Chapter 2 section 4 Art Agents: Cybernetic performance and art with robots

Domestic Tension occurs as performance art. It's antecedents are perhaps best exemplified by the works of such extreme works as those of Vito Acconci, Chris Burdon, whose performance, "Shoot!" strips down the mechanics of projectile themed performance to its brutal basics, and arguably Mathew Barney's Cremaster Cycle, which combines elements of platform style video games with machismo driven elements of digital Role Playing Games. When Barney's central character, played by a young and handsome Matthew Barney himself, climbs the interior of the Guggenheim museum in New York, and cavorts with nude women, in a surrealistic environment, I sense much of the same impulses that drive the Duke Nukem series of games, albeit with a much more developed theoretical rationale.

Domestic Tension has none of the glamour of the Cremaster Cycle, nor the short, sharp imperative of Chris Burdon's "Shoot". Burdon's work lasts for only about a minute. The performative element is only really from the time his friend aims at Burdon's arm, until about seven seconds later Burdon has ordered "shoot!" the friend fires and a bleeding Burdon walks unsteadily past the camera. The film is the only record of the performance, and the performance would have only been available to the small audience gathered there at that moment. This contrasts with the interactivity of Bilal's performance, and the ostensive elements- what sociologist Bruno Latour labels that which does not dissipate versus the performative- such as ongoing discussion as people review the youtube blogs that Bilal published during the performance, and the excerpts from chatroom blogs that he published in his memoir about the performance.

Perhaps the most salient point about Bilal's performance is the role of robot as a participant in the performance. The paintball gun was the crux of the performance. Without it, creating a sense of menace, the performance was emotionally void. Moreover, the specifics of the paintball gun versus a painting, were that its relationship with Bilal developed over time in a specific shared space, as opposed to the brevity of Burdon's "Shoot" or with Goya's works which were displaced substantially in time and space versus the events they addressed and the artist and audience they involved. After all, a painting could only be viewed in one space and were created several years after the conflicts they depicted. They could not affect an audience virtually in the same way that an internet performance can spill out from the space in which it occurs. Goya's painting, and Burdon's film of his performance, lack the obvious effect of agency deployed by a remote controlled, internet mediated paint ball gun.

My intention is not to evaluate different media, but to observe how a cybernetic paint ball gun might appear to have greater agency than a painting or a film. This appearance is suggested by Bilal saying that he felt lonely when the gun broke down during the performance. It is important to remember this performance was 31 days long. Burdon did not express similar emotions towards the rifle he was shot with. Even though we know that paintball guns are not imbued with intentionality, we still appear to be able to think about them as having a character. This suggests that although it is easier to imagine a moving, three dimensional object as having agency(a discussion I will elaborate in Chapter 4) would can ascribe a parallel agency to any art work. however, at this point, I want to simply consider some artworks that thematically resemble Domestic Tension i.e. The Eighth of May, 1808 and "Shoot!" but also contemporary artworks that utilise robotics and cybernetics as a means to expression.

More crude, and violent robots were the massive robots use by Mark pauline and other members of Survival Research Laboratories. These robots often used fire as well as battering attacks to create performances critiquing technological domination and the use of violence in governance(1). Chris Csikszentmihalyi produced his robot Hunter Hunter(1993) which was automated to load and fire a 9mm round towards a loud noise(2). Other Robot art works that suggest Domestic Tension include Epizoo created by Marcel.li Antunez Roca and Sergi Jorda. This performance consisted of a robot that deformed and manipulated the body of Antunez according to remote commends of the audience(3). Edaurdo Kac's robot Ornitorrinco has performed in several different events, exploring telepresence in multiple cities during one performance.(4)

The use of weapons, telepresence and robots have now several generations of deployment in contemporary art practice.

                           
(1)Kac, Eduardo "Towards a Chronology of Robotic Art" in Convergence 2001 7: 87
(2)Kac, Eduardo "Towards a Chronology of Robotic Art" in Convergence 2001 p.100
 
(3)Kac, Eduardo "Towards a Chronology of Robotic Art" in Convergence 2001 p.103
 (4)Kac, Eduardo "Towards a Chronology of Robotic Art" in Convergence 2001
 

Validation and recognitions

After pondering several terms: gesture, performance, agency, boundary object; several theoretical positions- actor-network theory, Gell's anthropology of art, boundary object theory, and phenomenology; and several scholars- Bart Simon, Bruno Latour, S.L. Star &J.R. Griesemer, Husserl, Alfred Gell and Carrie Noland; I have come full circle in re-encountering thinking that inspired me two years ago. As I began to think about the relationship of digital games to art history, I was at once encouraged by my friend, mentor and M.A. Supervisor Jean Bélisle to focus on the facts, before embarking on theories.

But the facts I had found were much inspired by a presentation on gestural games (think the Nintendo Wii, and now the Xbox360 Kinect) that Bart Simon, a sociology professor gave regarding how game players emulate and simulate movements far beyond the needs of a game. In that respect, he was very much engaged in his talents as an ethnographer. These talents would be embraced and expanded in the work of Shanly Dixon, a childhood friend and now expert in the field of childhood, cyberculture especially as regards girls and games. These people began to drive my thought towards space, and the sense of movement and embodiment that I saw as being significant towards drawing out the connections between artistic production, gamic experience and the embodied drive through space that occurs between and around these two realms.

As I have explored the problem of agency as dealt with by Alfred Gell, the British Anthropologist and the theorists of Actor-Network Theory, such as Bruno Latour, Michel Callon  and John Law, I came full circle to a scholar whose writing originally inspired me in her approach, but also her subject matter: Carrie Noland. A professor of Italian and French at UC Irvine, her essay about gesture and meaning in the artistic practice of Bill Viola gave me the impetus to start thinking about how to draw together the disparate thoughts I had about artistic practice, digital game aesthetics and the exciting discussion around gestural games that was emerging around the TAG(Technoculture Art and Games) Research Center of Montréal's Concordia University that had just been founded by Lynn Hughes, a design professor and Bart Simon, whose work had shifted from the sociology of science into video Game Studies.

This field excited me for both intellectual and pragmatic reasons. I see it as does Lynn Hughes among others such as Henry Jenkins, as a contemporary mode of performative artistic practice, rather than mass media.It is a wide open field, with much room for new thought. Looking at it from a phenomenological perspective, as arises from my undergraduate interests in Heidegger and later, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, Noland's essay(1) seemed to cover everything that I thought was relevant, save digital games.

So it was with great pleasure that I have discovered that her recent book(2) attempts to reconcile theoretical problems with ANT and the controversial theory of agency advanced by the late Alfred Gell. That fact that we have both trod along parallel paths has encouraged me to believe that I might be thinking usefully about the problems that I have chosen to grapple with. The problem of how artistic practice is deployed or deploys through bodies moving in space, and how phenomenological insights can be gleaned from these considerations as we consider how meaning is realised through motion, and agency can be characterised without demanding intentionality be assumed.
____________________________________________________
(1) Noland, Carrie "Motor Intentionality: Gestural Meaning in Bill Viola and Merleau-Ponty" in Postmodern Culture vol 17 #3
(2)Noland, Carrie. Agency and embodiment : performing gestures/producing culture. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2009

Chapter 4 Section 4- Art Objects at the Boundary

The boundary object is in its original formulation an object that can act as a point of communication between two groups. In the previous section I argued, following from the work of Actor-Network theorists and the work of Alfred Gell, that art objects have agency. Here I will discuss how this agency is expressed when disparate groups gather and communicate through such an agent. I will also consider the physical and metaphorical sense of the boundary as a spatial term, which will lead to the next section's discussion of spatiality.

The origin of the concept of the boundary object arises in a 1989 paper by Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer where they discussed the interactions of amateur and professional zoologists at the Berkley Museum of Zoology during the early half of the 20th Century(1). Their work extends its analysis from the concept of interressement developed by Bruno Latour, Michel Callon and John Law. As Star and Griesemer describe interessement as that which entails different groups, for example scientists and non-scientists 'translating' their concerns so that these can be shared by other groups, thus retaining them as 'allies'(2).  In contrast to their characterization of Latour, Callon, and Law's work with it's emphasis on how one group "funnels" the interests of others to support it's particular concerns, Star and Griesemer allow for multiple negotiations between networks of interested groups(3). This negotiation was called translation, as in the meaning and message conveyed from one group in a network to another were shifted sufficiently to be understood and embraced by another group without betraying the original concerns expressed the group seeking to 'funnel' the exchanges in the network towards a goal or objective.

The role of the boundary objects in achieving those goals is to be "objects which both inhabit several
intersecting social worlds...and satisfy the informational requirements of each of them"(4). Star and Griesemer explicitly critique Latour et al's concept as failing to address the multiple interests at play in a museum setting- they point point out that

"There, several groups of actors -    amateurs, professionals, animals, bureaucrats and 'mercenaries'-    succeeded in crafting a coherent problem-solving enterprise, surviving multiple translations."(5)

The application of boundary object theory to contemporary art history becomes more apparent when we consider it was initially deployed to try "to understand the historical development of a particular type of institution:natural history research museums"(6). In this case the natural history museum they were examining originated as a research museum, unlike many others which Star and Griesemer describe as originating as a popular attraction that subsequently reflected a growing professionalization in the museology of natural history(7).
                                               
(1) Star, Susan Leigh & 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 


 (2) ibid p. 389


 (3) ibid p. 390

(4) ibid p. 393

(5) ibid p. 392

(6) ibid p. 391


(7) ibid  p. 391


 Albertsen, Niels.& Bülent Diken "Artworks’ Networks Field, System or Mediators?" in Theory, Culture & Society 2004 (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 21(3): 35–58 

Rodriguez, H. "Technology as an Artistic Medium" in 2006 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics October 8-11, 2006, Taipei, Taiwan 

Berner, Boel. "Working knowledge as performance: on the practical understanding of machines" in
Work Employment Society 2008 22: 319


 Vandenberghe, FrÈdÈric. "Reconstructing Humants: A Humanist Critique of Actant-Network Theory" in
Theory Culture Society 2002 19: 51

Chapter 5 Section 1 Introducing a Conclusion

In his book We Have Never Been Modern, sociologist Bruno Latour notes how the AIDs virus "Takes you from sex to the unconcious, then to Africa, tissue cultures, DNA and San Francisco" but note how experts from a variety of fields discussion the virus within vary narrow delineated disciplinary categories without acknowledging, indeed explicitly asserting these categories(1). Within these delinations we can see two of Henri Lefebvre's three spatial domains; perceived space, conceived space and a specific type of lived space(2). In this case Latour's experts create a conceived space that derogates the common sense lived space, and ultimately serves to neutralise the imaginery space of of lived(3). Latour argues that "retying the Gordian Knot" severed by expert knowledge restores the complexity hidden by such expert arguments(4). It is here that Bilal's Domestic Tension succeeds. By exploiting the agency of art objects- the robotic paintball gun, the gallery and the artist himself- he creates boundary objects that work together in a particular fashion to cross disciplinary walls that differentiate nations, citizens and disciplines. His use of virtuality within and without a gallery setting allowed his work to engage an audience otherwise unlikely to explore a gallery space or engage in a dialogue with contemporary performance art. If Lefebvre wrote that space was a production of the society, then Latour theoretically breaks down the walls that define that space and leave it open for the particular agency of art works that Gell asserts and describes. Bilal's work embodies that theoretical model as it redefines perceptions of galleries, art objects and performances and the audiences and artists that result in a new possibilities of lived spatiality. By using the perceived space of the FPS digital game and the conceived space of the art gallery and the internet, he has connected people through the agency of the performance as boundary object.

Within the context of modern Geopolitics, Domestic Tension explores a particular response of one artistic to a moment, a tragic moment in a greater conflict. With the death of his brother, and his death leading to his father’s death a few months later, Wafaa Bilal offers a subjective response but it is a response that leads to much broader implications. In one direction, it explores and catalyses a “hi-art” response to a “low-culture” phenomena- performance art and how it deals with digital games, especially as an online social sphere. At the same time, Bilal’s performance allows people from a broad range of social background to experience the possibility of physically harming another via remote control. In this respect, domestic tension begins to offer an experience that is already common for many in the technologically advanced militaries of North America, Europe and Asia– the experience of committing a violent act from a place of comfort.
Some Chatroom messages expressed doubt as to whether the performance was ‘real’ as I noted in the review of video footage in Chapter 3 of this thesis. People in their homes fired the paintball gun, then questioned whether it was loaded, or that Bilal was actually the only person playing Bilal. His response was that it was not important to the success of the performance whether or not the scenario he portrayed was real. His gauge was the responses of those viewing the performance, especially via the internet. Contrast this response, of those questioning the reality of the performance with U.S.A.F drone operators expressing faith in their orders to strike at people 15 000 kilometers away, confident that what they see is what they are told it is.





                                                          
(1)Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern, Catherine Porter, trs. Harvard. Cambridge,Mass. 1993. p.2
(2) Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space
(3) Latour, Bruno ibid p.3
(4) ibid p.3

Chapter 2 Section 3- FPS: A Brief History of Virtual Mayhem

Airport level, Modern Warfare 2 from
http://freeandopenencounter.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/modern-warfare-no-russian.jpg

The term "video game" often brings to mind the image either of the popular puzzle game "Tetris" or the First Person Shooter(FPS) of which Wolfenstein 3D(Id, 1992) was perhaps the earliest example, up to games such as Modern Warfare 2(Infinity Ward, 2009), which currently occupies up to 25 million people playing online, according to the game's community manager, Robert Bowling(1). The popularity of this genre of game has created frequent moral panics as to their effect on players, especially promoting the idea that playing such games will promote bloody shooting sprees(2). More significant is the notion that these games may function as recruiting tools for various militaries, notably the game America's Army.

 The technical execution of these games has increased in sophistication over the preceding two decades, with the quality of the games going from a few polygons that created the forms of the player avatar and other figures, up to the near photo-realistic appearance of MW2. Likewise, the play has become more sophisticated with the scenery appearing to behave as it would in real life, with water rippling, clothes and hair shifting with programmed breezes and blood spattering concrete that shatters with the impact of ordinances modeled on increasingly precise physics (but then calibrated to make gameplay more enjoyable, as multiple head shots are possible in-game, while obviously incapacitating or fatal in real life).

Wolfenstein 3D from http://guestcontroller.wordpress.com/2010/09/06/wolfenstein-3d-micro-review/

Perhaps the most significant change, however is the appearance of on-line play. With this, players can communicate and interact with each others through their avatars, or via chatrooms or headsets. The sociality of on-line combat is a phenomena explored by Maria Frostling-Henningson(3). Her ethnographic study of game players discovered that they valued the social aspects of combat games such as CounterStrike and world of Warcraft and avoided playing solo games.indeed, her account emphasised that the groups of people preferred to play in close physical proximity in internet cafes, rather that via home computers(4). As one of her subjects says "‘‘I cannot do night ‘gibs’ any longer, since I am too tired to go on; before, I could because of the spirit of community— you know, with friends. If you have gaming as an interest, you can exchange experiences. It is a lot, a lot of communication in the games’’ (Cherin, 23-year-old female)".(5) The result of Frostling-Henningsson's research is that it reveals a much more social, and more nuance series of exchanges than is often presupposed. These exchanges are not necessary to the gameplay, as she reveals in the cooperative behavior of two female friends who are nominally counted as adversaries in the game world, but choose to work together communicating both within the game by actions such as shooting into space to identify their position, and covering each other so as to maneuver within the virtual game space.(6)


                                                                            
(1)http://content.usatoday.com/communities/gamehunters/post/2010/03/number-of-modern-warfare-2-online-players-tops-25-million/1. Numerous online gaming portals, such as Blizzard Game's Battlenet post player statistics indicating hundreds of thousands to millions of players on-line at any given time on each different portal.
(2)Power, Marcus. "Digitized Virtuosity: Video War Games and Post-9/11 Cyber-Deterrence"
  Security Dialogue 2007 38: 271
(3)Frostling-Henningsson, Maria."First-Person Shooter Games as a Way of Connecting to People: ‘‘Brothers in Blood’’" in CYBERPSYCHOLOGY & BEHAVIOR Volume 12, Number 5, 2009
(4) ibid p.558
(5) ibid p.558
(6) ibid p.560

Chapter 4 Section 3- Art as agent

If space is constructed by the means of production of a given society,  then what means of production enters in that of a gallery or an artist's given practice? One means to answering this question is found in the thought of Alfred Gell, a British anthropologist. His provocative thesis considers art objects as actors in the same sense as Bruno Latour , John Law and others who advocate Actor-Network Theory. Gell's argument, briefly put, is that agency is a perceptual category in the audience, rather than an expression of intentionality from within the actor. Some authors have debated whether a distinction should be drawn between actors(human agents) and actants(non human agents). Regardless, and my position is that this is a ontic or mundane response to a ontological or theoretical argument that is based on distaste for being considered as unintentional by others. The argument that an object (human objects?) have agency helps us examine the notion of the boundary object and how scholars such as Star and Leissomer(CK) have conceptualised this idea. In turn this will help us to consider art works as boundary objects, and how they reflect the origins of the space in which they occur.

Alfred Gell, writing in his book, Art and Agency argues for agency being found in art objects. His consideration for why he argues for this stems from his desire to create an anthropological theory of art which can avoid referring to specific aesthetics as the basis for considering social relationships(p.3). Instead he introduces the idea that "persons or  'social agents' are, in certain contexts, substituted for by art objects."(p. 5) Gell embraces the theoretical position that the art object is defined within the milieu in which it was created(p. 7). In keeping with other anthropological theories, such as apply to kinship, economics and the like, Gell defines the anthropology of art' as the theoretical study of 'social relations in the vicinity of objects mediating social agency'(p.7) rather than looking for aesthetic principles, Gell looks for actions which which belie agency; He considers art objects as being a index of agency and contemporary western art practices as being a subset of the totality of those indexes(p. 15)

Gell defines an agent as"one who has the capacity to initiate causal events in his/her vicinity" (p.19)His definition of agency leads him to argue that we identify an agent when "they act like an agent"(p. 20). He allows for the commonsense objection that objects such as children's dolls, works of art and so on by distinguishing between primary agents as having intentionality, such as human beings and secondary agents, that we do not attribute with intentionality(p. 20). However while he caveats these secondary agents as being channels of agency, he attributes both agency and our attribution of intentionality to the observer, rather than the observed. He describes the actor as" the agent" and that, or who that receives the action as "the patient" but characterises this as a contextual and fleeting relationship that must be considered in the broad social context in which it occurs(p.22). Intentionality with it history of a philosophical appeal to metaphysics, and theories of mind is not required for Gell's examination of objects as agents. Indeed, his argument seems more geared to disarm criticisms that his anthropology of art removes the 'anthro' from his object of study; that he eliminates the human. His arguement does not draw an operational distinction between "primary"(human) and "secondary"(non-human) agents. However Gell's reflections do respect our lack of conclusive experience regarding intentionality beyond our own personal anecdotal experience, and the inconclusive ruminations of luminary thinkers such as Berkley, Hume, Descartes through Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty who sought to explore, identify and define the nature of intentionality.

"Too often sociology remains without an object Like many human sciences, it has constructed itself so as to resist attachment to objects, which it calls fetishes. It has taken the ancient admonition of the prophets against gods, merchandise, consumer goods and objets d'art to heart: "Idols have eyes and yet do not see, mouths and yet do not speak, ears and yet do not hear."(Latour p. 236)

Latour's argument stem from a desire to rupture the dichotomy of interactionist sociologists, who see society arising from interactions from individuals and structuralists who see individual interactions as indexes of underlying social structures(Latour p. 230) Latour gives the example of how all the elements of a post office, with it's counter's, screens and so forth allow the interaction of architects, ergonomic specialists and so forth who are present via the the design and construction of the post office with himself and the postal clerk(Latour p. 238) He goes as far as arguing that social structures permit society to exist, as they permit the agency of actors/actants to exhibit itself beyond the immediate place and time that an actor/actant inhabits.(Latour p. 239)
__________________
Gell, Alfred. Art and Agency:An Anthropological Theory. Oxford ; New York : Clarendon Press, 1998

Latour, Bruno. "On Interobjectivity" in Mind, Culture, and Activity, Volume3, No. 4, 1996

Morphy, H. "Art as a Mode of Action: Some Problems with Gell's Art and Agency" in Journal of Material Culture, Volume14, No.1, 2009

Sutherland & Acord "Thinking with art: from situated knowledge to experiential knowing" in Journal of Visual Art Practice Volume 6 Number 2 © 200

War as Performance Art

"[W]e would drive into towns in Bosnia and find bodies crucified on the sides of barns or decapitated, burned and mutilated. That is why those slain in combat are treated as trophies by their killers, turned into grotesque pieces of performance art."Chris Hedges qouted in Malou Innocent Fabricated Myths about War

Chapter 4 Section 2- Local responses to global power: At the cusp of boundaries

Chris Salter argues in his paper"THE KULTURSTAAT IN THE TIME OF EMPIRE Notes on Germany Thirteen Years After"(1) that

"capitalism “produces producers.” In short, in bioproduction, capitalism is the ultimate autopoietic machine. It not only produces commodities, it produces new forms of subjectivities and social relations to consume and reproduce these commodities, constructing and catalyzing economic, social, and cultural life in an endless self- reproducing cycle.(Salter p.2)"

His discussion centers on the decline of state support for culture— he focuses on both 'prestige ' institutions and more challenging organisations in the realm of performance, such as the Deautsche opera and the Frankfurt ballet—and how this is an aesthetic response to global capitalism. While allowing that this has challenged German cultural practices, heavily dependent on state sponsorship, Salter argues that a new generation of german artist is now embracing  "DIY" artistic practices(Salter p. 13). To be sure he also presents resistances from the kulturstat which both rejects 21st century artistic practice and defends a 19th century sensibility that suggests these new practices and the economic milieu out of which it arises as "American"(Salter p.9-10).

This critic of new artistic practices is not essentially supported by Salter's analysis. He suggests that these resistances are both restrictive, as they ignore the current social environment, and counterproductive to artistic goals that challenge and supersede the concept of Empire as a monolithic structure that endlessly encompasses what various discussions, including his, Hart and Negri's and seminally, Michel Foucault's, as biopower. Salter asserts that biopower can indeed turn and rupture the apparently all-encompassing force of Empire  and that examples of that  demonstrate how. The scope of his paper, however does not give detailed analysis of how such ruptures are achieved.

His specific examples include works by German director/artist Christoph Schlingensief, such as Church of Fear, presented at the Venice Biennale of 2003. Functioning both in (experimental) theatre, political theater(Schlingensief ran for Chancellor in 2000) and experimenting with 'low culture'(does that include mass market video game?) this German artist presents a specific example of art work that moves beyond early modern models of artistic production into more contemporary situations. As salter puts it "Schlingensief’s blend of political/aesthetic action combined with popular entertainment and trash culture embodies much of what is common across the Berlin performance and visual art worlds. Soap operas, TV talk shows and the like provide the content and context for many “off theatre” and performance troupes who exist outside of the stadttheater scene as well as for the less established visual arts scene."(Salter p. 12)
Looking closely at Schlingensief's body of work, we see similarities in his concerns between regional interpretations of state power, with Schlingensief's work rooted in German concerns as Bilal's are in Iraq, but both addressing American expressions of power in an age of global capital.


including avoiding the triumphalism of what is often characterised as American capitalism that seems to arise within the critique of that economic system when we look at writings about Empire.










__________________________
(1)Salter, Chris. "The Kulturstaat in the Time of Empire: Notes on Germany Thirteen Years After"
 in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, PAJ 77 (Volume 26, Number 2), May 2004, pp. 1-15

Chapter 4 Section 1- Thinking About Producing An Artistic Space

Boundary objects create a space for interactions between groups

Bilal's enunciated goal for Domestic Tension was to create a space of conversation. The production of space is much the focus of French philosopher Henri Lefebvre. lefebvre's thought contends that social spaces are specific to the societie that produce them. Thus in Bilal's case, his space of conversation, in sofar as he creates it, is much a product of the society out of which creates it. This apparent tautology in Lefebvre's case indicates some of the limitations of using his philosophies of spaciality to describe Domestic Tension. In Bilal's case his performance approaches space that includes and transcends virtual versus embodied space. This porosity between screen space and embodied space occurs through boundary objects. The discussion of boundary objects, a concept originally developed by sociologist Susan “Leigh” Star and philosopher James R. Griesemer, posits objects(which can include items such as the paintball gun robot of Bilal's performance, ideas and people) can have multiple and vary significances which none-the-less allow different groups of people to interact. This concept has bearing on the actor-network Theory of Bruno Latour and John Law, amongst others, as their theories grant agency to objects commonly thought of as being inanimate. This notion significantly can create a particular aesthetics, especially for interactive performances. Some criticisms of boundary objects have been raised by Charlotte P. Lee, who argues that the boundary object concept inadequately describes the relationships between groups and writes "Theories are needed to explain how collaborators from different communities of practice, that lack pre-existing standards, use material artifacts to collaborate."(Lee p. 314). These negotiated boundaries, boundaries which in this case are present in virtual spaces in the case of Bilal's performance, provide a theoretical hinge for discussing performance art, including those performative arenas we can refer to as digital games. The immediate implications for Domestic Tensions I will discuss in the final, concluding  chapter of this thesis. Some more general questions raised by this discussion I will elaborate here.

________________________
Lee, Charlotte P. "Boundary Negotiating Artifacts: Unbinding the Routine of Boundary Objects and Embracing Chaos in Collaborative Work" in Computer Supported Cooperative Work (2007) 16:307–339

Chapter 2 -Section 2 Goya and the framing of violence and protest

Francisco Goya, The Third of May 1808,
1814, Oil on canvas, 268 × 347 cm image source: Wikipedia

The face of the defenceless in the face of violence has a particular poignancy. As works of art, both Wafaa Bilal's Domestic Tension and Francisco Goya's share some similarity, in as much as they take a stand against war, especially against the toll paid by non-combatant's caught in zones of conflict. However, the differences in content and form suggest differing forms of resistance from two artists separated by time, but united in an opposition to militarism. Where as Bilal's performance put a true non-combatant(he had fled conscription into the Iraqi army) in the line of fire, his performance was strongly inspired by the death of his brother, who was manning a check point barricade, defending his community, when he was killed by a missile strike from a U.S. Army helicopter(1). The civilians portrayed in Goya's painting were in fact local militia, who had defended Madrid against the invading troops of Napoleon. Goya, like Bilal almost two centuries later, found himself living with in the regime that killed his loved ones, as Goya was appointed to create paintings for the puppet king Joseph the first(2).
These two artists, Bilal and Goya, share a fraught relationship with the respective invaders of their countries, as Bilal fled to the freedom that the USA offers, especially in comparison to the ba'thist regime of Iraq, and Goya like many artists and intellectuals of his time believed that Napoleon would disseminate the enlightened goals presented by the French revolution(3). In that case, Napoleon's machinations- He had convinced the Spanish monarch to ally against Portugal. King Ferdinand was deposed and fled when he realised the French had no intention of leaving. It was only after the defeat of the Napoleon's armies in the Peninsular war that Ferdinand regained his throne. A despot himself, it is not clear that there was a material improvement for the majority of Spaniards. Indeed, Allegory of the City (1810 oil on canvas) was originally painted during the French occupation, and art historian Sarah Symmons notes that the painting was modified several times to reflect political changes(4). For example, inscriptions portrayed on a large lozenge to the upper right of the painting. The changes honoured the Spanish constitution imposed by the French king, Joseph Bonaparte, and then the subsequent restoration of the Bourbon monarchy lead to additional changes representing the concurrent changes of the Spanish constitution, until finally the inscription honours the Spanish insurrection of the 2nd of May, 1808.

Symmons notes that the image of the Third of May, 1808 does not show partisans of the Iberian peninisula, from whom the term guerilla originally arose, as warriors but rather as casualties and victims(5) that perhaps reflected Ferdinand the Vlll's desire to quell any popular resistance to his autocratic regime(6). Indeed, the central figure has a obviously Christ-like pose, suggesting sorrow and terror rather than stoicism or defiance. The communication of a loathing for war would be more poignantly realised in Goya's The Disasters of War(1810-1815) etchings, with their often macabre and grotesque portrayal of the brutalities of war, especially on the civilian population. In that respect, Goya and Bilal follow interesting but divergent trajectories that none the less offer a resistance to the political power that ultimately be said to have supported them. Goya's sympathy for the Spanish resistance is tempered by his portrayal of the violence committed by the respective regimes of Joseph Bonaparte then the Bourbon Ferdinand, though both were his patrons at some point in time. Bilal's open dialogue of Domestic Tensions, with its illusions to First Person Shooters (but a mechanic more closely adhering to the early NES game, Duck Hunt) gives way to his portrayal of himself as a Saladin-like character in his video-game-based performance work, Virtual Jihadi, where he embraces a more violent representation of himself as an islamic guerilla, rather than a non-combatant. These different trajectories perhaps reflect the nature of power as it is exercised in a modern constitutional democracy versus an autocratic monarchy. The choice of art works reflects the means offered by the productive capabilities of a essentially pre-industrial culture versus that of a post-modern, digital society. How we can analysis the means by which an artwork interacts with its artist and audiences I will explore in chapter 4.

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(1) Bilal & Lyderson
(2)Vega, Jesusa "Dating and Interpretation of Goya's Disasters of War" in Print Quarterly, 1994 p.3
(3)Bareau, Juliet Wilson. Goya's Prints, The Tomás Harris Collection in the British Museum. British Museum Publications, 1981.
(4) Symmons, Sarah. Goya. Phaidon, 1998 p.234
(5) Symmons, Sarah, p.TK
(6) Boime, Albert Art in the Age of Bonapartism 1800-1815. Chicago and London. U Chicago Press.1990