The Yes Men

 

The Yes Men are jammers of corporate culture. Cultural jamming is a set of tactics used to expose assumptions behind commercial and political culture, and can take the form of refigured logos, fake websites, and image manipulation to make ironic or satirical statements. The object is to disrupt unconscious thought processes and promote alternatives to global corporate capitalism.

Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos, working under the aliases of Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno respectively,  have created a network of supporters to impersonate entities they dislike, a practice they call "identity correction." By catching these powerful entities off-guard, the Yes Men and their supporters expose corporations and organizations to public scrutiny with the intent of showing how they work and figuring out how to control them. The Yes Men strategize what would cause their target to lose control and act stupidly, capitalize on their target's reaction, and write news releases.

The Yes Men have produced two documentary films about their exploits. The Yes Men (2003) records their invitation to speak at a conference in Austria sponsored by the World Trade Organization. In The Yes Men Save The World (2009), they target neoliberal think tanks, the creators of Captain Euro, climate-threatening corporations, and Dow Chemical for the environmental and human disaster it caused in Bhopal, India. Currently The Yes Men are working on a new film project.

Cascadia Artpost has saluted The Yes Men with a set of five artistamps and a popup brochure. The designs of the artistamps modify scenes from publicity photos. Modifications included scanning the photos through thin tissue paper, colorizing selected portions of the scenes and adding facial details (Cascadia Artpost's own identity correction!), rescanning, and editing in Photoshop Elements.

For the latest activities of The Yes Men, see their website: http://theyesmen.org/