Inspired by '70s sexploitation and action flicks, "Gynadome" - the latest work by the lesbian culture-jamming duo DAM!, or Dyke Action Machine! - takes place in a "remote biosphere" on another planet where "women are Women, men have been put out to pasture and computers are just Big Paperweights." Meet Marsha (code name Ditto, born deaf and left for dead on the Microsoft campus), RenČe (code name Womewaccka, the subject of a nefarious scheme to produce originals for cloning) and Crystal (code name Media, a shape-shifter with overly peaceful inclinations for the information-war era).

They're all characters in a "trailer" for the Webwork "Gynadome," which is set to debut online in late June and will feature a Neo-Luddite chatroom and a game where visitors will suffer surprising punishments for even mentioning technology. The project will also showcase videos of the GynaGirls going "back to the land" on Mother Earth and moderated discussion events with "scientists" and "celebrity lesbians." A marvel of flash animation and evocative sound, "Gynadome" manages to satirize simultaneously the contemporary technophile movement and the commune movement of the sixties counterculture. Who said progressive media art can't be funny?

A collaboration by photographer Sue Schaffner and painter Carrie Moyer, DAM! was originally a larger collective that was part of the gay and lesbian direct-action group Queer Nation. The two met at a meeting in 1991 after Schaffner saw (and admired) Queer Nation's "Absolutely Queer" poster campaign, which "outed" celebrities like Jodie Foster using the Absolut Vodka ads as a model. They conceived a project together parodying a Gap advertising campaign, then continued to work together after the larger group disbanded in 1993.

1993 was a watershed year in American media art. The social crises of the late '80s mainstreamed art about AIDS and multicultural identities. Artists like Barbara Kruger and the AIDS-activist collective Gran Fury employed the mass-media language of advertising and agit prop in the subversive posters and billboards they designed for the street. By the time Bill Clinton was inaugurated in 1993 and began to retreat from his left-leaning campaign promises, however, fickle art-world tastes had shifted away from artistic social engagement - or at least official support for it.

This change of zeitgeist hardly deterred DAM! Their campaigns directly targeted the inequities of the '90s political scramble to the middle-right, such as a ferociously funny project attacking the absurd "don't ask, don't tell" policy restricting the Constitutional right of American servicemen and women to speak about their sexual persuasion. (Reflecting their backgrounds in advertising and their political concerns, DAM! always refer to their projects as campaigns.)

The culture-jamming strategies of '80s artists who borrowed communications-industry tactics and took them surreptitiously to streets and billboards were altered by the widespread use of the Internet beginning in the mid-'90s. DAM! augmented its street-works with a sophisticated Web site. By providing inspiration and example for activists everywhere, the Web may be radically altering the notion that all politics, art and action is local.
- Robert Atkins

Sue Schaffner: I went on to be a part of the Lesbian Avengers, where I was in charge of the distribution - all right, wheatpasting - of propaganda. I was also involved with the Lesbian Avengers video team. We traveled the streets posing as a crew from MTV and asked people at tourist sites to explain to us what a "Lesbian Avenger" was. I have always loved this idea of disguising a socially conscious message with humor. I went on to produce and direct some spots for Dyke TV in the mid '90s.

Carrie Moyer: I was also involved in the Lesbian Avengers, where I became a sort of Minister of Propaganda. I also did years of agitprop for the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization. Plus pro bono work for the New York Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project.

RA: This reminds me how much was cooking in the realms of activism and agit prop then. Where has that energy gone? Has it simply dissipated or is culture jamming a better arena for getting out progressive messages now?

CM: Culture jamming is a good strategy now for trying to reclaim public and virtual spaces from the encroachment of corporate sponsorship. In addition, DAM! injects images of people - dykes - who are never represented within the visual culture that surrounds us each time we step outside or turn on our television sets.

SS: The evolution of our culture jamming has been influenced by the notion that effective advertising has to constantly reinvent itself. So we've targeted commercial spaces normally occupied by product marketers and motion picture publicists. We have also jammed spaces in our very own gay community by placing our work next to ads that are now directly targeting us. We want lesbians to consider the price we pay for assimilation into consumer society.

RA: Has any of your output been co-opted by advertising and the media? Do you think pointed critique always cycles into toothless pop culture?

CM: To my knowledge, our work has not yet been directly co-opted by advertising. I did see a picture of lesbians at the WTO protest in Seattle with the caption "Dyke Action" in Newsweek last year. Yes, you've pinpointed a problem with this work. The tone of bravado always gets absorbed by the voracious machine of pop culture. Many art directors are smart and highly attuned to what is happening on the so-called margins of society. However, our projects still work for the lesbian-on-the-street or -Internet. We get tons of fan mail from people saying how great it is to see themselves and their feelings represented in the world.

SS: Our early work was a mostly reactive critique. Even later as we became less reactive our style changed with every campaign. Although we have revised historical forms and at the same time developed new visions, we rarely push the same design style more than once. We do constantly employ irony and references to popular culture and lesbian identity. In that, we are the co-opters of the slick ad agency. I think it would be quite difficult to co-opt something that is already riffing and constantly changing. Is the marketer today more interested in the outside vantage point of Dyke Action Machine! than they were in 1991? We'll let you know when dyke becomes a household word.

RA: Can you talk about the early ad-based works about queer families? What sort of response did they get?

CM: We have generally gotten very enthusiastic responses to our work - especially from the gay community. We started veering away from direct appropriation of existing mainstream ad campaigns in 1994. It started to get kind of tired just inserting images of lesbians into existing campaigns. This strategy was a pretty simplistic and even innocent means of becoming visible. Even though there are still virtually no representations of lesbians in visual culture, the solution is not to simply use images of dykes to sell yet more products.

Our "Gay Marriage: You Might As Well Be Straight" campaign was probably the most controversial one we've done. A lot of gay people are really into gay marriage, so they were angry that we were questioning it. At the same time, people have asked us for posters to give their gay friends as wedding gifts!

SS: The "Family Values" campaign that posed a pregnant lesbian couple was unique for its day in 1992. It received a very positive response from the gay community and a "polite" response from others. I'm not sure the straight community knew what to make of it at the time. They had not yet been programmed by the mass media, which would soon bring them celesbians such as Ellen and Anne, and Melissa and Julie in baby-land bliss.

The "Gay Marriage" campaign definitely got people riled up, which becomes a bigger challenge every year. As long as our audience feels that we are critiquing someone else - then they're entertained by our message. With "Gay Marriage" some people felt personally attacked and offered pretty negative feedback. Whereas some amusing responses came from straight people who seemed confused, thinking that gay marriage is what we all want and now don't know our minds.

RA: Are you now giving up your object works - print posters, etc. - for an entirely digital practice?

SS: We are constantly evaluating the Net audience against the audience of the street. Right now the urbanscape of New York is overflowing with messages, and the locals are somewhat cooled to street messages. The Net is still a relatively new frontier with an audience that may be a better target for something with shock value. Although our online output does allow us to reach a far wider audience than our street campaigns, there is something incredibly satisfying about actually seeing (and greeting) the end user of our art. A virtual world does not allow you to walk down Fifth Avenue with a bunch of dykes that have plastered Gynadome tattoos all over their very real bodies. Ephemera's qualities of collectibility and nostalgia aren't relevant yet to digital works. I don't think we will ever give up the object work.

CM: The object has been important to us. We give them out free to people who request them from us. I've often had the pleasant experience of going to somebody's home, [somebody] whom I don't already know, and seeing one of our posters there. So these cheap, ephemeral objects have a life long after the street installation comes down. We feel having a street presence is important to our history. Partly in response to Giuliani's "quality of life" dictates, there are fewer and fewer locations to wheatpaste, so our forthcoming project "Gynadome" will have a billboard component to augment the Web site. We think it will be funny to see a billboard advertising nothing for this neo-Luddite site which critiques the Internet explosion. Last year dot-com billboards seemed to be taking over the public space of New York City. Let's see what happens now that the NASDAQ is in the dumps.

RA: In an increasingly conservative era, identity politics has been increasingly marginalized by the art world and the media. What strategies can we use to combat this?

CM: Tough question. As you may surmise, DAM! has struggled long and hard to be "seen" by the art world. The fact that we always use overt lesbian content somehow precludes our work from being "art" in the minds of many curators [and] magazine editors and therefore not of interest to the general public - whoever that is! Fortunately, some curators and writers have been able to situate DAM!'s work within the continuum of political and conceptual artwork produced in the past decade.

Sometimes I've wondered if we really need a project with a more overt "lesbian agenda." I think we're using such a strategy now with "Gynadome," where the lesbian viewpoint is implicit. The sci-fi/superhero narrative is shown through the lens of '70s separatism, essentialism, and "back to the land" movements. This is a tactic that a lot of gay artists are using right now, probably as a means of making sure their work gets seen and appreciated. Sometimes it feels like a bit of a cop-out, though, because it re-inscribes how "progressive," "tolerant" and "comfortable" our culture has become with queers. Ha! At the same time, we have been doing this for 10 years, and we want to try different strategies and keep growing as artists. I don't know that you can be truly radical if irony is one of your primary strategies.

SS: The work needs to be evaluated on more than the basis of identity politics, and this is something that we have been struggling with for a long time. There have been some recent breakthroughs like the Studio Museum of Harlem featuring gay content in a non-gay show with Glenn Ligon and John Bankston. One of the ways we combat this is by strategic publicity. We become the distributors and the presenters of the work when we publish on the Net or the street. We create our press releases and help the media position us in a way that way that favors less marginalization and more content.