulted in a $2 billion dollar drop in Dow’s share price and forced the company into a PR crisis.
Since Trump’s election in 2016, The Yes Men have been questioning their previous methods that use news and other media platforms for activist campaigns. They ask: What is the point of getting media attention in an economy of social media that drives news according to users’ taste and search history? Does satire work when truth itself is so absurd? What forms of activism are impactful in a moment of rising fascism and supremacy? Mike Bonanno, one of the members of The Yes Men, will unpack these and many other questions in the talk “Creative Activism in the Post Factual Age.”
Since Trump’s election in 2016, The Yes Men have been questioning their previous methods that use news and other media platforms for activist campaigns. They ask: What is the point of getting media attention in an economy of social media that drives news according to users’ taste and search history? Does satire work when truth itself is so absurd? What forms of activism are impactful in a moment of rising fascism and supremacy? Mike Bonanno, one of the members of The Yes Men, will unpack these and many other questions in the talk “Creative Activism in the Post Factual Age.”
About The Yes Men and Mike Bonanno
The Yes Men are known for their outrageous, headline-grabbing pranks made in the service of social movements. They’ve made three feature films about the actions (The Yes Men, The Yes Men Fix the World, and The Yes Men Are Revolting). Writer Naomi Klein called them “the Johnathan Swift of the Jackass generation,” but that was around a decade ago when people knew what Jackass was. They are currently searching for a new tagline that better explains to college-age kids what they do. (Suggestions welcome!) When he’s not doing the Yes Men, Mike Bonanno is also a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., where he goes by the name Igor Vamos, which his parents bizarrely decided to assign him, thus necessitating a “normal” name for undercover work. This talk is presented as part of “Reading Between the Lines,” a project by first-year CCS Bard graduate student Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi and supported by a grant from the Bard College Center for Experimental Humanities, with additional support from the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies.
For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail [email protected].
Time: 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Location: Campus Center, Weis Cinema