Google and China's "Great Firewall": Fun with the Billboard Liberation Front and monochrom
The San Francisco-based Billboard Liberation Front has been transforming the world of advertising since 1977. When Austrian art-pranksters and regular BBtv guests monochrom recently visited the United States to spread their Sculpture Mob dogma, a historic meeting with the elusive BLF took place. Boing Boing tv's hidden cameras captured everything.
And in part two of today's BBtv episode, Xeni travels with the BLF and monochrom to document their first-ever joint exploit to build "The Great Firewall of China" around one of the Google signs on the internet giant's Mountain View campus. Hijinks ensued; dogs, cops, and GOOG security guards pursued; TV news crews newsed.
The goal of their "unpaid advertising services"? To draw attention to Google's role in online censorship within China. As it happened, this particular day was the same day of a Google shareholder meeting, during which related proposals came up for vote.
Link to Billboard Liberation Front press release, and here's monochrom's side of the story. Here are previous BBtv episodes with monochrom.
the latest
the latest
I knew inhaling helium before before the segment was a bad idea.
covertly yours,
Milton Rand Kalman
BLF Chief Scientist
Thank you for the collaboration.
We needed to maintain a low standard of political metaphor to give American citizens a chance to understand it. From an aesthetic perspective, The Great Firewall of China is radically mediocre. In the end, China's stoic indifference to Western art insanity is quite impressive.
We are currently uploading detailed photographs to a Flickr account. So next time we should visit those guys.
Xeni, you misspelled my name two different ways! Delightful meeting you nonetheless. Please give a call next time you feel like videoing some bored middle class vandals. Too bad you didn't stick around for the drinks afterwards - Jack did a table dance! (Milton had to help him up onto the table, though.) Nice work on the segment, I for one am well pleased.
Best of all, I had a girlfriend here when it was posted... nothing like the look in a woman's eye when she realizes you're an internet celebrity. ;-) Strike another 10 seconds off my 15 minutes...
Johannes and Daniel - great to meet & work with you guys. I hope you'll find more reasons to come to SF in the future. "radically mediocre", LOL! That should be our slogan! "The BIllboard LIberation Front - radical mediocrity since 1997! Er, 1977."
Much love & respect,
eHricH
Nice job BBTV. Thanks for ramping up the production values. Xeni, please know that your spot on choice of head wear in this and the "Combat Robots, Warring Battleships" episodes has not gone unnoticed.
At least Google didn't give millions of dollars to death squads just so we could eat
bananas!
Well done, but it's a pity that so few are gonna notice it
@trnck: We live in a hypermedial environment. Lots of people will notice it. Walter Benjamin wrote about the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In the meantime -- I guess -- we have to exchange mechanical with something more trendy. Like optodualcorefibrous.
I guess the real object wasn't out there for a long time. I'm sure they pretty quickly called some workers to get rid of it. But we left a bottle of *really* good scotch at the site... for the clean-up personnel. As a cheerful "thank you".
Johannes
monochrom
Fast forward 5 minutes to get to the "action"...
I agree with the protest idea, but the video seems like a self-congratulatory 7 minutes of "wow, we are so great, look at what we are doing!".
And why is China represented with those farmers' hats anyway, it doesn't strike me as steroetyping and not very creative.
Long comment apparently just lost to browser freakout. Short version:
Cisco is aggressive and shameless in selling censorship tech to the Chinese secret police. Yahoo happily cooperates with them when they're hunting inconvenient reporters and bloggers. Google, by contrast, does the bare minimum required to comply with Chinese law. (Which makes them exactly as much or as little compromised as anyone else doing business in China; the only alternative is to stay out altogether, which won't help many Chinese). And if the BLF doesn't like what's required by Chinese law, there's no point complaining to Google --- Google can't change it.
Google aggressively click-tracks Americans. They sell technology (and who knows what else?) to the NSA. Those might be reasonable reasons to protest. This, on the other hand, seems... ill-conceived.
#7 , I picture those chinese farmer hats and shreds of clothing as being left behind by chinese citizens as they Jump over the firewall. It's campy, sure, but it's a parody after all.
The fact that Google's shareholders voted that day _against_ the anti-censorship proposal should be enough to justify some criticism. Maybe someone wants to go hassle Yahoo or Cisco next week? Anyone?
Damn it, I knew this was going to happen. Now people think we care about something, rather than just being petty vandals with too much time on our hands. We're going to have to do something really snotty for our next hit.
Netshark...
I think that Monochrom and BLF made it clear that you must be ironic about your own quests of self-creation. That's why the whole piece is really great. I mean, the last line of the film is one guys saying: "I'm getting bored!" ;-)))
This seemed like it was making light of a very serious human rights issue.
5 minutes of what looked like something teenagers put on youtube followed by dropping a fence littered with ridiculously stereotypical "Chinese stuff" in front of a sign.
The BLF has done some clever work in the past, the NSA/ATT billboard comes to mind. This was just goofing about.
@Simplehuman:
What the world needs is clear ambiguity. And twiddling with cultural codes. It's as easy as that.
@Larf: Yeah. Even pranking has more than two layers of reality!
@Charliedodgson: I recommend to start your own sculpture mob! At least we want to create a movement here! Check out the Yahoo site. But it's pretty uninspiring. We drove by.
@Aviddd: And after all. It's bloody art.
Johannes
monochrom
@9, ordinary google shareholders don't actually have any real voting power; when google went public they set up a dual-class voting structure where the founders and some other early insiders have so much more voting power per share that outsiders effectively have no influence at all. Of course, any shareholder who's done their due diligence knows this, so it's not like they're getting duped or anything.