Day 17
Bilal begins this video by saying it is quiet- "except for the gun going off, every few seconds". He goes on to say he is having difficulty reaching people and that his support system may be falling, so he is trying to ask people he hasn't made requests to before. he says it makes him sad but he understands that his project has pulled his friends away from work and life. He makes a request to anybody watching who has time to visit to come to the gallery. He mentions he has a few friends who are supposed to be coming by that day, but his knit brow suggests that he is very doubtful.
It is slower when the gallery is closed he says and the video breaks
It is so good to be clean" Bilal says having taken a shower. He shows his clothes he had been wearing as being fairly dirty having not changed them for several days. He said Jason had come by with site statistics. They had received 6 million hits and transmitted 250 Gb of data, not counting the data from their earlier server. This volume of traffic pleased Bilal as it meant more and more people were "engaging in the conversation". He mentions he is chatting less as he is afraid that he is affecting the discourse in the chat room. He said he didn't want to be an authority figure but rather to "keep that narrative open" as people communicated with each other.
He says he does not seek a narrative, and wants a dynamic outcome that is not determined by himself or anyone else. he is aware that he has set parameters, but doesn't want to guide the outcome.
As the blog winds down for the day he says his energy is good, and that he is used to the sound of the gun. His demeanour is markedly more upbeat from the previous segment. having been living in the same clothing for days it is easy to conjecture that cleaning oneself and changing into fresh clothes might feel euphoric. he does mention that reloading the gun "got to him" as it involved him having to get up frequently in the night in order to load more paint balls into the hopper, sometimes every ten minutes.
he says that five hours of sleep. He assures people that his health is sound and he will complete the project. He says "The project is doing what it is supposed to be doing, engaging people in conversation" and asks that "people continue giving him emotional support". He then says good bye but returns with a brief video post-script.
he explains that some friends had emailed him asking why he is placing himself in physical and mental jeopardy. He says, simply"desperate time call for desperate measures".
How is the video different from the chat room? How does the performance shift from in mechanic to out of mechanic. Are the video blogs "cut scenes"?
is this game art or art game? The performance has finished but the documenting is still there; where is the temporal border of the performance? The spatial border is defined by Bilal as the gallery space, but we can follow him out of range of the gun as he walks through the gallery, or even beneath the gun mount- in the age of Empire, is this the limit of spatiality?
His is not a utopic space, because he bends the territory- like those who avoided battles in former Yugoslavia holidaying kilometers from battle fields.
Bilal's emphasis on a non-narrative or emerging narrative seem to relate to other interactive perfromance pices but also other emergent behaviors and this is a point where it touchs on Empire as an endlessly rupturing economic system. does duchamp also ask this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-t_otw-ang
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