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RTMark: www.RTMark.com

Dubbed the "MacArthur Foundation for aesthetic anarchy" by the Village Voice, RTMark was founded in 1991 as an entity designed to support various culture jamming practices, especially those aimed at undermining corporate power. It has since evolved into a large online meeting ground not only uniting unruly tactics, artists, and funding sources, but encouraging a wide array of spoofs, hoaxes, and pranks. As the site's activities have expanded, RTMark's public profile has also increased (while its individual members continue to remain anonymous), thanks in part to numerous news-gaining antics aimed at disturbing the easy functioning of corporate hegemony.

The list of projects supported by RTMark reads like an insider's guide to the most critical -- and often most hilarious -- attacks wrought by artists against creeping corporate power over the last decade. Several years ago, the Barbie Liberation Organization, for example, tackled egregious gender stereotypes in dolls by clandestinely switching the voiceboxes in talking Barbies and GI Joes. Scores of kids enjoyed a few seconds of gleeful dissonance as GI Joe chirped, "I love shopping!" while Teen Talk Barbie growled, "Vengeance is mine!" RTMark funneled $8,000 to the BLO in 1993.

In 1996, RTMark also delivered money from a New York City shopkeeper to a programmer at a company called Maxis, which makes the SimCopter game. The programmer had managed a clever hack, replacing the game's requisite buxom babes with affectionate young men in bathing suits. The programmer was quickly fired, but not before the game had been shipped out to stores.

While RTMark aids many like-minded hackers and jammers, they are themselves responsible for some of the best media pranks listed on their site. In 1999, they created GWBush.com, a website that initially appeared to belong to George Bush Sr., who at that point was running for President. Rather than touting the presidential hopeful, however, the site pointed out glaring contradictions and embarrassing gaffes.

Similarly, gatt.org offers visitors a survey of the latest activities of the World Trade Organization; indeed, the site even announced the demise of the WTO, explaining, "The WTO will reintegrate as a new trade body whose charter will be to ensure that trade benefits the poor." It sounds too good to be true, of course, but many were fooled by the website's hoax. Score one more for RTMark.

Commenting on RTMark's predilection for media hoaxes, Frank Guerrero, an alias for one of RTMark's members, notes, "Subterfuge and fakery are the only real operative modes of public political engagement for business and government today." He continues, "We just throw in the irony to show that, unlike the people in power, we are not trying to fool anyone. Really, when there is so much untruth going on at the level of government -- myths perpetrated against the public for the worst imaginable purposes -- the little bits of fiction and trickery that we use to deliver what in the end is simple satire seems just fine to me. We are telling stories, fables basically, that have morals. Sometimes to get to the moral of the fable one has to follow a path of deceit."

RTMark's latest endeavors include the creation of "The Yes Men," a group of anonymous speakers who impersonate representatives of the WTO; sometimes they attempt to spark outrage by exhorting audiences toward morally bankrupt practices, but overall the goal is to encourage people to think rather than to follow. Commenting on RTMark's plans for the near future, Guerrero points out that the rising attention to corporate abuses of power means that his group's activities can become more clandestine. He quickly adds, however, "Of course, it's a shame that despite everyone knowing full well about the Enrons and WorldComs corporate scandals, our Senate and Congress and President continue to deregulate industry at a record pace, while simultaneously paying lip service to their improprieties. This is the kind of deceit that we are up against." And with that kind of deceit, RTMark won't be far behind.

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Emerging Fields > Digital Arts / New Media | Products & Consumerism | Americana | Labor | Politics | New York | 2000