 Let's get this started. Hello, welcome to the one-bottom of the Metropolitan State University of Denver's largest scholar and designer series, sponsored by the Department of Health and Center for Visual Art. As we offer in this part of the MSC Denver, the CDA acts as a resource for students in the broad range to contemporary exhibitions of local significance and will reach. It's a diverse education program and workforce development for students interested in creating fields. Sign up for the CDA newsletter and learn more about our coming program in the past. So thank you for coming out to the CDA tonight. It's an exciting time of the year in education. Our second VLN show opens tomorrow night, and graduation is imminent, just a few weeks away. And it's an interesting time of the year that often brings some sort of combination of exhaustion and exhilaration of all together. So thank you for coming out to the CDA tonight. Before we go much further with this introduction, I'd like to take a moment to recognize the historic event about to happen in Colorado in Denver. Tomorrow, over 10,000 teachers are marching in the State Capitol. 10 of the largest districts in the state of Kansas School have had this historic day. If you don't know where you're going, Colorado ranks down between 36 and 46 in the nation carrying their resource for K-12 funding. And regardless of where the state is ranked, the idea itself of some sort of national education can finally rank involved reveals our problem. In Colorado, we are short of roughly $2,600 for students statewide, and that adds to a total deficit roughly of $800 million. Please bear with me as I tell you this next part of the story. But in light of all this, I have the very special freedoms tonight, being the first person to make this wonderful event. Calgary, one of the states' most famous corporations, one of the most powerful companies in the world, based right here in Colorado, has been so moved by the show of energy and courage of Colorado's teachers that Calgary has decided to convert its entire asset portfolio, which amounts to somewhere around $2.6 trillion, which has been a massive fossil fuels, military industrial complex, and surveillance, has decided to convert their asset portfolio completely over to education. So, as soon as we choose that amount, we're turning it down to you. Calgary Boulevard is distributed as $2.6 trillion to students across the state of Colorado. This is a result in each college student in Colorado receiving a $1.6 million dollar scholarship, which is why at Calgary, near inter-education headquarters in Colorado, we have to say, this is one half the scholarship. Raise your hand if you're familiar with the estimate, if you've heard of the estimate, it's worth a lot of practice. Raise your hand if you think they're smart. Raise your hand if you think they're smart. Okay, a few of you think they're smart. I guess they need a city grant. We can ask that one more time. Raise your hand if you think they're smart. Okay, raise your hand if you think that what they do is smart. Excellent. Thank you for having me in class again tomorrow. This is a rhetorical question. The answer is, are you guys going to go to Calgary's? It's just a question to analyze and incorporate. Anyways, to finish up this introduction. In the Department of Agriculture, faculty consistently ask their students to do a few things in the pursuit of online education. You can see these keywords in the course descriptions. You can see it on our website. We ask the students to explore. We ask them to investigate. We ask them to think quickly. We ask them to learn. Tonight's guest, Andy of the African, does all those things as they come to work. Without further hesitation, if you're ready to explore and investigate and think quickly and learn, please join me while I'm here. I have a couple of people who have heard of this before here. I'll tell you a few things. Part of the tradition of artists which has never worked as a term for me, have resisted it, rejected it, asserted it, I'm not one, many times. But then I discovered yesterday, thanks to something in the room, a term post artist. So it probably makes our people comfortable. Our identity with it. So the guest men are part of a tradition of post artists. People who have certain talents, certain abilities or certain interests, not necessarily any of the other things, but certain interests and excitement of doing something creative to further social change in some way. And that's basically how I define this. Our particular stick, it has been to kind of hijack the mainstream media. And I'll put into this, this is changing, of course, recently. But we basically hijack the mainstream media or hijack the attention of the mainstream media in order to convey important issues in the mainstream media. And usually through telling the truth, we're actually telling the lies, but telling the lies in order to tell the truth. So I'm doing a terrible hatch-a-job describing what we'll do. So I'm just going to show a one-minute video that does it much better and I want to be your guest. We don't usually get arrested. But ever since the 1990s, Mike and I have been dressing up in second-hand suits and impersonating big and powerful people. Hello, this is Reggie Lindry calling from the S. Bush Hand County. Hi, this is Antron Spratt from the WTO. My name is Francisco Guerrero. My name is Spratt, I'm from Caliber. We need people our way out to center stage. At least for a little while. It's awesome, you're not even on the directory yet. You're not even looking. You don't even have a phone number. Come to that as I say. The first find-out is accepting full responsibility for the vote-off catastrophe. For the price, which is greatly not between the cents, called the Dow shares, we need people our way to the news. It's a group of pranksters who call themselves the yes men. An activist group called yes men. It's not fully most people protesting, but it's our way to say no to corporate greed. Oh! Our balance is, yeah, yeah we do. But it's, yeah, we don't, we've got trouble once we were sued by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for something we did. I can show a video at some point. And other than that, we've been doing this for 20 years, had dozens of targets, and we've gotten no actual lawsuits except for that. We got dozens of cease and desist letters when we used to get those. But we would just kind of publicize them. We would just respond publicly to them, and that would make people laugh. So is part of it because your work is covered under a speech order? That's part of it. It's legal, probably. And we've never gotten a perfectly straight answer from a lawyer. There is no case study, which is why when we were sued we were all pretty excited about that. We think we would have won, or lawyers thought we would win, obviously our opponents didn't, but the smart people in the room thought that we would win, and that would have set up precedent saying you can do this now. But there hasn't been a lawsuit, there hasn't been a case on this sort of thing, probably because corporations are too smart anymore to actually try and sue activists with any media clout at all. Like there's a case in the 90s where some activists were passing out pamphlets in front of McDonald's in London, and they were doing this repeatedly to try to draw attention to their labor practices, to the bad of all the other food, and McDonald's turned around and sued them. And the case dragged on for 10 years, so tremendous amount of media attention. And the activists won, but after there was this massive attention for everything the activists were trying to say. So it's actually the reason McDonald's has salads on the menu, and cares, but it's also the reason that large corporations don't sue activists with any ability to draw attention to their labor. What were a few projects that you did before a bunch of your bigger things went viral or got published? Huh, let's see. Like what led up to the initial big things that got on air? Like you had to have worked out the courage to just like pull off something big, so what was something like a little medium right before? Yeah, well let's see. Okay, the very first thing. This did not actually get a whole lot of attention compared to later things. This was, so this was in 1999, when the, this is actually how the incident started, we heard that 30,000 activists were headed to Seattle, that that was a projected crowd size, to shut down the whole trade organization which represented everything that was bad about capitalism at the time in the popular imagination. And it was the focus of this movement, the anti-qualization movement at the time, which actually successfully shut down that meeting in 1999 and really limited their scope and really put a big dent in their power. And we knew it was important, it was the focus, it was the focus of the activist world. And so we set up a fake world trade organization website, and this was in 1999, so he was super used to fake websites. Like all you had to do with that and you wouldn't pay attention. Especially if the target of your staff had reacted, which they did. Nobody actually, they wrote this press release and put it on their website and attacked us and said, you guys are bad. And they actually read it, so they actually wrote us an email and said, look what you made us do. This was also apparently before the era of modern public relations. And so we actually sent out a press release with their press release and got a lot of press for it. And that is basically how we got started because it's the WTO itself that started us because when the attention hit the web of 1999, the search engines of the time, oh, that one, this is on November 3rd, which I think is the date of the Seattle protests. I think that's when the day they shut them down. He just noticed that. But when search engines of the time like y'all could be melted, this is a hot bot. Pick red text. They would kind of link them. So WTO, Gattler and WTO.org confused the search engine and then we started getting email intended for WTO. Like this. And this kind of looked for a long time. And nobody would have been frustrated one usually. And the replies would get longer and longer. Experts, I'm afraid, which you can see by reason as we are. With my realizing that the principle of capitalism or neoliberalism is then involved, still exists, is that you let the wealth they do whatever they want and things turn out great for everyone. And help the wealth they do what they want. So that's how we broke the spectrum. And then one day we got an invitation to a conference. Same thing, just on the e-mail website. A website. I think it's the real thing. Not reading any of the material content on it. And we went to that conference after a while. We went to see that for three months. We basically didn't know what to do about this. Director General Mike Moore was just the name of all things. And he was kind of large. So we actually forwarded this to Michael Moore. Ah! Wait. We didn't know what else to do. And waited. No answer. And then about two or three months later we finally realized, wait, wait, wait. Let's just answer that D.G. Moore is not available. And let's just send this to us to do. And they said, that's great. And so we flew to the Saltsburg, Austria. And all the way we did not have this. And Barca London, we tested various ideas for what to do when we got to Saltsburg and came up with a whole PowerPoint presentation. And this is this one slide from it where we basically did this satirical version of the voting teal which is logic a little too far. And we talked about how any barrier to free trade is a problem. Any barrier to capitalism, any barrier to the wealthy and as wealthy as possible is a problem including democracy. So we have a solution to this. And this chart is actually on the slide. You might get it. It's like this is the current, it's often the current version of democracy where corporations pay in and out to get ads, broadcasts, voters with no transfer of money at the final stage. And the alternative is just pay a website to pay people to vote. And we have a website. We bring out some democracy closer together. And to our shock, we went not knowing exactly what would happen. We did ask the lawyers at the time and you couldn't go straight and answer what would happen. So we actually just went and brought a camera person along expecting there to be some drama and expecting something interesting would happen. And instead, people just nodded and asked the like questions. And we didn't really have anything interesting on the camera footage. Besides, people asked the nice questions and asked me. He said, really, it's nice to thank you. We went to lunch with him afterwards. I praised him. We received him on all seasons. No reaction. We have a stage of pying with me. This was at a time when pying was popular. People would throw pies in the face of people they didn't like. And Milton Friedman had just gotten pied at a grandfather, you know, a girl, a son. A few days later, got pied. And so we pied me. And, you know, staged a pying. So threw a pie in my face. And then, why did we do that? We didn't have to. We did that just for fun. We used it in the video. We made it afterwards. But we sent the cameraman with he had a beard and some shit disappeared off. And sent him back into the conference to ask the attendees if they had noticed anything weird during the day's presentation. And we found people who had been at this conference and asked them, like, so, you know, was there anything strange about this presentation? Because he's been pied. And, you know, he's like in the hospital because he's pied. People are also overreacting to pines. So we played on that. And people said, oh, no, he's been pied. That's terrible. No, he didn't say anything. He had no role. And one person, he remembered exactly what I said. And said, God, it's about making markets more efficient in a democratic world. And stuff like that. So, you know, we filmed, he filmed all that as in pretending to be a newspaper, a newsman, a video camera. And we made a video of it. So that, yeah, to answer your question, that was, that's not what happened with that. But that was the first thing we did. It was sort of successful. I mean, you have times where you printed out very lengthy correspondence we had with the conference afterwards where people, we actually emailed everybody at the conference after we got back to the U.S. And he said, look, the speaker at your conference was pied. And he, unfortunately, the pie was, um, old. And he's been attracted to toxic bacillus infection. And he's in hospital. And, you know, just anybody can remember. This is a crime now. And so we need to, he's saying that nobody, nobody responded basically. So we did what we had to do. We sent out another email and the mail said that the unfortunate speaker has passed away. Oh my God. At this point, he started remembering things. Yeah. Okay, yeah. He said this. And they actually remembered. But they didn't see anything offensive about it. And then finally the conference wrote to us and said, please stop. They were supposed to be competitive. And the New York Times had printed a full page of that. It was pretty funny to see all those exchanges. But, um, but, you know, that wasn't like a giant trope. In fact, we were very shortly afterwards invited to another conference. And we thought the New York Times should have now heard a nose and now that. How do you start to brainstorm what to do next after that? Because like, you have that little bit of brush of exhilaration. It's like, okay, we have some power. Yeah. Like, how do we use it? Like, how do you go about deciding what to do? Or is it a little bit of a chance? It's all chance. Yeah. Like, that was all chance. That story. Before that was all chance, too. How we got to that point was all chance. And then the next thing that happened was we were invited to a conference in Finland. A textiles conference. Just a university temporary Finland who was having a big textiles conference and invited us to give a speech there. So we, that's basically what decided what we did next and how we would get the next brush. Because there is a big element of adrenaline and addiction to the fun of it. So I'll show you what happened at that conference. We decided to make it more dramatic so that there had to be a reaction. We just figured, okay, we'll just push it much, much further and we'll definitely give a reaction by making it so crazy that people can't just sit there. This is what we did. This was in the context of so it's a textiles conference I'm from the WTO. We're both from the WTO and we're talking about textiles of the future. What we as a world trade organization imagine as the textiles of the future. Given that we need free trade we need corporations to be able to do whatever they want, wherever they want overcome all impediments to working wherever they want, however they want whatever countries they want, whatever legal issues with however they want. This is the textiles solution to this problem of like democracy and to the ultimate power tool let's say the ultimate power tool for corporate power. In a world where the headquarters of a company might be in New York, Hong Kong, or Espoil, Finland and the workers are in Devon, Rangu or Estonia how does a manager maintain proper rapport with the workers and how does he or she ensure from a distance or in an ethical fashion. I'm about to show you an actual prototype of the WTO solution to two major management problems of today. Now we all know that not even the best workplaces I can help even the most the stupid manager keep track of workers. What you need is a solution that enables complete rapport with workers especially when they're located far away. Mike, would you help me move? Thank you. This is much better much more comfortable. This is the WTO's answer to two of the major management problems and we're calling it the management leisure suit. The two problems again how to maintain close rapport with different workers and how to remain comfortable and increase leisure activities. How does the management leisure suit work besides being extremely comfortable as I can guarantee you. Well, allow me to describe one of these four features. This mediated the employee visualization appendage. With totally hands-free operations. With lots of managers to speed his employees directly right here. Signals communicating the exact amount of quality of physical work are currently not only visually right here but directly through electric channels and planted directly in the middle. The workers, for their part, are fitted with corresponding transmitting chips that are implanted humanely directly into the shoulder. But the increasingly equipment at the MLS has to do with leisure. In the United States, leisure another word for freedom really increases steadily since the 1970s. The management leisure suit prevents the manager to reverse this trend by letting him do his work anywhere while they are in complete touch with the workers physically sensing what's going on in the workforce on the floor through the channels in terms of directly into the manager. Again, the manager sees the employees but also figures out where to focus in the workplace environment. So, in conclusion I'd like to ask, is this a science fiction scenario? Everything we've seen here, everything we've been talking about is entirely possible today. We can always look forward on the boundaries of progress towards ever-new horizons with cooperation and mutual delight in the service of prosperity. I'm very excited to be here. Thank you very much. Actually, no one asked me if I had dinner with them. I wonder if you took that picture and asked the conference organizer like, so do you realize and he was curious. Today, would you be able to have your speech actually on the members in your hand? Great idea. My other question is about the absorption into the visual being titled as an artist but we all want to claim you and I'm wondering if you get a similar feeling from people who are actors or theater, if they also have interest in the Yes Men and also invite you to speak at other schools for such things? Someone, we did a theater workshop recently in Belgium with some theater people that we totally traumatized by basically showing them some videos of what we do and then saying, okay, now you're talking about it. We're expecting the techniques and they did a fantastic job but usually not, it's usually art world and you know, for artists that's fine. The resistance is valuing whatever it is about in terms of the art world like the art world I live in New York and the obvious is horror. It's like the horrible system that's really not about art at all it's about the summerfine thing that ultimately it's about money and speculation about your theater and at best it's about putting something nice in a rich person's home but it's not really about changing the world, it can't be in that context and there have been many times that this has changed the world like earlier we were talking about Ran Fury, the art battalion packed up in the 80s and 90s artists who had gallery careers who became incredibly important in the fight against AIDS and the fight to force pharmaceutical companies so they became the core of it in a sense, I mean they became the visual part of it like the visual identity backed up and all these famous images that we know that was them and that's art, they were artists they just weren't using it in the context of the art world and they were very conscious about we don't care what the art world thinks of this we're using it to make a difference in the world and so we're not faced with the same degree of a state of we weren't still the same degree of state of emergency as Ran Fury in the days of AIDS where AIDS was killing tens of thousands of people but we use the same I guess we use whatever art techniques we have for social issues in the same way would you say that you feel akin at all to like Berman's Supreme? Berman's Supreme? Oh yeah, he's fun he's got to erase the hat a bit of a boot on his head and he runs for president yeah, I mean that seems pretty over the satire I guess like ponies, there's something about ponies what oh, I don't know what you're saying well, yeah, but I just don't believe that he's running for president yeah, okay yeah, yeah, it's the same general world yes, and there's many different flavors there's a lot of different I wanted to show a couple of oh yeah, activity so that's a website that has dozens of actually hundreds of examples of creative activism oops, sorted by sorted by all kinds of things issues regions and you can just browse and search on things there and beautiful trouble which is a kind of more systematic like systematic overview of the kinds of work that we do or Berman's Supreme does or many, many other kinds of activists or artists do these are various tactics that people use like banner which Greenpeace does a lot but so do artists creative positions delivery some of these fall definitely into things you can see as art electoral theater flash mobs guerrilla projections light projections hoax we wrote part of this and in this little theater there's all kinds of stuff that definitely falls into art and there's other stuff that's harder to see as art like occupation although occupied Wall Street could be seen as performance art it was like an occupation of Wall Street it was like blocks from Wall Street and it was performance art I mean it succeeded in a massive way to politicize what people were concerned about so it was incredibly effective at it but you wouldn't normally think of a strategic non-violence which is much more serious how to use non-violence to overthrow our regime non-violence and then there you find stuff about pop-up war who went through the loss of it in Serbia and all kinds of other examples of how that has been used through time and yeah just through that inspiration I'm wondering in the back of your finding other than the honor already which you're going to get for tonight you know you're going to have to couple years do you have speaker's fees or honorariums which you present to them at this for these conferences for the big appearances no and not just because that would be fraud it might be fraud I've heard it all I mean I mean it's quite a joke that was my it was too seriously no but we don't we do we have jobs we make those things a little money sometimes but most of the day jobs teaching universities I don't right now that really goes into kind of my question can you just expand that a little bit more you know like how do you balance your whole creative activist practice maybe like 10% of your time is interventions or maybe it's 60% interventions how much do you teach, lecture, travel how do you balance that now I teach to Europeans I don't have a job in the past I I mean it changes all the time before the election it would be I had a job and I did a lot of workshops at the job so that was a mix of interventions so maybe you know it was all kind of a lot of intervention and teaching and workshops and speaking engagements around work maybe 10, 20% of them what else do we now it's really shifted like after the election we just stopped doing this kind of work at all except with a couple of occasions exceptions to just see if we figure out how to fit in how to make this work now and having the teaching we have done some workshops and speaking engagements we've started a movie project we're waiting for funding and I'm making a separate movie and it's not going to be a movie and we're already working on so yeah changes from moment to moment but yeah I really shouldn't do the election that was just like how does this work so if this is not the line of work you're doing now like what are you working on oh I'm sure I just want to answer this piece I did with a group in New York it's very New York it doesn't really make any sense here but it does answer the question and and I really like the video and it does address a big issue of using the video to talk about I did this with a group started by a couple of friends in New York filmmakers and it was after the election they just were like one of them is a super extrovert and loves talking to people and also loves to feel useful like we all do so we started this group of filmmakers and there's maybe 20, 30, 40 people in it who are filmmakers, graphic designers, writers and so on and the goal is basically to support campaigns that matter to resist Trump and to resist what's happening in the country so it's about the local issue, it's not about trying to get rid of him it's about trying to support candidates at the local levels or national levels but you know, generally local, we supported a few maybe one in Montana and some other places and we made this video in New York as the director but it was super collaborative and there were like at least 10 people involved in it so it's about it explains itself Hi, I'm Edie Falco In the election, New York State acted fast to pass Hi, I'm Edie Falco After the 2016 election, New York State acted fast to pass these measures to resist Trump's agenda Universal single payer healthcare fully funded public schools strong environmental safeguards and sanctuary state legislation to protect all immigrants Just kidding that didn't happen but it could have and it probably would have if not for the independent Democratic conference New Yorkers routinely vote Democrat at both state and national levels and there is currently a majority of Democrats in the state Senate but since 2011, a small group of so called Democratic Senators called the Independent Democratic Conference have refused to caucus with the Democrats and in control of the Senate to Republicans They do this in exchange for what they call Lulu's bigger salaries nicer offices and community chairmanship In fact some IDC members are literally getting paid by the Republican Senate leadership in legally questionable ways that are making headlines in both local and national press IDC members also get tons of campaigning money for real estate, charter school and healthcare lobbyists some of whom are Republicans with connections to Trump IDC members say that they're getting things done but because they had Senate control the Republicans hardly any progressive legislation comes up for a vote and what it does, it is heavily watered down like the 2013 minimum wage law Remember all those awesome things from the beginning? They have all passed the assembly but thanks to the IDC they were all blocked by the Senate IDC members insist that the fault really lies in another vote Democrat who votes with Republicans The truth is they are both at fault and they use each other as scapegoats to shift blame for their treason against the people who voted for them Are you pissed off yet? Great, let's fight back If we can raise enough awareness of these eight IDC districts we can vote the fake Dems out for a real blue state like California and inspiring other states of the union to resist Trump too So share this video with them find out if your state senator is in the IDC and join one of these groups to help us fight back So, you know it's about making New Yorkers angry and mad it actually makes a difference like this video we tweeted it for a while and we got 100,000 views which is bad for something so low Then the current challenger to the governor was the first state 500,000 views and she's campaigning on abolishing the IDC and we've also made some little videos against IDC members and the other day a week or two ago the government bad guy met with the IDC and the real Democrats and got them to agree to join and dissolve the IDC So, officially the IDC doesn't exist anymore and I think it's in part because of this video a little bit and it's able to use it to publicize and raise a stand about it it's temporary it's obviously for political expediency that was one of the government abolished it got abolished but this kind of work does seem to it's concrete it's like this work it's not as funny it's not as fun to do it doesn't seem to be the same but it is super fun and it's effective which is most of the fun most of the feeling of fun comes from the belief that it's going to do something it's going to change something so for that reason and the stuff that we're doing and that we're going to be doing again as we can figure out and we have one project that will be long that we're going to be doing I hope in about a year around the midterms that sort of work is really mainly about hasn't been mainly about raising attention for things that are underrepresented in mainstream media for giving journalists an excuse to cover important issues that they wouldn't have an excuse to cover otherwise like yeah well yeah most of our alright the WTO things that we did I'll show some other things that are more relevant I think to what I'm saying they're like jokes as if we were clowns they're jokes for the media to use to cover the joke to cover the host and then they cover the important thing but now that's not really necessary we try to actually like all you have to do is look at stuff and it's right there there's not that much that needs to be exposed so what is needed is mobilization and it's getting people out to do things and that our work used to do also and will do again in November but but people are very mobilized so the thing that I think feels necessary now is to get progress as elected and that's it the midterms that's all I can see that's important on the national scale like the PR firms and they're much more savvy to what you guys are doing and no change in that some things don't work anymore like fake websites don't work in 1999 it worked great because the web was 5 years old so we could make a fake website and people would believe that and plus it would be news just what fact would make a fake website obviously that doesn't work search engines are much more sophisticated e-mail doesn't work nearly as well we could blast out the press release say we're the WTO and people would get it in their inbox and go oh my gosh the WTO now that doesn't work for many reasons and also fake news is reprehensible now I mean what we do is fake news it's like we reveal it always but still there are other ways of doing what we do and we've used social media in the past to do the fact we did that for a while we've gotten invited to conferences without ever putting on the website or using e-mail just by like e-mailing the conference and saying can we speak can our eminent and how we're going to see a conference and doing a little social engineering maybe a phone call or two to have some inter-office argument and they say yes please come especially since we've made our own way they're just delighted and that still works I was no aware of that that's all that's important so have you ever been invited somewhere to have your material reviewed beforehand like does that happen? it's reviewed I mean sometimes you know you can go to a conference and you can find it in a search on conferences and click on the conference so it's interesting or relevant and find the speaking opportunities form and fill out the form and they usually ask you this not all the words that you send it to them they'll be like that's what it is yeah we can do that anytime you can do that anytime doesn't ask if you've ever got like what kind of following is that what site do you make our mark on where the idea of like it's for kind of these creating projects for change do you ever get people approaching you now there's this company in particular or there's this idea of R2 that we really want to take down do you have people approaching you in that sense like saying we do this for us do you accept those or do you accept R2 for that one yeah we show them websites we send them here we say go look at this and here's another website where you look at that one not that one beautiful trouble instruction we also have a little in process instruction here's how to do it do things we just send them instructions tell them to do it because it's not rocket science it's like we're just this is we've done this for 20 years some things we're good at we still screw up in major ways and it's that we're not by any means the first to do this it goes way back most recently the 60s the 80s did all kinds of things of this sort that other website beautiful trouble such a good resource there's a history section with like all kinds of examples these are principles these are principles that you might want to think about and disagree with some of them contradict each other do you give them the idea of how to think through what to do and how to do an action logic that's the most useful thing in this entire book it's the concept of action logic coming up with actions that convey by themselves what you're trying to say some thing artists are really good at and then case studies so these are actions most of them are pretty modern but some of them are ancient and then practitioners, that's the thing so some of these are recent but then it goes back like the grand future of the the artist battalion and a lot of work over through the loss of edge in Serbia in 2000 using a lot of creative artistic techniques that's a new story what was the question? I was just asking if you had people approach you like art articles are real you're a bit too excited about what it is for creativity we just say like we'll get what's been done get inspired by what's been done do it yourself either do what we do if we really want or do what other people used to do rip it off work on your own new amount of different things it's all like public domain nobody's going to sue any kind of current copy of the thing yeah kind of to bounce off how do you decide your approach on to like getting new messages anything's done how do you decide that the approach that you take is the approach that you take oh yeah I'll show you an example this is an example of a so-called decision that we made yes okay so this was a project that we undertook in 2012 maybe there was a policy in New York in the New York police department called stop and frisk you guys are not in front of this yes 600,000 people a year stop and frisk for no reason by the police and it's their policy and they would do it in certain neighborhoods like the Bronx places with a lot of people of color they didn't do it on Wall Street they did it on the Bronx and they would catch 5% of the people that had captured something and I guarantee you on Wall Street they would have caught 20% but there was a decision to cry all this racist policing and there was a big movement to get it abolished in fact our current mayor ran on the platform and abolished it later that was after this and so these activists approached us and one activist basically with a small organization and she and so we organized the students we've got some local activists some occupied people with some experience and we just sat in the room and brainstormed and we looked at all the symbols the company this race there's police what else happens in the neighborhood where there is stop and frisk where all these people are stopping frisk what else is there there's bad food out there there's all kinds of some good food too but a lot of fast food we just looked at all these things put them on the board try to think of what happened what sort of headline might be an action coming from something just did our brainstorming techniques bunch of people threw out ideas and then somebody came up with an idea that made everyone laugh kind of uncomfortably but laugh and so that was it and that was the bottom line seemed like the idea and the organizer didn't like it and she said no we can't do that that's really too uncomfortable and so I just asked her to go back to her constituency the people she was representing up in Bronx and talk to them and see what they thought of this idea and so she went there and talked to her collaborators and made love to them they didn't find it at all offensive and this is the result so that's how we came up with this it was just by trying to figure it out and see what was funny well it seemed like a joke from the start if you are stopping frisk free time for the NYPD you get a free happy meal and you can find it on the website where it came from spread quickly online and had some belief it was true I went into report Kristen Thorn shows us what happened and who was behind it that's why we're excited to introduce I mean three strikes you're in while the NYPD can't stop you can't stop the frisk McDonald's can help police reward law-abiding citizens McDonald's NYPD teaming up to get guns and drugs off the streets seemed strange well it should it's part of the school website called that's why you need a W every time you stop frisk and release simply pull out your name, ethnicity you can't stop after three stops you're in when you're completed, go out to your nearest McDonald's and exchange it for a free hat people call it broken window policing but we'd like them to think about issues like what happens to the young person's mind when they leave the house they're targeted Jerry surrounded and do not grant created the site during the local activist group called people enraged by racial policing the NYPD stops and frisk some 600,000 people every year critics say it encourages racial profiling the department says it's a vital way to reduce violent crime we wanted to make the connection between race and bias based policing is their sapphire could actually be taken as real grounded and durant put it to the test setting one of their home into a local McDonald's with one of the fake vouchers the manager looks at the voucher orders it for a second and then puts in the order you might shout to the NYPD about all this but they didn't get back to us a supposed to be for McDonald's this entire thing is just made up as for the site, three strikes you'll end, it was taken down within hours of being posted because of a copyright infringement inside Queens, Kristen Thornton, Channel 7 I witness news it doesn't just don't work that's... copyright infringement would probably be one of them don't do that nothing on that maybe you can break the law as much as you want I'm not sure if there's any reason but there doesn't seem to be a limit that we found it's more like doing really really stupid things there's one that I'm looking for it's about burning puppies this is so weird did I just remove the lid oh I remember being that said oh god this was yeah this is what happens when you have too much opportunity when somebody like in this case it was Russell Brennan he had a friend he has a show that's all about activism and he's a friend in his department and he was the big stink in the UK because the UK was trying to raise the age of retirement to fight firefighters something like 55 to 68 I don't know and so since 2013 I remember that was oh god let me just show the video this is what we tried to do and then I'm gonna oh god pretty good ok so these firefighters were posing the raising of the age of retirement for 55 to 60 and so we thought it was a really stupid way to demonstrate what was wrong with that we created a public announcement of a so called public announcement of a demonstration by old firefighters it's mostly by government showing that 60 year old firefighters fight firefighters really well and there's no problem raising the age of retirement from the firefighters and so we tried to get I don't know if we actually tried to get home there but we just got a bunch of friends to go I think it was friends to go we just yeah no definitely it was friends to go because it was all staged so these people came to find so it was carnival that we had invited the public and then had this demonstration of a bunch of firefighters fighting the fire so we had a pyrotechnist team and a fire truck and a real pyrotechnist team and they burned this giant thing and then the firefighters all came with their poses and squirted the fire and the pyrotechnist team made the fire go out a little bit but then okay and then for some of what we're filming this and then we filmed a screening the firefighters and then the firefighters and turns the pose and squirts the dog into the fire and then you see somebody saying turn the camera off and somebody saying like don't film that and you just catch a little and then we made this video we put it on youtube and we tweeted it out supposedly from a person who had called it and we tried to get attention and Russell Brown who tweeted it and went nowhere we thought that video of the dog accidentally being incinerated by ancient firefighters was pretty funny and people just go crazy over it but absolutely nowhere it was absolutely no and I think it's because people really don't want to see a new dog anymore whoo or you guys okay and I came like so you may have said that is there or where is the sweet spot between what I call SVA something dynamic art that pushes information out of people and really wonderful work that invites people in but still gets the inspiration to act yeah well we get very dynamic at the end we use the funny stuff to get people in as you said and to get the media in together at the end to make people laugh maybe make people see things from a different perspective for a moment but basically it's about the issue so at the end we say this is what this is about and we have to do this and that and we try to get people out of this reaction but thank you and that's why we work with organizations nowadays with some exceptions we work with intelligent activist organizations but have campaigns around things that large ones they were intelligent but they were not yeah sometimes we family we work with organizations but at the end we really want to say something very simple like stop art drilling you know engage trauma whatever it is it's very simple and straightforward we just I don't know if that answers your question when a student in terms of us it depends on the moment if we're doing a project and they just become a participant in the project we've had students who have become really important and made them happen basically with us and then from them to do their own stuff sometimes yeah they just do whatever they know how to do like did this the one thing that we've done let's see this we did it was the one thing we tried to do since the election we were invited to the conference called Politicon in LA just like a comic con for politics I think I was a lot of politics just for the sake of it they get these like and culture people and they also get like super progressive people and they just argue yeah it's still not fun but that's great thank you and so each time we try to think of something to do here we posed as representative I posed as a high end representative of the DNC Democratic National Committee and said that we had finally learned from our mistakes and we're now going to adopt a progressive agenda truly progressive one here's why I'm working here's the polls that show this is what we need to do and they happen to land a week after Chuck Schumer available what he called a progressive populist agenda which was not and so basically I said like nobody thought this was any good they didn't really find the right there's all this stuff about universal basic income universal health care and all these truly progressive things that people actually want that have been proven to resonate with local voters and it's all true and it was about getting that information and there was the DNC over being such a noctose middle of the road Democrats at a time and populists who literally called for less populism which has that populism doesn't have a good name but it can be just you know progressive like agitation and like really trying to get a better world rather than just following all the financial breadcrumbs which they do so we did that and a student an intern did all the social media and a lot of the camera work and there were actually two of them and they worked great and they got it out there so yeah it just depends when we don't have a project it can look like they take the tree I'm curious you've mentioned that you needed permission to go to speaking maybe not conference but for projects such as having a full hybrid techniques where do you get that coming are you umbrella underneath? no that was Russell Brennan we did it with him his show it wasn't him personally it was his TV show Hire the Pyrotechnics team and the fire truck yeah but yeah we work with organizations that fund things when there's needs of fund things or half of the material on hand the three strikes you're in project that didn't cost anything to do that it was a website it was a video video camera bar there was the vouchers that weren't really printed in any quantity and so you can do these in small streets but that vocational we ended up working with an organization that has things like barges and marching bands and so we use them and it's not always a good thing it's like sometimes better to not have resources actually we found in 2004 during that election right? that was the second bush election we had this big truck because we got a big grant and so we got what we used this money for and we got a truck and it was a big bush campaign truck and we made it weird and we were really weird and our original idea was to tail the actual bush campaign we couldn't figure out where they were though the democrats didn't know where they were the bush campaign was so we couldn't actually do that and so we just drove around trying to make videos funny videos and it was kind of a flop but it was funny and the videos are pretty funny and weird but we found that eventually when the bus broke down and we trashed it at the junkyard we were then free to actually do more interesting stuff and we did the best stuff out of that and then finally the best stuff was just going to go to the door in Florida we flew down Miami and went to the door and it was that we could get out of the boat after so what's appropriate what's the role of this in the election maybe there is one but it's less clear it's more like it's relevant for bigger issues like environmental issues or when it's down to the wire and you have to go to the dictator before it becomes a long dictator then you don't do this as an activist group that has traveled internationally it's kind of easy to connect those activists to different places yeah there's one group in Germany in Copenhagen that they actually do what we do they took it from us and they do it kind of better than we do and more tied to local issues websites a lot better on the slide they yeah it doesn't seem to be orders to this that we've had yet how do you see this peaceful commentary going into the future after I mean it's creating a world of terrifying social discourse how can you represent what you can make better right now is there any nope really can't at least not with any hope of it being effective and it has to be effective for it to be fun so that satire is a great word for it we have one project that works that I'm excited about it's not really satire but it's definitely in our the vein of things that we've done in the past but basically yeah it's important in a moment like this to be just focused on what works and we know what works it's supporting progressive candidates and that will make a big difference because they do win so if you can get them in the primaries to be the less progressive candidate less progressive democrat that's great if you can get them to support them in the internal campaigning itself that's great that's the national state level that's important to support progressive efforts at all and that's straightforward that's been done for centuries we know how to support candidates and all the win and I think that's it I think we're all at this there might be I'm not yeah personally not that interested in figuring it out and I think it's one project that we have that for November is pretty interesting I'm excited about that but I'm not I used to kind of feel like I should proselytize for this sort of work and say this is really important and it can be an extra thing toolbox and it can be but maybe I'm not maybe it can be now too but I just don't have the answer for how and I feel first of all like I've just got to you know where I can live with myself later I have to do what I know is going to be effective because we are in a forum where we can go and it can it is a great opportunity sorry for when things look better you want to join and do stuff with us then just go to our website and get involved a lot of time does