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
