Bilal describes his reaction to a 2007 TV interview with a young soldier who operated a robotic drone from her base in Colorado(1). She trusted the information and orders that she received causing her to launch missile attacks or guide other aircraft to attacks the targets she had acquired. This in turn filled Bilal with feelings of hatred and rage, as a similar remotely guided attack had killed his brother Haji. Yet, Bilal was able to reflect that these were "mostly just kids caught up in a cycle of greed and power they don't understand"(2)
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri offer an analysis of this when the assert "the passage to post-modernity and Empire prohibits any such compartmentalization of the life world and immediately presents communication, production and life as one complex whole, an open site of conflict"(3) Hardt and Negri see this conflict as a creative militancy linked to biopower and as such inevitably functions within a world that knows no outside(4). Thus this attachment to the means of production means that the resistance of Bilal's 'virtual human shield' is analogous to the deployment of young cyber soldiers, as with the young drone pilot just mentioned.
Empire is greatly predicated on production becoming the result of communication and on the absorption of all spaces into Empire(5). In contrast to traditional Marxist analysis, Hardt and Negri assert there are no exterior spaces for capitalism to exploit; rather it must create new spaces within itself. However, the possibility of these spaces also offer a place for the "uncontainable rhizomes" through which the Multitude reappropriates fresh spaces that realise the desire of the multitude to construct concurrent freedoms(6). Hardt and Negri present the movement of workers from Mexico into the USA as an example of the contradictions of Empire, in that it requires the labour to function, but can only attempt to control it by rendering it illegal(7). At the same time they characterise the free circulation of biopower, of the proletariat, of people as a fundamental freedom desired by the multitude. Thus the networks of biopower serves both Empire and the Multitude that resists it.
1. Bilal p.10
2. ibid
3. Hardt, Michael &Antonio Negri. Empire, Harvard UP, Cambridge, Mass & London, 2000. p. 404
4. ibid p. 413
5. ibid p. 404
6. ibid p. 397
7. ibid p. 399
Showing posts with label Chapter 1. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chapter 1. Show all posts
Friday, November 5, 2010
Friday, October 29, 2010
Chapter 1 Section 4- Spaces between Comfort and Conflict
Wafaa Bilal speaks about the contrast of space of comfort and the space of conflict. His displacement of virtual and physical presence reflects his experience, throughout his life, of being in overlapping zones of conflict. From his early childhood, with his often violent father, to his neighbourhood that became increasingly divided by religious factionalism, through the internal violence of Iraq's repressive Ba'athist regime, to Iraq's external conflict with Iran, Kuwait and the American lead coalition. Yet as an emigre, and a university Professor, he now resides in what is ostensibly a zone of comfort. Yet he finds that zone troubling, partially because so few others recognise it as such(1). So his work seems to often involve placing the audience as an active participant within an unfamiliar setting. He deliberately chose to set up Domestic Tension as a performance that requires spectator involvement, that subverts expectations of a triple A first person shooter game and that creates a space for those who might normally ignore or simply denigrate conceptual and performance-based art. That he can cross these ideological divides suggests how in the age of Empire, typical moves to create space as a project of 21st century capitalism can be resisted, subverted or evaded. At the same time, Bilal's project is very much a product of twenty first century US culture, with it's references to digital games, paintball and internet sociality.
Bilal explicitly opposed didactic readings of his work(2). He did not ban people who posted vicious words, although he did restrict players who attempted to alter the physical operation of the paintball gun, effectively turning it into a machine-gun for example. That the rules were simple- fire the paintball gun if you want, hit want you can and write what you will in the chat-room- left space for many different responses.
1. Bilal p.
2. Bilal p.
Bilal explicitly opposed didactic readings of his work(2). He did not ban people who posted vicious words, although he did restrict players who attempted to alter the physical operation of the paintball gun, effectively turning it into a machine-gun for example. That the rules were simple- fire the paintball gun if you want, hit want you can and write what you will in the chat-room- left space for many different responses.
1. Bilal p.
2. Bilal p.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Chapter1 Section2- Who is Wafaa bilal?
Wafaa Bilal is assistant Arts Professor in the department of Photography and Imaging at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. His works span from paintings and drawings he did in his native Iraq through to performances such as Domestic Tension, Virtual Jihadi and his latest work ....And Counting. In his memoir Shoot An Iraqi, he recounts how his early works were often aimed against the oppression of Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime and the violence that plagued Iraq both from the outside- the Iran/Iraq war, gulf wars 1 & 2- and the internecine violence between Sunni and Shia Muslims as well as violence against opponents to the regime which in turn exploited these conflicts to maintain its grip on political power. Bilal's art works, often critical of the Iraqi government eventually caused a reaction from the state that forced Bilal to flee for his life first to a Saudi refugee camp, then eventually to the United States, where he continued his studies of art.
Bilal was born in Kufa, Iraq in 1966. The third of 7 childrenCK, he attended Baghdad university, majoring in Geology although his efforts were primarily focused on painting. These paintings were often critical of the Baathist regime, and Bilal would hide them, for example, by rolling up the canvasses and storing them within hollow bedposts(1). Several of the shows he put on during that period were closed by the regimes security apparatus(2). Paintings as innocuous, in the Canadian context, as portraying people living in poverty, were seen as anti-government, with some of them being seized(3).
Bilal publicly refused to volunteer for military service with the threat of an American lead coalition looming as a result of Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, in 1991( p.68) After leaving Bagdad University, lest he "disappear" as other dissident students had, Bilal fled Iraq, eventually being interned at a refugee camp in Saudi Arabia. There he attempted to continue painting, despite the declining conditions and threats of rape and abuse at the hands of the Saudi guards. He and his brother, Alaa were granted refugee status, arriving in the United States in September, 1992. He would subsequently enroll in the school of Arts at the University of New Mexico.
Bilal's artistic production after leaving Iraq dealt with such themes as violence and dehumanisation as in his Honours exhibit Sorrow of Baghdad. This gallery installation used the sounds of a baby crying from within a coffin, a be-suited pig laughing at short videos and a room with the faces of Iraqis trapped in a space, with the only exit a window looking out onto a battlefield.( ) His subsequent works include The Absinthe Drinker(200TK), which would electronically insert the gallery spectator into the digital frame, causing the central figure to become animated and react to the movement of the spectator. This general approach would be repeated in The Bar of the Follie Bergeres(200TK), and One Chair(200TK). In each case, the work makes a direct reference to an antecedent art work; those on the impressionists, in the first two cases, and to DaVinci's The last Supper, in the case of one chair. All of them allow the visitor/spectator to interact with the work, and in the case of The Bar of the Follie Bergeres have a presence with in the frame. This would become even more actualised in Domestic Tensions.
1966 Born, Kufa , Iraq p.5
1968 Ba’ath party stages coup, taking power in Iraq p.34
1979 Age 13 Bilal makes a stand against his Father’s violent temper and increasingly violent behavior. When his father shatters a plate over Bilal’s head, he seizes a shard a chases his father out of the house and locks him out. p.23
1979 Saddam Hussein becomes President of Iraq
September 1980 Iraq invades Iran, ostensibly as a result of an Iranian assassination attempt on foreign Minister Aziz. Iraq moves to seize oil rich areas, strategic canals and supress the spread of the shiite Islamic revolution from Iran to the Shiite majority in Iraq.p.39
August 1990 Iraq invades Kuwait
Bilal publicly refuses to volunteer for military service- leaves University and flees repercussions. p.68
January 1991- American forces begin bombing campaign against cities and military in Iraq
February 1991- American ground forces invade Kuwait and attack Iraqi troops. Iraqi troops withdraw from Kuwait after 100hour campaign.
Kurds and Shiites rebel against Sadaam’s rule. The baathist regime brutally supressed the rebels with helicopters, artillery and ground troops (fixed-wing aircraft were grounded by American decree)
Bilal travels to the Kuwait border to shelter in refugee camp at Safwan. He fled the regime’s pogrom against dissidents and the actual military force used against perceived rebel communities p.99-100
1991 Arrives in refugee camp.p. Experience of seeing of abuse, rape and murder by Saudi guards which leads to uprising in spring 1992.p.123 & 135
September, 1992 Leaves Saudi Arabia p.141
Arrives in America
Enrolls in UofNM p.
Honours thesis was interactive exhibit p
“Absinthe Drinker” wins award from New Mexico museum of Art
Iraq invades Kuwait
1999 Bilal graduates from University of New Mexico with BFA.p.
US and Coalition invade Iraq
2003 Graduated with an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
December 2003 Sadaam is captured by US forces in Iraq.
2004 Brother, Haji killed in American airstrike. His father dies three months later, from grief.p.125
Bilal's artistic production after leaving Iraq dealt with such themes as violence and dehumanisation as in his Honours exhibit Sorrow of Baghdad. p.
Writing about Bilal's personal history and that of Iraq which is intertwined with it is grueling. The brutality on all levels is highly disturbing, as is the collusion with western powers in such atrocities as the Halabja massacre of 1988. I will leave the editing for tomorrow.
1. Bilal & Lyderson p. 64
2. ibid p. 64
3. ibid p. 65
tk http://www.wafaabilal.com/html/sorrowBaghdad.html
Bilal was born in Kufa, Iraq in 1966. The third of 7 childrenCK, he attended Baghdad university, majoring in Geology although his efforts were primarily focused on painting. These paintings were often critical of the Baathist regime, and Bilal would hide them, for example, by rolling up the canvasses and storing them within hollow bedposts(1). Several of the shows he put on during that period were closed by the regimes security apparatus(2). Paintings as innocuous, in the Canadian context, as portraying people living in poverty, were seen as anti-government, with some of them being seized(3).
Bilal publicly refused to volunteer for military service with the threat of an American lead coalition looming as a result of Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, in 1991( p.68) After leaving Bagdad University, lest he "disappear" as other dissident students had, Bilal fled Iraq, eventually being interned at a refugee camp in Saudi Arabia. There he attempted to continue painting, despite the declining conditions and threats of rape and abuse at the hands of the Saudi guards. He and his brother, Alaa were granted refugee status, arriving in the United States in September, 1992. He would subsequently enroll in the school of Arts at the University of New Mexico.
Bilal's artistic production after leaving Iraq dealt with such themes as violence and dehumanisation as in his Honours exhibit Sorrow of Baghdad. This gallery installation used the sounds of a baby crying from within a coffin, a be-suited pig laughing at short videos and a room with the faces of Iraqis trapped in a space, with the only exit a window looking out onto a battlefield.( ) His subsequent works include The Absinthe Drinker(200TK), which would electronically insert the gallery spectator into the digital frame, causing the central figure to become animated and react to the movement of the spectator. This general approach would be repeated in The Bar of the Follie Bergeres(200TK), and One Chair(200TK). In each case, the work makes a direct reference to an antecedent art work; those on the impressionists, in the first two cases, and to DaVinci's The last Supper, in the case of one chair. All of them allow the visitor/spectator to interact with the work, and in the case of The Bar of the Follie Bergeres have a presence with in the frame. This would become even more actualised in Domestic Tensions.
1966 Born, Kufa , Iraq p.5
1968 Ba’ath party stages coup, taking power in Iraq p.34
1979 Age 13 Bilal makes a stand against his Father’s violent temper and increasingly violent behavior. When his father shatters a plate over Bilal’s head, he seizes a shard a chases his father out of the house and locks him out. p.23
1979 Saddam Hussein becomes President of Iraq
September 1980 Iraq invades Iran, ostensibly as a result of an Iranian assassination attempt on foreign Minister Aziz. Iraq moves to seize oil rich areas, strategic canals and supress the spread of the shiite Islamic revolution from Iran to the Shiite majority in Iraq.p.39
August 1990 Iraq invades Kuwait
Bilal publicly refuses to volunteer for military service- leaves University and flees repercussions. p.68
January 1991- American forces begin bombing campaign against cities and military in Iraq
February 1991- American ground forces invade Kuwait and attack Iraqi troops. Iraqi troops withdraw from Kuwait after 100hour campaign.
Kurds and Shiites rebel against Sadaam’s rule. The baathist regime brutally supressed the rebels with helicopters, artillery and ground troops (fixed-wing aircraft were grounded by American decree)
Bilal travels to the Kuwait border to shelter in refugee camp at Safwan. He fled the regime’s pogrom against dissidents and the actual military force used against perceived rebel communities p.99-100
1991 Arrives in refugee camp.p. Experience of seeing of abuse, rape and murder by Saudi guards which leads to uprising in spring 1992.p.123 & 135
September, 1992 Leaves Saudi Arabia p.141
Arrives in America
Enrolls in UofNM p.
Honours thesis was interactive exhibit p
“Absinthe Drinker” wins award from New Mexico museum of Art
Iraq invades Kuwait
1999 Bilal graduates from University of New Mexico with BFA.p.
US and Coalition invade Iraq
2003 Graduated with an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
December 2003 Sadaam is captured by US forces in Iraq.
2004 Brother, Haji killed in American airstrike. His father dies three months later, from grief.p.125
Bilal's artistic production after leaving Iraq dealt with such themes as violence and dehumanisation as in his Honours exhibit Sorrow of Baghdad. p.
Writing about Bilal's personal history and that of Iraq which is intertwined with it is grueling. The brutality on all levels is highly disturbing, as is the collusion with western powers in such atrocities as the Halabja massacre of 1988. I will leave the editing for tomorrow.
1. Bilal & Lyderson p. 64
2. ibid p. 64
3. ibid p. 65
tk http://www.wafaabilal.com/html/sorrowBaghdad.html
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Chapter1 Section 3 How Wafaa Bilal creates spaces for discussion of the political issues his work addresses.
A significant theme that Bilal annunciates through out Domestic Tensions is his wish to "Keep the conversation going"(1). While the second Gulf War has provoked highly polarised rhetoric within the United States and between the citizens of it's allies, who have mostly opposed the invasion of Iraq, actual debate has been relatively absent, with few cases of either side expressing respect for the other's opinion. In that respect, Bilal's paint ball project has been highly successful, in that it drew people into contact that would have been unlikely to ever interact, let alone discuss the issue. It would be a gross mistake to assume these conversations were uniformly measured, thoughtful and polite. However, these chatroom conversations did place people with a position on the violence and significance of the American invasion of Iraq in touch with each other. Some would use these chatroom spaces to hurl racist epithets and jingoistic rants at Bilal and those others in the chatroom who opposed the war in Iraq. But verbal abuse is as much a part of what Bilal refers to as a zone of conflict(2) as mental and physical abuse.
This contrast that Bilal draws, between the zone of conflict and that of comfort is central to his artistic choice. He wants to place himself, living a comfortable life as an academic and artist in a large US city, again in a zone of conflict as a means of expressing solidarity with his family who would not or could not leave Iraq(3). More over, he has written that this performance was intended to provoke a crisis for those residing in a zone of comfort "shielded from the actual horrors of" the campaign in Iraq(4). As his biography makes clear, he is no stranger to threats of violence and intimidation, through the wars, repression and bigotry he has encountered both with in and with out Iraq as well as his home town of Kufa and even his own home there.
Yet this space of conflict he had created, by providing a means of committing physical violence, via the paintball gun, a means of discussion via the internet and within the gallery space, itself, and by means of spectators viewing his Youtube blogs and the media reports generated, has allowed communication to take place that would have otherwise been unlikely to have happened.
Comments like:
"Make that chair spin"
FIRE!!!!
fuckin' Iraqis
contrasted with:
Peace to you and your people, Wafaa
This guy has heart
Don't shoot him, he's fucking human being!!
The expansion of the discussion space arose when the popular internet reference site, DIGG.com picked up on the performance via an article in the Chicago Tribune. This reference in DIGG lead to a geometrical increase in visitors to the Domestic Tension website, as the more people drawn to the site via DIGG in turn "digged" the story, pushing it up to the top of the lists, leading more people to encounter and explore the story(5). This social networking operated in concert with Bilal's attempt to create a community, although I sense that this was serendipitous as he more straightforwardly publicised his performance in atypical websites(for a high art project) of paintballnation.com. The net result was over 80 million hits, from 136 countries during the course of the performance(6). Ascribing the quality of space to a chatroom, the quality community to people who may be shooting at you, and the quality of discussion to among other things a low velocity projectile fired at one's body may seem to be stretching the definitions of these terms. But the relationship of these terms to Bilal's performance may be better understood if we look at both Bilal, and his companion-for that is how he came to describe the paintball gun(7)- as boundary objects.
A boundary object is
This concept was developed by Susan L. Star and James R. Griesemer as way of considering how different social groups, and their members might interact using an object that carries different significances how either group. Thus the paintball gun might be perceived simultaneously as a weapon, an art object, a threat a toy depending on the social milieu of the person activating it. At the same time, Bilal himself, appearing rather like a non-player character(an NPC, essentially a "robot" simulating a person, animal, monster or some other agent in a digital game) functions as a boundary object: at once an artist, a target, a human being and so on. This multitude of meanings allowed different participants to be drawn into the performance without immediately confronting a didactic message that might have caused those opposed to Bilal's anti-war stance or those unfamiliar with contemporary art practices to remain disengaged from the discussion of the Iraq war and the common lack of engagement with the broad and profound implications of a military conflict. He recounts how he was an anti-war symbol, a target for hateful bigots, entertainment and company for the bored, lonely or flirtatious, or topic for academic and philosophical discussion, among other roles(9).
A common response was for participants to fire a paintball round at Bilal, then often feel guilt and then engage in conversation. Obviously, some participants simply enjoyed the anonymous physical and mental abuse that they could express. The degree to which this was prevalent rather shocked Bilal(10). Yet the variety of peoples comments and responses suggests how successfully he engaged large numbers of people in what Henri Lefebvre would call a "representational space, embodying complex symbolisms...linked to the clandestine...side of social life, as also to art"(11). Lefebvre's conception of space includes art works, as well as architectural structures, that hide power relations. How Bilal's project negotiates these spaces I will discuss in depth in Chapter 4 of this thesis.
1. Bilal explicitly states this during the video blogs of days'
2. Bilal & Lyderson p.4.
3. ibid p.11
4. ibid p.1
5. ibid p. 79
6. ibid p.xvi
7. Bilal, Wafaa (mewafaa)The paint ball project day 10 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mz6zAwrkolc accessed 2010-08-27 11:55:53 Bilal also mentions this on page 93, during the day 16 section of Shoot An Iraqi.
8. Star, Susan Leigh and James R. Griesemer. "Institutional Ecology, 'Translations' and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39" in Social Studies of Science, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Aug., 1989), pp. 387-420
9. Bilal & Lyderson p. 110
10. ibid p.78
11. Lefebvre, Henri The Social Production of Space. Blackwell, 1991 p.33
This contrast that Bilal draws, between the zone of conflict and that of comfort is central to his artistic choice. He wants to place himself, living a comfortable life as an academic and artist in a large US city, again in a zone of conflict as a means of expressing solidarity with his family who would not or could not leave Iraq(3). More over, he has written that this performance was intended to provoke a crisis for those residing in a zone of comfort "shielded from the actual horrors of" the campaign in Iraq(4). As his biography makes clear, he is no stranger to threats of violence and intimidation, through the wars, repression and bigotry he has encountered both with in and with out Iraq as well as his home town of Kufa and even his own home there.
Yet this space of conflict he had created, by providing a means of committing physical violence, via the paintball gun, a means of discussion via the internet and within the gallery space, itself, and by means of spectators viewing his Youtube blogs and the media reports generated, has allowed communication to take place that would have otherwise been unlikely to have happened.
Comments like:
"Make that chair spin"
FIRE!!!!
fuckin' Iraqis
contrasted with:
Peace to you and your people, Wafaa
This guy has heart
Don't shoot him, he's fucking human being!!
The expansion of the discussion space arose when the popular internet reference site, DIGG.com picked up on the performance via an article in the Chicago Tribune. This reference in DIGG lead to a geometrical increase in visitors to the Domestic Tension website, as the more people drawn to the site via DIGG in turn "digged" the story, pushing it up to the top of the lists, leading more people to encounter and explore the story(5). This social networking operated in concert with Bilal's attempt to create a community, although I sense that this was serendipitous as he more straightforwardly publicised his performance in atypical websites(for a high art project) of paintballnation.com. The net result was over 80 million hits, from 136 countries during the course of the performance(6). Ascribing the quality of space to a chatroom, the quality community to people who may be shooting at you, and the quality of discussion to among other things a low velocity projectile fired at one's body may seem to be stretching the definitions of these terms. But the relationship of these terms to Bilal's performance may be better understood if we look at both Bilal, and his companion-for that is how he came to describe the paintball gun(7)- as boundary objects.
A boundary object is
"both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and the constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites...They have different meanings in different social worlds but their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them recognizable, a means of translation"(8)
This concept was developed by Susan L. Star and James R. Griesemer as way of considering how different social groups, and their members might interact using an object that carries different significances how either group. Thus the paintball gun might be perceived simultaneously as a weapon, an art object, a threat a toy depending on the social milieu of the person activating it. At the same time, Bilal himself, appearing rather like a non-player character(an NPC, essentially a "robot" simulating a person, animal, monster or some other agent in a digital game) functions as a boundary object: at once an artist, a target, a human being and so on. This multitude of meanings allowed different participants to be drawn into the performance without immediately confronting a didactic message that might have caused those opposed to Bilal's anti-war stance or those unfamiliar with contemporary art practices to remain disengaged from the discussion of the Iraq war and the common lack of engagement with the broad and profound implications of a military conflict. He recounts how he was an anti-war symbol, a target for hateful bigots, entertainment and company for the bored, lonely or flirtatious, or topic for academic and philosophical discussion, among other roles(9).
A common response was for participants to fire a paintball round at Bilal, then often feel guilt and then engage in conversation. Obviously, some participants simply enjoyed the anonymous physical and mental abuse that they could express. The degree to which this was prevalent rather shocked Bilal(10). Yet the variety of peoples comments and responses suggests how successfully he engaged large numbers of people in what Henri Lefebvre would call a "representational space, embodying complex symbolisms...linked to the clandestine...side of social life, as also to art"(11). Lefebvre's conception of space includes art works, as well as architectural structures, that hide power relations. How Bilal's project negotiates these spaces I will discuss in depth in Chapter 4 of this thesis.
1. Bilal explicitly states this during the video blogs of days'
2. Bilal & Lyderson p.4.
3. ibid p.11
4. ibid p.1
5. ibid p. 79
6. ibid p.xvi
7. Bilal, Wafaa (mewafaa)The paint ball project day 10 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mz6zAwrkolc accessed 2010-08-27 11:55:53 Bilal also mentions this on page 93, during the day 16 section of Shoot An Iraqi.
8. Star, Susan Leigh and James R. Griesemer. "Institutional Ecology, 'Translations' and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39" in Social Studies of Science, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Aug., 1989), pp. 387-420
9. Bilal & Lyderson p. 110
10. ibid p.78
11. Lefebvre, Henri The Social Production of Space. Blackwell, 1991 p.33
Friday, July 16, 2010
Chapter 1 Section1 Page 1 (and my thesis proposal, natch)
In this thesis I shall defend the position that Wafaa Bilal's use of space in his performance art work, Domestic Tension, both resists and reifies the notion of "Empire" as presented by Hart and Negri and discussed by Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter in the book Games of Empire. Wafaa Bilal is an Iraqi-born artist and academic whose work frequently addresses issues of politics, power and virtuality in relation to his native Iraq. Bilal recreated his living room in the Flatfile gallery in Chicago and lived within that space for thirty one days while visitors to a related website shot at him with a robotic paintball gun and/or communicated with him by internet chat. This performance is a response by Bilal to the death of his brother in an US air strike in their home town of Kufaa, and attempted to reach out, primarily via internet, to people who would not normally visit art galleries or engage with critical artistic discourses about the war in Iraq or about political conflict in general. The simulacra of a First Person Shooter(FPS) game that is simulated in Bilal's performance provides a means to reflecting on the similarities and differences between commercially available FPS and the dialogue between the two streams of visual/digital culture.
My first chapter introduces the general thrust of my argument, introducing the biography and work of Wafaa Bilal, his position as an artist of Iraqi origin and the stakes he raises by means of his artistic production. I pay particularly close attention to how he creates spaces for discussion of the political issues his work addresses. I briefly exposit how he uses youtube video blogs and a subsequent book to document his performance. I also introduce discussion of the 30 000 pages of internet chat that he recorded. This chapter concludes by outlining the relationship of the spaces Bilal creates to the notion of empire and it's antithesis, multitude, as discussed by Hart and Negri and Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter in their respective writings.
The second chapter of this thesis looks at the previous literature that discuss three themes that intertwine within this thesis. The first of these themes deals with performance art and conflict. By drawing on writing about extreme performance I suggest a direct line between Chris Burden's performance "Shoot!", and the short film that documented it through to Domestic Tension. The second theme touches on discussions about virtuality and space and especially the body of writing centered on Henri Lefevre's the Social Production of Space. The third theme deals with literature exploring the growing cultural ubiquity, and possible cultural dominance, of digital games and their relationship to 'Empire' and 'Multitude'.
The third chapter is a close reading of Bilal's video blogs of his performance and two primary written sources dealing with it; his book, written with journalist K Lyderson, Shoot an Iraqi:Life Art and Resistance Under the Gun and the record of internet chat that comprised a significant element of the performance, both as an expression of the multitude and an embrasure of Empire.
The forth Chapter explores the central arguments for 'Empire' and how these apply to art and digital games. Some of the discussion here turns back on artistic practices such as those of Marcel Duchamp, who understood that the resistances offered by his work would eventually be turned and subsumed into modernist, capitalist discourses and power structures. Much of this chapter serves to contextualise the concluding chapter of this thesis by demonstrating previous relationships between art, games and empire.
The final, concluding chapter will discuss the formal aspects of both Domestic Tension and FPS digital games and show how the space they create form lines of resistance between Empire and Multitude. This system can be presented on a semiotic square, with Empire and Multitude opposing on one axis, with resistance and embrasure opposing each other on the diametrical axis.
My first chapter introduces the general thrust of my argument, introducing the biography and work of Wafaa Bilal, his position as an artist of Iraqi origin and the stakes he raises by means of his artistic production. I pay particularly close attention to how he creates spaces for discussion of the political issues his work addresses. I briefly exposit how he uses youtube video blogs and a subsequent book to document his performance. I also introduce discussion of the 30 000 pages of internet chat that he recorded. This chapter concludes by outlining the relationship of the spaces Bilal creates to the notion of empire and it's antithesis, multitude, as discussed by Hart and Negri and Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter in their respective writings.
The second chapter of this thesis looks at the previous literature that discuss three themes that intertwine within this thesis. The first of these themes deals with performance art and conflict. By drawing on writing about extreme performance I suggest a direct line between Chris Burden's performance "Shoot!", and the short film that documented it through to Domestic Tension. The second theme touches on discussions about virtuality and space and especially the body of writing centered on Henri Lefevre's the Social Production of Space. The third theme deals with literature exploring the growing cultural ubiquity, and possible cultural dominance, of digital games and their relationship to 'Empire' and 'Multitude'.
The third chapter is a close reading of Bilal's video blogs of his performance and two primary written sources dealing with it; his book, written with journalist K Lyderson, Shoot an Iraqi:Life Art and Resistance Under the Gun and the record of internet chat that comprised a significant element of the performance, both as an expression of the multitude and an embrasure of Empire.
The forth Chapter explores the central arguments for 'Empire' and how these apply to art and digital games. Some of the discussion here turns back on artistic practices such as those of Marcel Duchamp, who understood that the resistances offered by his work would eventually be turned and subsumed into modernist, capitalist discourses and power structures. Much of this chapter serves to contextualise the concluding chapter of this thesis by demonstrating previous relationships between art, games and empire.
The final, concluding chapter will discuss the formal aspects of both Domestic Tension and FPS digital games and show how the space they create form lines of resistance between Empire and Multitude. This system can be presented on a semiotic square, with Empire and Multitude opposing on one axis, with resistance and embrasure opposing each other on the diametrical axis.
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