Youtube Video- The Paintball Project Day 5

On day five, Bilal invited his digital imaging class, from the University of Chicagos’ school of fine artsCK to receive their final critiques in the gallery space. The day’s video begins with Bilal bantering with his students about shooting him¹. After an anti-climatic misfire, they succeed in getting the paintball robot to fire, this time with two shots in quick succession. This anomalous event- the system was supposed to fire once every thirty seconds- was followed by expletives and gasps from the students gathered behind the robot. Bilal explained to his students that some visitors to the gallery would pick up misfired, un-ruptured paintballs and just throw them at him. The video then cuts as Bilal leaves the space to conduct his class critique.

When Bilal resumes the Day 5 video he reports it is about six thirty in the evening. He expressed pleasure in his student’s visit and their work. He then goes on to discuss the failure of the robot’s server due to an overwhelming demand from visitor’s logging onto the project website. He expressed the hope that the problem could be fixed and the sever speed increased. In the mean time he hoped to get some rest while the gun was non-operational. He mentioned how great his fatigue was then turned off the camera. He continues his blog less than an hour having been hit twice by painballs.He thanks his technician then says that a nap “isn’t going to happen”. He began to tear up. The video ends with Bilal saying that “he could not gather his thoughts”. He conveyed a sense of overwhelming fatigue.

1Bilal, Waffa (mewaffa)”paintball project day 5”
Youtube video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfX4ynCr0M8 posted 10 may 2007, retrieved 7th June, 2010

Youtube Video- The Paintball Project Day 4

Bilal showed signs of normalising the presence of a paintball gun threatening him.
He described the day as uneventful, although there was “a lot of shooting”. He interviews his friend, Meredith Hope Clarke and she gives her thoughts about having to shelter behind a screen and her feelings of great unease at their situation and specifically the sound of the movement of the gun.

He introduces his friend, Meredith Clarke and she goes on to say it feels like being on the other end of a video game “but the difference is that you’re a real life person and bodily harm can happen”. She expresses a curiosity about what the audience is thinking and where it crosses the line from “being a game to being a real person on the receiving end⁸. In response to prompting from Bilal, she suggests the relatively slow traffic through the site at meal times reflects that violence is a response to boredom and that people engage in it when they have nothing else to fill their time at that moment. Bilal notes that midnight to four o’clock in the morning is the zenith of activity for the project⁹. As the Youtube video continues, Bilal escorts Clarke out of the space, demonstrating how he uses a plexiglas screen mounted on a rolling clothes rack. He gives his guest a full head paintball mask to wear until they exit the space. After a brief discussion, they decide to eat dinner together in the space but behind the plexiglas shield. He sets up the camera to record any attempts to shooat at them while eating. At the beginning of the Day 4 video Bilal reported that he had been shot  five or six times in the stomach and chest and that he was”trying to stay strong” although his body was slowing down and “giving up”¹⁰. Now he is sharing his meal with another person for the first time in the space. Clarke expressed anxiety and did not think she would be able to sustain such a piece for thirty days. Bilal says that eating dinner under the threat of the paintball gun reminded him of eating together in a small space during the 1991 aerial bombing campaign against Najaf.

This leaving and entering the space microcosmically provides a metaphor for forces exfiltrating a theatre of combat. The danger to coalition troops in Iraq and Afghanistan is greatest  during entry and exit and generally while moving from one place to another, as during reconnaissance and other operations, and while trying to land or take off from airfields such as Kandahar and Bagram. This expression,  a theatre of combat reflects the simulacram within a simulacram of a performance piece, simulating a game, simulating a conflict.
Theorists of play and games Jesper Juul, Johan Huizinga and Roger Caillois in their respective works discuss the elements of a game, and one significant criteria is that it not contain an actual weapon¹¹.

1. 8Bilal, Waffa (mewaffa)”paintball project day 3”
   Youtube video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L19JzTZ1_g posted May 09, 2007 retrieved 5th June, 2010
2. 9ibid
3. 10ibid
4. 10Juul, Jesper. Half-Real:Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. Cambridge,Mass. MIT press, 2005. p.41. Juul provides counter examples as to the deletrious consequences of some games. The prohibition against weapons is implied in Huizinga’s discussion of the “magic circle” of play and Callois’ description of play as an escape from capitalist modes of production. These are also discussed in Juul’s section on classic models of games.

Youtube Video- The Paintball Project Day 3

Bilal is already expressing great discomfort with lack of sleep. He visits a sound artist preparing for a show that evening. The artist compliments Bilal on his installation but notes the constant sound of the gun is disturbing. Bilal offers to disable the paintball gun during the performance if it is too disturbing5. Bilal returns to the installation space and also reads from some email from visitors to the website and chat room. He leaves again to try and sleep in a sunny spot in the gallery. He says the constant sound of the gun has kept him from napping. Even though he is out range of the projectiles, the sound effects him. He concludes the days’ entry with “I wish people could just enjoy life, and stop this senseless killing”6.

This sequence seems to run against the implication that Bilal would be restricted to the actual play space for the entire thirty days. This contrasts with endurance based pieces such as Chris Burden’s White Light/White Heat(1974) performed over the course of twenty two days at the Ronald Feldman gallery in New York. Burden’s piece involved him lying unobserved on a triangular platform. The spectators, if the term applies in this case, were invisible to  Burden’s view. A different piece of burden’s, Doomed, had him lying under a slanted piece of glass. A clock counted off the time he spent lying motionless until a museum guard placed a pitcher of water within his reach, thus triggering the end f the piece, as Burden smashed the glass and the clock at around the forty five hour mark.

This sense of the walls being more porous is alluded to by Bilal when he writes “TK”7. He notes how he is not exposed to the same level of danger as his family in Iraq. Yet I think in many respects  in his retreat to a sunny spot in the gallery to try and get some sleep he replays his search for temporary respite during past events in his life

Youtube video- The Paintball Project Day 2

During this video report, Bilal remarks that the table lamp is the second favourite target after himself but “is in better shape than me”. Visible tattered by several paint ball rounds but still functioning, the lamp serves as a metaphor for Bilal’s physical and mental state. In the previous day’s video, he had already said he had not slept in two days. In his memoir he described the great difficulty he had in getting any rest, especially during the first several days of the performance(Bilal& Lyderson, 2008 p.TK).
As a performance, this piece had very specific issues. Being virtually mediated to most of its audience, technical issues informed the performance. Rather than constituting a failure, Bilal himself would later note that these low fidelity elements call into question whether or not the images appearing on the audiences screens are real(ibid p.TK).
This kludge forms a resistance to utopic and dystopic notions of process. A potentially graceless but functional answer to an operational challenge, the kludge marks the point where theory ruptures. The picture perfect images promised by technology fail as servers hiccup, causing web cams to freeze,
When Bilal’s technician says webcam visitors to the performance are “shooting blind” because the webcam cannot provide a real time image my immediate reaction was drawn to reflect on the mediated weapons systems like the predator UAV which is operated by, among other organisations, the United States Air Force. An drone aircraft,  frequently mentioned in the the media due to its increasing use in modern conflict, it is deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, but its pilots are based in the continental USA and operate the vehicle via satellite communications. This sophisticated system is supposed to operate under all conditions using visual and infrared cameras, ground scanning radar and other sensor systems to guide it, as it reconnoiters and attacks targets using the missiles it carries or guides other weapons from allied aircraft or artillery. A 2002 executive summary, attributed to then Director of Operational Test and Evaluation  Thomas P. Christie(note 1) describes how operational units utilised “work arounds” to overcome failures in design, including what his report describes as “human factor” design failures(note2).

notes:
note 1-Thomas P. Christie was sworn in as Director of Operational Test and Evaluation for the U.S. Department of Defense in 2001. http://www.defense.gov/releases/release.aspx?releaseid=2984
downloaded 4 June 2010.
note 2- Executive Summary of Operational Test and Evaluation Report on the Predator Medium-Altitude Endurance Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, October 30, 2001  downloaded from Project On Government Oversite(POGO) http://www.pogo.org/investigations/national-security/predator.html#Related_Resources, 4 June, 2010

Bilal, Wafaa and Kari Lydersen. Shoot An Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun. San Francisco. City Lights. 2008

Commentary on the internet as a space

ERIC FISCHL & APRIL GORNIK " It replaces experience with facsimile." Their argument is that the internet "flattens" the experience that would be available if the audience was directly in the physical presence of the art object.
 -http://www.edge.org/q2010/q10_1.html#fischl_gornik retrieved 20 July, 2010

Chapter 1 Section1 Page 1 (and my thesis proposal, natch)

In this thesis I shall defend the position that Wafaa Bilal's use of space in his performance art work, Domestic Tension, both resists and reifies the notion of "Empire" as presented by Hart and Negri and discussed by Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter in the book Games of Empire. Wafaa Bilal is an Iraqi-born artist and academic whose work frequently addresses issues of politics, power and virtuality in relation to his native Iraq. Bilal recreated his living room in the Flatfile gallery in Chicago and lived within that space for thirty one days while visitors to a related website shot at him with a robotic paintball gun and/or communicated with him by internet chat. This performance is a response by Bilal to the death of his brother in an US air strike in their home town of Kufaa, and attempted to reach out, primarily via internet, to people who would not normally visit art galleries or engage with critical artistic discourses about the war in Iraq or about political conflict in general. The simulacra of a First Person Shooter(FPS) game that is simulated in Bilal's performance provides a means to reflecting on the similarities and differences between commercially available FPS and the dialogue between the two streams of visual/digital culture.

My first chapter introduces the general thrust of my argument, introducing the biography and work of Wafaa Bilal, his position as an artist of Iraqi origin and the stakes he raises by means of his artistic production. I pay particularly close attention to how he creates spaces for discussion of the political issues his work addresses. I briefly exposit how he uses youtube video blogs and a subsequent book to document his performance. I also introduce discussion of the 30 000 pages of internet chat that he recorded. This chapter concludes by outlining the relationship of the spaces Bilal creates to the notion of empire and it's antithesis, multitude, as discussed by Hart and Negri and Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter in their respective writings.

The second chapter of this thesis looks at the previous literature that discuss three themes that intertwine within this thesis. The first of these themes deals with performance art and conflict. By drawing on writing about extreme performance I suggest a direct line between Chris Burden's performance "Shoot!", and the short film that documented it through to Domestic Tension. The second theme touches on discussions about virtuality and space and especially the body of writing centered on Henri Lefevre's the Social Production of Space. The third theme deals with literature exploring the growing cultural ubiquity, and possible cultural dominance, of digital games and their relationship to 'Empire' and 'Multitude'.

The third chapter is a close reading of Bilal's video blogs of his performance and two primary written sources dealing with it; his book, written with journalist K Lyderson, Shoot an Iraqi:Life Art and Resistance Under the Gun and the record of internet chat that comprised a significant element of the performance, both as an expression of the multitude and an embrasure of Empire.

The forth Chapter explores the central arguments for 'Empire' and how these apply to art and digital games. Some of the discussion here turns back on artistic practices such as those of Marcel Duchamp, who understood that the resistances offered by his work would eventually be turned and subsumed into modernist, capitalist discourses and power structures. Much of this chapter serves to contextualise the concluding chapter of this thesis by demonstrating previous relationships between art, games and empire.

The final, concluding chapter will discuss the formal aspects of both Domestic Tension and FPS digital games and show how the space they create form lines of resistance between Empire and Multitude. This system can be presented on a semiotic square, with Empire and Multitude opposing  on one axis, with resistance and embrasure opposing each other on the diametrical axis.

My proposed thesis

Domestic Tensions: The Politics of Sense in Gamic Space.
A thesis proposal by Adam van Sertima, July 2010

    In The Politics of Aesthetics, Jacques Rancière has argued that we need to rethink aesthetics as “the invention of new forms of life”. The notion of life is necessarily informed by an embodied and hence a spatial element. However, spatiality, the experience of embodiment in space occurs at a subjective level. One’s sense of space has now been expanded to include digital spaces. Contemporary artist Wafaa Bilal’s performance work, Domestic Tension(2007), and his subsequent digital work Virtual Jihadi(2008)  explore the mediated space by referencing digital games and recontextualising the experience in reference to the banality of violence that wracked his native Iraq through three wars and ongoing internecine conflict.

    Wafaa Bilal was born in Kufa, Iraq in 1966. He pursued his artistic career from his youth in Iraq, often critiquing the Baathist regime of Saddaam Hussein in his paintings. After enduring the home front effects of the Iran/Iraq war, and the two Gulf wars, he fled Iraq and eventually settled in the United States. He continued both his studies and artistic practice there, eventually teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is currently an assistant professor at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.

    Domestic Tension was a thirty one day performance installed at FlatFile Galleries in Chicago in 2007. During the course of the exhibition, Bilal essentially confined himself to the gallery space. During the performance, people had 24-hour virtual access to Bilal via the Internet. They had the ability to watch Bilal and interact with him through a live web-cam and chat room. Viewers also had the option to shoot at Bilal with a remote controlled paintball gun. Thus in many ways this performance is similar to First Person Shooter (FPS)digital games such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (Infinity Ward 2009) where the audience wields a gun visible on the other side of a screen and can interact with each other by VOIP and chat technologies. This game, like Domestic Tension, also features the experience of shooting at an unarmed non-combatant, in its controversial opening game play sequence. A similar dissonance was visible in Bilal’s relationship to his performance piece, sometimes considering it as a “fun game”(Bilal & Lyderson 2008. p21) and other times as a work of art with the goal of making a point(ibid p.75).

    Bilal personally documented his work, especially Domestic Tension, by video blogging daily from the performance space. He also expanded on his personal history and artistic biography with the publication of his memoir Shoot An Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun(2009). As a digital art work, existing both in “meat space” and cyber space, Domestic Tension provided an unusual perspective on its audience, as it offered the chance to interact directly with the artist via chat room, as the performance unfolded. Moreover, it reached a much broader audience than contemporary performance art might. By publicising the performance on websites such as Paint Ball Nation(www.pbnation.com) Bilal attracted an audience otherwise disconnected from contemporary art practices. Moreover, he compiled a large array of responses that ranged from “I hope you die in the next 9/11” to “...I can learn a bit from you and maybe we made you think a bit, too”(ibid p.128-130). In this respect, Domestic Tension was extremely successful in achieving one of Bilal’s stated goals of reaching and engaging with an audience “beyond the normal art world... who would never step into a gallery or go to an anti-war protest”(ibid p.11)

    In Games of Empire Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter argue that digital games serve as one method of controlling what Michel Foucault describes as biopower(Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter 2009.p.). Briefly, Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter make the case that as a project of late capitalism, digital games function as training and harnessing systems.
     I see this thesis as addressing three overarching questions, each suggesting a chapter with a concluding chapter examining how Domestic Tension exhibits a resistance to the social force of “Empire”.
The three questions are:

1. What is the relationship of art work to video game as mediated by Domestic Tension?

2. How do spaciality and linear perspective relate to domestic tension? How do linear perspective and spaciality contribute to an Imperial visuality and spaciality?

 3. How do the formal aspects of virtual games negotiate deployment by and resistance to the concept Empire that is discussed by Dyer-Witheford and de Peuyter?


One element of the subjective experience of mediated or digital life is what has been called immersion. As in a paper I will be presenting in August, I will attempt to show a connection between attic theatre, as conceived of by Friedrich Nietszche, and the experience of playing digital music games such as RockBand(Harmonix 2007). Then I will attempt to argue for a similar connections between Domestic Tension and digital games such as Modern Warfare2.

Does art constitute a space of play- and how does this answer relate to Domestic Tension? How successfully does Domestic Tension and Bilal's subsequent work, Virtual Jihadi resist or reify empire?

Bibliography:

Bilal, Wafaa and Kari Lydersen. Shoot An Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun. San Francisco. City Lights. 2008.

Dyer- Witheford, Nick and Greig de Peuter Games Of Empire: Global Capitalism And Video Games. Minneapolis, London. University of Minnesota Press. 2009

Domestic Tension: The Politics of Sense in Gamic Space

This is my attempt to use blogging technology as a medium for developing and writing my MA thesis for the department of Art History at Concordia University. It will allow my supervisor, Prof. Jean Bélisle and other committee members, Prof. Bart Simon and Prof Loren Lerner to review my work as I produce it, conveniently from any computer with an internet connection. While not supplanting more traditional approaches, I enjoy writing blogs, and think this will aid the quality and quantity of my work.

By adding an RSS feed to your email client, you can receive anything I post automatically.

The nature of my thesis, revolving around a performance performed online, simultaneously blogged by the artist, Wafaa Bilal, lends itself to this approach as I can link to youtube videos of Bilal's video blogs. I think this will enhance your critiques of my work as you will be able to view the same object/performance as I do.

I see perhaps the majority of my posts as being subsections of the larger chapters. Some posts may deal with more peripheral concerns, such as organising interviews, locating additional materials and so forth.

My next post will be a version of my current thesis proposal, then I will transfer the pages I have already written. of course, I can forward this material in more conventional formats, as the university will eventually require, anyway.