While we’re on the subject of weird things on roof-tops…
Thanks Wooster Collective
How false information creates true events
From monochrom: An article by Klaus Schoenberger — who is doing pop-culture research at the University of Hamburg, Germany — featuring the Yes Men and their Union Carbide/Bhopal hoax in 2004.
Activists use fakes and hoaxes to communicate information by speaking in the name of someone else – persons or institutions invested with power. With the spreading of Internet communication, this pattern of action and communicating has acquired additional power as a means of political and social protest. Within the framework of Guerrilla Communication, with its specific understanding of politics, faking develops into an efficient form of political articulation.
Editor’s note: See also April Media Fools, March 30, 2005, by Rory O’Connor for MediaChannel.org
Rogue Government Agency Tackles America’s Oil Addiction
Posted by Andrew Boyd:
On the first day of the 2007 New York Auto Show, SWAT-team-like uniformed agents from the Oil Enforcement Agency (OEA) surprised visitors and convention center security when they impounded a Toyota Tundra on the showroom floor.
See Plenty Magazine article and watch a video about the action:
As they secured the perimeter with “Global Warming Crime Scene” caution tape and announced to a growing throng of onlookers that, at a measly 14 MPGs in the city, the Tundra fell well below the agency’s fuel-efficiency standards, many in attendance wondered whether the government was finally taking the threat of climate change seriously.
In fact, the OEA is an elaborate prank just launched by the coalition of environmental groups at FreedomFromOil.com (with some help from me, pictured above). The idea is to heighten pressure on the Big 6 automakers to increase fuel efficiency as well as model of what the government SHOULD be doing to reduce tailpipe emissions.
OEA “field offices” are starting up around the country, and anyone can join. It’s simple and fun: Choose a code name. Order your hat and uniform. Download the secret training manual. And you’re good to go.
The new web site at http://www.oilenforcementagency.com has everything you need, including a hilarious video of OEA action hi-jinks.
View a trailer for the video:
The Yes Men Are Coming! The Yes Men Are Coming!
In the midst of their ‘Yes, Bush Can!’ campaign, the busy pranksters spread faux Republican cheer on their way to L.A. for the opening of their new movie. Reprinted from the LA Weekly, September 23, 2004, Photos by Dan Ollman.
“Bush stood right over there,” says Laurel. “They built a platform for him and three governors and the secretary of the interior, and surrounded them with firemen made up with fake soot to look like they”™d just been fighting fires.” Laurel, a member of ecological activist group the Oxygen Collective, is gesturing to a ridge overlooking a partially charred meadow on the outskirts of Medford, Oregon. “We had a busload of farmers and children with a few banners. They weren”™t expecting us, but they were prepared. The whole time, we were circled by Coast Guard helicopters with machine guns pointed at us. That”™s when Bush unveiled his Healthy Forests Initiative.”
This lesson in George Bush”™s poisonous environmental policies is actually a collateral benefit of our visit to this historical spot “” I”™m here as an embedded reporter with the Yes Men”™s “Yes, Bush Can!” campaign as they film a music video for “The Smokey the Log Theme.” Smokey the Log is the “Yes, Bush Can!” campaign”™s new pro-lumber mascot for the USDA Forest Service, replacing the obsolete namesake bear. Yes Man Mike Bonanno, looking like an escapee from a Syd and Marty Krofft production in a giant anthropomorphic latex log costume, clambers on top of a blackened stump. “Now dance!” commands his cohort, Andy Bichlbaum. “Dance and jump to the ground!” Able to see out only through one armhole, and constricted by faux log to well below the knees, Mike gamely jigs around the sawed-flat surface of the old-growth conifer, but when it comes time to dismount, he teeters and tumbles appropriately but painfully to the forest floor. Continue reading “The Yes Men Are Coming! The Yes Men Are Coming!”
Greenpeace Hijacks Kleenex PR Stunt in Times Square
Greenpeace activists performed an amusing and savvy intervention on a Kleenex commercial shoot in Times Square, effectively hijacking their ad campaign, and shutting down the shoot for the rest of the day (March 24th 2007). Kleenex, responsible for vast old-growth forest destruction in Northern Canada’s Boreal Forest, opened the door for this one.
Friends of mine at notanalternative.net put together this neat little video of the jam:
And check out the main campaign against Kleenex’s criminal timber practices at: http://kleercut.net (a good culture jam in its own right).
With additional coverage here at gothamist.com.