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.