YOSHUA OKÓN

DEMO is a project by Yoshua Okón and Juan Obando. Through it, the artists explore the phenomenon of Astroturfing and frame its repercussions while questioning the construction of modern democracy.

The term Astroturfing designates the practice of phantom funding for specialized agencies to produce artificial public demonstrations and pass them off as organic, genuine, and spontaneous. These —primarily private— agencies use unemployed people and precarious workers as actors to play activists in their events who are required to sign releases that forbid them to disclose that they are paid performers. At the same time, these agencies work hand in hand with media outlets to produce viral news and highly emotional images that generate massive consensus on the interests of their clients. The term refers to the artificial grass brand Astroturf, in opposition to grassroots activism —highlighting the contrast between fake social movements against organic ones. Their Astroturfing practices indicate an advanced moment of political camouflage at the service of capital and show the level of sophistication in techniques of massive perception and manipulation. Pre-paid protests share similar aesthetic, discursive, and Spatio-temporal patterns and are highly regulated, stylized, and serialized. They ultimately serve hegemonic power as they saturate the public’s consciousness and neutralize collective imagination towards new forms of interference and systemic change. Still, these operations run freely under a neoliberal ideal of freedom that grants them full public agency but also utter obscurity to the forces behind their interventions.

For DEMO, the artists hired the services of “Crowds On Demand” to organize a public protest in Phoenix, AZ. They based their request on popular civil demonstrations most common performative paradigms, commissioning the replacement of a specific cause with that of a silent gesture. As such, the actor-protesters modulate and gesticulate the protest without omitting any sound. They also sport garments and carry blank signs in Digital Green (Digi Green), the color commonly used as background in creating special effects —also reminiscent of artificial grass. In DEMO, this color takes center stage, formally and functionally. In this way, the artists reveal conventional protest tactics and aesthetics as highly vulnerable formats for instrumentalization.

Through real actions, framed by an abstract and oversized environment, Yoshua Okón and Juan Obando propose a structural visualization of the connections derived from contemporary Astroturfing. They link the perceptive takeover of our political imagination with the expansion of capitalism, the configuration of neoliberal ideology, the normalization of corruption, accelerated virality, social media engineering, and, finally, the neutralization of civil action through the instrumentalization of social movements. DEMO makes use of reflective play between media containers and ideological content to frame Astroturfing as one of the main narrative mechanisms that inform the global imaginary around civil action and —at the same time— as a weapon of massive social destabilization. In this space where ambivalence disguises itself as consensus, we see the fragile foundations of democracy in our era.