Artist 11

This is an image from the Electronic Disturbance Theater, an internet based group that organizes large scale protests in support of the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico, following in the example of the sit-ins of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's.  They are not able to make their presence so immediately physical, and so several figurative measures have been taken to allow these electronic methods to hit just as hard.  When the participants run the "bad URLs" on the targeted web sites, whoever is trying to log in on the other end (whether that be the President of Mexico, etc.) is presented with the name of one of the innocents killed during the massacre in the village of Acteal, as well as the site possibly overloading, or at least loading extremely slowly.  I was very drawn to this mission, and the work that this group does. I am very interested in issues of human rights, and methods of protest and so forth.  However, if this group were not present on the list of New Media Artists, I would probably label them as an activist group, which they surely still are, but not an artist or group directed at creating art.  There definitely seems to be an art in the act of organizing the protests and properly executing their objectives.  And the manifestations of those objectives and aspirations would be the realization of the dignity due to all humans.  And that would surely be a beautiful, moving thing.  It seems to me that this is actually beyond art.  This is a question of the human experience, of life.  Art is the description of a message, a vision, of what that life should or may or did look like.  Well, perhaps then the EDT is truly creating art.  A fluid and somewhat intangible, ever changing work of art, that definitely takes us away.