Youtube video- The Paint Ball Project Day 21

Day twenty one begins with Bilal in protective goggles, his black and white Keffiyeh around his neck. As with most of his videos, his face is in closeup, with the the usual paint spatter yellow of the gallery wall behind him.

Bilal's video blog for that day begins without his usual greeting. His appears to have started recording in the middle of his address. He stumbles for words which emerge as a jumble "ahh...post-traumatic syndrome...ahhh starts showing that.."

He then swears with a sudden an unusual vehemence, as if he were spitting. he pauses again, then there is a brief jump as he cuts and sways back and forth from the camera, then starts to speak again with the familiar "Hi Everybody... it is almost 11:30 in the evening on Day 21. Things are going good and bad. The good is I see the end of it- only 9 days to go. But the bad things is I am beginning to see a lot of health problems." he reaches behind his neck to scratch as he lists skins rashes, difficulty breathing, which he describes as "heavy", and symptoms of post-traumatic syndrome.

He explains the shooting has intensified. In the background, the sounds of paint balls being fired constantly punctuates his monologue. He notes in the chat room people were doubting whether the performance was real.

Bilal quoes someone at IP address 195 as doubting whether this performance is real. Bilal says"It doesn't really matter if the performance is real or not....I wanted to illustrate the point that we are disconnected from reality sometimes." He differentiates being in "a comfort zone and a conflict zone". He expresses the view that the difficult decision whether or not to shoot must be left up to others than himself. His goal was to share the predicament of his family in Iraq. Perhaps, he notes the fact he has created the environment and set some of the parameters means he has a much better situation than his family in Iraq."I can step out of it any minute I want, they cannot step out at all" Bilal says.

Again he refers to the anxiety, the filth and the health problems. His attempts at improving the air with a fan, and cleaning the room have little effect on his immediate environment. He carefully moves across the room to avoid paintball fire, and shows the protective wood he had placed the previous day were completely painted with yellow, as was the tree. The floor has a pool of yellow paint with empty paint ball shells suggesting festering on the floor and lower parts of the walls where these would occasionally stick.

Bilal turns the camera back to look at the gun. It tracks, and fires and he sees it needs to be reloaded. He notes that he has to reload it almost every twenty minutes. This suggests a rate of fire of approximately one shot every six seconds. The camera tracks violently around the space as we hear bilal pouring paintballs into the hopper. The camera finally comes to rest on the hopper of the gun. He notes that 4000 paint ball had been fired that day.

He then holds the camera low to the ground, showing more of the filthy, paint covered conditions of the space, as he makes his way to his computer station. From there, he turns his camera back towards the gun. He says "this is for IP address 195. I ran out of ammo... it is a healing process " that would help himself, Bilal, deal with things he had not previously dealt with. He expressed hope but "wasn't sure if the performance would end the way he wanted to". I hope to be able to finish up, and in nine days to be out of here na this place will be in the history(sic)... My goal is to survive." saying he will do what he can to preserve his physical and mental health, Bilal signs off.



Suggestively, the hopper has the lable "halo" vsible on the side. Halo is also the name of the popular FPS series produced by Bungie Systems for Microsoft. This potential crossover between players of paintball and FPS digital games seems to touch on the idea of Dyer-witherford and de peyuter(CK) as a deployement of FPS as a kind of topoi that is encoded in the material culture of both types of games. The mock battlefield of both serves as a internal colonialisation similar to the battle fields of old imperialism, but now recolonising a globalised territory. How does his inside and outside negotiate with the inside and outside of Empire?