"Yes Man" lectures on campus Feb. 25

“Culture Jammer” and “Yes Man” Igor Vamos lectures 5:10 p.m. Monday, Feb. 25 in the McDonough Museum of Art on the campus of Youngstown State University.

The lecture is free and open to the public.

Vamos, professor of Media Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, is also known as “Mike Bonanno” in his work with The Yes Men, the performance-activist duo that impersonates captains of industry and surprises unsuspecting business audiences with satirical actions that comment on pressing social and environmental issues. The movie, The Yes Men Fix the World, was an official selection of the 2009 Sundance Film Festival and won the Panorama Audience Award at the 2009 Berlin International Film Festival. The movie, which chronicled the hijinks of the Yes Men, earned praise from national and international press.

Vamos is also renowned for culture jamming -  the act of using existing media such as billboards to comment on those very media themselves or on society in general. It is based on the idea that advertising is little more than propaganda for established interests, and that there is little escape from this propaganda in industrialized nations.

"After 10,000 years of a stable climate, the earth has entered a period of great instability,” said Vamos, who holds a bachelor’s degree in Studio Art from Reed College and a master’s in Fine Arts in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego. “Because of this, students today will likely face environmental and social problems at a scale and complexity that civilization has yet to witness. It is for this reason that my focus as an educator and a communicator has been to help prepare them to proactively work towards solving these emergent problems, both through applied multi-disciplinary projects that treat the symptoms, and by civic engagement intended to address the root causes."

Vamos is also well-known for his collaborative public art projects such as the Barbie Liberation Organization and the Center for Land Use Interpretation, a non-profit organization dedicated to the dissemination of knowledge about the nature of human interaction with the Earth. In 2003, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Parking for the lecture is available in the Wick Avenue deck for a nominal fee.