Igor Vamos | |
---|---|
Nationality | American |
Education | Reed College |
Occupation | Comedian, Activist |
Known for | Yes Men |
Igor Vamos (born April 15, 1968) is a member of The Yes Men (using the alias Michael "Mike" Bonanno), and an associate professor of media arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. [1] In 2000, he received the Creative Capital award in the discipline of Emerging Fields. [2] He is also a co-founder of RTmark and the recipient of a 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship, granted for a project that used Global Positioning System (GPS) and other wireless technology to create a new medium with which to "view" his documentary Grounded, about an abandoned military base in Wendover, Utah. [1]
In 1990, Vamos earned an undergraduate degree in Studio Art from Reed College in Portland, Oregon. He later earned an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego. While at Reed, Vamos organized a student group called Guerrilla Theater of the Absurd. They performed and documented "culture jamming" acts of protest, including Reverse Peristalsis Painters, where 24 people in suits stood outside the downtown venue of Dan Quayle's fundraiser for Oregon senator Bob Packwood and drank ipecac, forcing themselves to vomit the red, white and blue remains of the mashed potatoes and food coloring they had consumed earlier; and a middle of the night contribution to the debate over renaming Portland's Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, wherein the city awoke to find that all of the street signs and freeway exits for another major boulevard had been changed to read "Malcolm X Street." [3]
Vamos made Le petomane: Fin de siècle fartiste (1998) [4] about the French flatulist and entertainer Joseph Pujol, a parody in the style of a PBS documentary. [5] Another early project was the "Barbie Liberation Organization", where Vamos and his cohorts purchased three hundred Barbie and G.I. Joe dolls, exchanged their electronic voice boxes, and then returned them to the stores; the soldiers ended up saying, "Let's go shopping!", and the Barbies exclaimed, "Vengeance is mine!". It was a small-scale project, and few people found themselves in possession of the switched dolls. The stunt nevertheless attracted national media attention. [6]
Vamos presented the Reed College Commencement Speech on May 19, 2014, where he announced that the college had decided to divest from fossil fuels, [7] a decision the college had in fact not made. [8] [9]
Reed College is a private liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon. Founded in 1908, Reed is a residential college with a campus in the Eastmoreland neighborhood, with Tudor-Gothic style architecture, and a forested canyon nature preserve at its center.
Joseph Pujol, better known by his stage name Le Pétomane, was a French flatulist and entertainer. He was famous for his remarkable control of the abdominal muscles, which enabled him to seemingly fart at will. His stage name combines the French verb péter, "to fart" with the -mane, "-maniac" suffix, which translates to "fartomaniac". The profession is referred to as "flatulist", "farteur", or "fartiste".
Shirley Ann Jackson, is an American physicist, and the eighteenth president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She is the first African-American woman to have earned a doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is also the second African-American woman in the United States to earn a doctorate in physics.
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) is a private research university in Troy, New York, with additional campuses in Hartford and Groton, Connecticut. It was established in 1824 by Stephen van Rensselaer and Amos Eaton for the "application of science to the common purposes of life" and is the oldest technological university in the English-speaking world and the Western Hemisphere. Numerous American colleges or departments of applied sciences were modeled after Rensselaer.
RTMark is an anti-consumerist activist collective, whose stated aim is to subvert the "Corporate Shield" that "protects" American corporations. The name is derived from "Registered Trademark".
The Yes Men are a culture jamming activist duo and network of supporters created by Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos. Through various actions, the Yes Men primarily aim to raise awareness about problematic social and political issues. To date, the duo have produced three films: The Yes Men (2003), The Yes Men Fix the World (2009), and The Yes Men Are Revolting (2014). In these films, they impersonate entities that they dislike, a practice that they call "identity correction." The Yes Men operate under the mission statement that lies can expose truth. They create and maintain fake websites similar to ones they intend to spoof, which have led to numerous interview, conference, and TV talk show invitations. They espouse the belief that corporations and governmental organizations often act in dehumanizing ways toward the public. Elaborate props are sometimes part of the ruse, as shown in their 2003 DVD release The Yes Men. The Yes Men have collaborated with other groups of similar interest, including Improv Everywhere, Andrew Boyd and Steve Lambert.
The Barbie Liberation Organization or BLO, sponsored by RTMark, were a group of artists and activists involved in culture jamming. They gained notoriety in 1993 after switching voice boxes in talking G.I. Joes and Barbie dolls. The BLO performed "surgery" on a reported 300–500 dolls from retail and returned them to shelves, an action they refer to as shopgiving. Thus, Teen Talk Barbie dolls would say phrases such as "Vengeance is mine", while G.I. Joe dolls would say phrases such as "The beach is the place for summer!"
Pamela Ribon is an American screenwriter, author, television writer, blogger and actress. In November 2014, she found a Barbie book from 2010 titled I Can be a Computer Engineer. She decried elements of the book where Barbie appeared to be reliant on male colleagues. Mattel has since ceased publishing the book. Also known as Pamie and Wonder Killer, she runs the website pamie.com. She was one of the original recappers for Television Without Pity. Her commencement address for the 2019 College of Fine Arts graduating class of the University of Texas at Austin was praised by Texas Monthly.
Peter Rock is an American novelist born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is a professor of creative writing at Reed College and lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and daughters.
Sarah Dougher is an American singer-songwriter, author, and teacher. Dougher began her musical career playing the Farfisa organ in the Portland, Oregon based band The Crabs, and later joined Cadallaca with Sleater-Kinney frontwoman Corin Tucker. She has also released multiple solo albums.
Alexander King Sample is an American prelate of the Roman Catholic Church. He has been serving as archbishop of the Archdiocese of Portland in Oregon since 2013. Sample previously served as bishop of the Diocese of Marquette in Michigan from 2005 to 2013.
Mary Jo Bang is an American poet.
Shane McCrae is an American poet, and is currently Poetry Editor of Image.
Julia Meltzer is an American video artist and director.
The Bonnie Bronson Fellowship, named after American painter and sculptor Bonnie Bronson, is an award presented annually to Pacific Northwest artists.
Peter Zuckerman is an American journalist and author who has focused his career in court reporting, investigative journalism, and adventure stories. He is also a leader of several prominent progressive political campaigns.
Southeast Bybee Boulevard is a light rail station in Portland, Oregon, United States, served by TriMet as part of the MAX Light Rail system. Situated between the Southeast Tacoma/Johnson Creek and Southeast 17th Avenue and Holgate Boulevard stations, it is the 14th station southbound on the Orange Line, which operates between downtown Portland, Southeast Portland, and Milwaukie. The station's entrances are located on the Bybee Bridge, which spans Southeast McLoughlin Boulevard, the light rail tracks, and Union Pacific Railroad (UP) freight tracks and connects Portland's Sellwood-Moreland and Eastmoreland neighborhoods. The grade-separated island platform station adjoins Eastmoreland Golf Course and Crystal Springs Rhododendron Garden to the east and Westmoreland's park of the same name to the west.
Cynthia Lahti is an American contemporary artist from Portland, Oregon, who works in many mediums: "from collage to ceramics, altered books, and painting".
Kambiz GhaneaBassiri is Thomas Lamb Eliot Professor of Religion and Humanities at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of A History of Islam in America: From the New World to the New World Order and Competing Visions of Islam in the United States: A Study of Los Angeles. He is one of the founding editors of a book series on Islam of the Global West published by Bloomsbury Academic Publishing. Both he and his books have been quoted and referred to a multitude of times. He has been named a Carnegie Scholar by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and received a Guggenheim Fellowships Award in the Humanities for his work on the mosque in Islamic history.