The Beijing Olympics have elicited several very creative protests in the Western design community. One of the most biting is the web site Behind Beijing Olympic , which mimics the design and logo of the official Olympic site. However, the symbols and contents have been altered to convey images of political oppression. For example, the famous Olympian circles have been turned into handcuffs and the little stick figures that symbolize each sport have been altered to resemble policemen beating up monks and kicking babies.
The most prolific practitioners of this kind of web site hijacking (or “identity correction” as they call it) are the artists and activists the Yes Men, sometimes known as Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, who use digital design along with their own special brand of satirical performance art to expose political “truths”. The first subject for the Yes Men’s online “identity correction” was President Bush back in 1999. The activists created a web site under the domain name GWBush.com that was identical to the President’s official site GeorgeWBush.com, with a few notable changes in slogans and messages.
(The site quickly infuriated the Bush team and when the presidential candidate was asked about the site in a press conference on May 21, 1999, he responded that the website had gone too far in criticizing him, and that “there ought to be limits to freedom.”) Since then, the Yes Men have continued to vex organizations like The WTO, Dow Chemical, Exxon and BP with both offline and online hijinks. Their work was documented in the outrageously funny 2003 documentary The Yes Men and according to their web site they are currently at work on another film project.
