The BLO
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In the mid 1990s cultural critic Mark Dery wrote: The BLO claims to have performed corrective surgery on 300 Teen Talk Barbies and Talking Duke G.I. Joes---switching their sound chips, repackaging the toys, and returning them to store shelves. Consumers reported their amazement at hearing Barbie bellow, "Eat lead, Cobra!" or "Vengeance is mine!," while Joe chirped, "Will we ever have enough clothes?" and "Let's plan our dream wedding!". The BLO was an early reference of culture jamming initiatives that fostered the emergence of shopdropping (also known as reverse-shoplifting) projects later on. I would dare to say that it can be interpreted as the cultural appropriation of reverse engineering, a military strategy often used during WWII to figure out other nation’s technological information; a practice that has continued gaining attention, especially in relation to open-source philosophies. Pictures are taken from this page that keeps the memory of the legendary group and offers a scanned copy from the original step-by-step guide to perform our own Barbie/G.I Joe home transformation. Related: Modified Toy Orchestra makes electronic music that derives from the modification of toys; and Stelarc Ken (webpage). |
Researching a bit for a talk I'll be giving in 
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In this article Mike Bonanno (one half of the Yes Men), claims to be the founder of the BLO.
Chalk up another one for the Yes Men. Equipped with absurd aliases, cheap suits, and official-looking websites, Andy Bichlbaum (a.k.a. Finisterra) and his coconspirator, Mike Bonanno (above right), have posed as officials from the World Trade Organization, McDonald's, and even the Bush campaign. Rather than being exposed as frauds, the Yes Men and their crackpot proposals—from recycling human waste into fast food to using global warming as a weapon against the French—are often met with approval from unsuspecting audiences.
The origins of the Yes Men and rtMark are detailed in The Yes Men Movie. just to add to this.
Yes, BLO turned Yes Men.
Origins of the BLO
I was a student at Reed College in Portland, Oregon in the mid-90s. In the late 80s/early 90s, there was a student group that was founded called the Guerilla Theater of the Absurd, which pulled pranks around the city of Portland. When Vice President Dan Quayle came to town, they showed up to puke red, white, and blue mashed potatoes. In the middle of the night, they changed the freeway exits for and street signs of Marin Luther King Jr Blvd to Malcom X Street. A later project was turning the lawn of the college into a used car lot. Another project that grew out of the GTA was the Barbie Liberation Organization. One of its key members was Igor Vamos, a studio art major, who later moved to New York. Igor Vamos went on to co-found RTMark (http://www.rtmark.com/) and is one the members of the Yes Men, who recently released a documentary of their activities (http://www.theyesmen.org/movie/).