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One of the most notable projects that RTMark has engaged in is the Yes Men’s World Trade Organization (WTO) parody site, www.gatt.org. The site, launched in early 2000, looks almost identical to the WTO’s official site but has been modified to generate critical discourse about the policies and proposals of the WTO. The site spawned invitations to attend conferences by visitors who thought that they were conferring with the actual WTO, which the Yes Men accepted. The resulting outcome can be seen in the documentary The Yes Men (2003) by Dan Ollman, Sarah Price, and Chris Smith, who follow the activists’ antics as they act as spokesmen for the WTO.

I recently met with “Max Kauffman,” one of the RTMark members who joined RTMark six months after its founding in 1996. Kauffman, like other members, prefers to remain anonymous and goes by this pseudonym. Initially, Kauffman became interested in the idea of art as an activist tool after being frustrated by his experiences as an employee of a multinational corporation. Kauffman was concerned with the increasingly materialistic culture and growing margin between people and profit. According to Kauffman, RTMark was built by a network of artists, classmates, and activists who found one another at the rise of the Internet in the mid-1990s.

Despite the eclectic projects, RTMark’s tactics are clear. Kauffman asserts, “We come from the tradition of Jonathan Swift and A Modest Proposal [1729]–the idea of couching sharp social commentary in the guise of satire.” (2) An important project RTMark completed in 1999 was aiding an Austrian art group, etoy, in a lawsuit filed by eToys.com over the use of the domain name www.etoy.com. EToys claimed the Web site www.etoy.com was hurting their sales. Linked by the Internet community, which made the debate international news, an outpouring of support helped etoy get their domain back, and the arts organization is still in existence today. The Internet helped RTMark achieve its goal of promoting and aiding activists’ projects. As Kauffman says, “RTMark is a clearinghouse for ideas of resistance to corporate abuses of power. I don’t think RTMark could have existed without the rise of network culture.” (3)

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In Cologne, Germany, Agricola de Cologne uses the Internet to create thematic social sculptures. By linking to other artists and curatorial projects, de Cologne builds community with like-minded thinkers. As a result, he has created what he describes as, “a dynamic network including countless projects, artists, curators, institutions, and organizations; without them, my work would not exist.” (4) He began as a painter, moved into installation, and then shifted his production exclusively to the Internet at the beginning of 2000. De Cologne introduced a collective approach to his art production as an artist/curator/director with such projects as “A Virtual Memorial” (2000) and “Le Musee di-visioniste” (2000), both a part of his NewMediaArtProjectNetwork (http://nmartproject.net/). He describes the NewMediaArtProjectNetwork as “a gigantic dynamic artwork consisting of subordinated networking constructions as projects and subprojects.” (5)

Much of de Cologne’s work is a result of concern for what happened during the Nazi regime and World War II. In 1995, at the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of WWII, he began a project that reflects the past and present and contributes to the German reconciliation with the Jews and the people of Poland. The resulting project, “1000 years 50 years and still so terribly young” (1995), which he asserts “relates to the historical Nazi ideology of Hitler and its neo-fascist manifestations nowadays,” (6) was a successful show that was included in ten Polish museums, among them the state museums of Auschwitz and Majdanek. Building on the concepts of this exhibition, which pre-dates his Internet work, de Cologne completed another installation, “A Living Memorial–Memorial Project Against the Forgetting, Racism, Xenophobia and Anti-Semitism” (1995), which was shown in the Czech Republic, Germany, and Poland.