Mike Bonanno

From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia Igor Vamos born April 15 1968 is an internationally known multimedia artist leading member of The Yes Men using the alias Mike Bonanno and an associate professor of media arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute1 He is also a cofounder 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 Vamos earned an undergraduate degree in Studio Art from Reed College and 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 Quayles 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 Portlands 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 Another successful early project was the Barbie Liberation Organization where Vamos and his cohorts purchased three hundred Barbie and GI Joe dolls exchanged their electronic voice boxes and then returned them to the stores the soldiers ended up saying things like Lets go shopping while the Barbies exclaimed Vengeance is mine It was a smallscale project and few people actually found themselves in possession of the switched dolls but the stunt nevertheless attracted national media attention Description above from the Wikipedia article Igor Vamos licensed under CCBYSA full list of contributors on Wikipedia