By Tilman Baumgärtel
At the end of his presentation a assistent took off the speaker’s jacket. Under it the speaker was wearing a skin-tight, golden, shining suit. He raised his arms, and between his legs a longish object started to move upward which looked… well, which kind of looked like a phallus with a built-in monitor. This man was supposed to be a representative of the World Trade Organisation (WTO)?
The Finns did believe it. 150 spectators applauded friendly at a conference at the Technical University Tampere to the speaker with the strange costume, who supposedly came from the WTO. Hank Hardy Unruh, as he called himself, spoke at the conference “Fabrics for the future”. Two days after the stunning presentation "Aamulehti", the second-largest newspaper of Finland, published an article about the show that Unruh had put on. Next to the text was a picture of him, that showed him in his golden suit.
This suit was, as the American expert pointed out, a new kind of garment that allowed managers to stay in constant touch with their company. Over a radio (wireless???) connection the "Management Leisure Suit" would provide its wearer with information about productivity, the number of sick employees and the stock quota (price of share?). Unruh: "The technology to create such a suit does already exist."
It occurred to none of the participants or the organisers of the conference that the speaker might be a prankster or even a swindler. Nobody criticized his presentation. Only one female attendant remarked that the suit was not fit for female managers because of its unique shape.
To make a long story short: there really isn’t a Hank Hardy Unruh, certainly not at the WTO. The man, who appeared in Finland, isn’t prepared to tell his real name. But he is ready to admit that he is really a political activist and a member of the group called The Yes Men”. They call themselves a "group of genderless, loose-knit association of some three hundred impostors worldwide”, who “use any means necessary to agree their way into the fortified compounds of commerce, ask questions, and then smuggle out the stories of their undercover escapades to provide a public glimpse at the behind-the-scenes world of business.”
The Yes Men get their invitation to high-powered meetings over their Website www.gatt.org. Now, GATT – the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades – was replaced by 1994 by the WTO. The GATT-Homepage looks at first exactly like the website of the WTO. Just when you look closer you discover that it contains mainly Anti-Globalisation-Information. The professors of Tampere University used an E-Mail-Adress on this website to invite Michael Moore, the head of the WTO.
What they got, was Hank Hardy Unruh – supposedly suggested by Moore himself – who included a number of surprising ideas in his presentation. He called the American civil war a “gigantic waste of money”. When the American South would have been left “to the forces of the free market”, slavery would have been abolished by itself. All president Lincoln had done was interfere with the freedom of trade of the southern states. He also criticized the Indian liberation fighter Ghandi: he had handicapped the free market in India with his civil disobedience strategy.
It wasn’t the first time that the Yes Men had a chance to voice their strange points of view at a public event in the name of the WTO. At a conference of lawyers in Austria a “Dr. Bichlbauer" of the WTO told the surprised audience that his organistion was in support of giving voting rights to big corporations. On a TV discussion the same WTO representative said that his organisation was in favour of putting anti-globalisation-activists in “re-education camps”: “We feel that these people are too concerned with reality.”
For the “Yes Man”, who appeared in Finnland as Mr. Hank Hardy Unruh, these pranks are “neither pranks nor performance art. We want to show that it is possible to propagate dangerous ideas in the name of the WTO. And those who listen will understand, that these ideas are only the logical consequence of what the WTO already propagates."
Even though the “Yes Men” claim that their actions are not art, it is quite obvious that they are standing in a long line of net art projects that toyed with the possibility to create bogus-identities on the internet. Pseudo-companies such as etoy and fake-nations such as the virtual State of Seborga are examples of the net serving as a medium to create phoney, yet, at first, convincing entities. Yet, the “Yes Men” succeed in bringing such a fake entity back into the real world with subversive effects.
In a recent move, they made a software package available on the net, that everybody can use to download complete websites. Now everybody can host their own version of the Website of the WTO, the White House or Afghanistan on their website. At least, if they are not “too concerned with reality”…
The Yes Men
Etoy
www.etoy.com
Invisible Embassy of Seborga
http://www.thing.de/artwarpeace/1consul/in.htm
Tilman Baumgaertel
Tilman Baumgaertel
Tilman Baumgaertel