The Subservient President is a political parody of Burger King’s Subservient Chicken advertising campaign. The site was created by Steve Anderson, a Los Angeles based media artist and professor of Interactive Media at the University of Southern California. The “President” was played by Jon Perry, who also programmed the site.
The Subservient President attempts to give ordinary people a momentary sense of what it’s like to be a wealthy Bush campaign donor or an oil industry executive. Just type a command into the database and watch the President take your order – anything from “dodge the draft” or “get arrested for drunk driving” to “start a war in Iraq” or “search for Weapons of Mass Destruction.”
Underlying the overtly satirical aspects of the project is the fact that American politics increasingly seem like they are being made-to-order, catering to public opinion polls and the whims of “undecided” voters rather than being guided by social needs or ethical principles. The Subservient President offers a darkly humorous counterpoint to the media hype and superficial campaigning that pass for political discourse in the United States.
The Subservient President launched in July 2004 during the Democratic National Convention in Boston. After being picked up by bloggers covering the convention, the Subservient President peaked at over 450,000 unique visitors a day. The site received widespread media coverage, including a feature on CNN, and has been associated with a new generation of politically motivated web art.
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Steve Anderson is Assistant Professor of Interactive Media at the USC School of Cinema-Television and the Associate Editor of Vectors Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular. He is a theorist-practitioner of digital media whose research interests include historiography, the theory and history of new media, documentary and experimental film and video, and interactive media design.
