FISHING VILLAGE WINS PRIZE FOR TECHNOLOGICAL WARFARE

Ars Electronica, the foremost new media technology festival in the
world, has awarded its prestigious InfoWeapon cash prize to the people
of Popotla, a tiny Mexican fishing village, for resisting unwanted
technologies by means of trash and recycled materials.

To film the movie Titanic, Twentieth Century Fox built a movie
maquiladora in Popotla, and surrounded it with a giant cement wall to
keep the villagers out. ("Maquiladora" is the term for US factories
operating in Mexico because of the low wages.) The people of Popotla
reacted to the unsightly wall first in humiliation and anger, and then
by covering it with a mural constructed from garbage they amassed and
collected. The Ars Electronica InfoWeapon jury is rewarding Popotla for
this remarkable low-tech gesture against an unpleasant high-tech
situation.

Ars Electronica is also awarding the movie Titanic itself, which cost
US$200 million to make, its Golden Nica cash prize for computer
animation. Ars Electronica is thus in the cutting-edge position of
rewarding both parties in a cultural and economic impasse, thus perhaps
furthering discussion between them.

RTMARK will present the InfoWeapon cash prize to a representative of
Popotla at the Ars Electronica award ceremony in Linz, Austria, this
September.

For a fuller story of the Popotla wall, see
http://rtmark.com/popotla.html.

For a description of the InfoWeapon prize, see
http://www.aec.at/infowar/NETSYMPOSIUM/ARCH-EN/msg00000.html

To learn about Ars Electronica, see http://www.aec.at/.

RTMARK was established in 1991 to further anti-corporate activism, in
some cases by channelling funds from donors to workers for sabotage of
corporate products. Recent and upcoming acts of RTMARK-aided subversion
are documented on RTMARK's web site, http://rtmark.com/.