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
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