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.

___________________________
(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

Chapter 2 Section 1 redux- Art and firepower

Wafaa Bilal's memoir  Shoot an Iraqi features the subtitle Life, Art and Resistance Under the Gun. This gives a clue to his explicit goals and also the historical place his work fits into. The portrayal of violence in visual culture dates back to the earliest extant paintings we know of such as images of hunting found in the cave paintings of Lascaux and Altamira. Images of archers in Classical Greek pottery are some of many found through out antiquity. But the particular significance of these images lies in their political or religious elements of the time. The celebration of the hunt, as portrayed in the images found in rock paintings dating back some 40 000 years, or the celebration of military victories, as often portrayed in Hellenic pottery are two examples of early missile weapons and the significance granted them. This significance is changed when we consider paintings such as Francisco Goya's(1746-1836)' The Executions of the Third of May 1808(1). which portrayed the massacre of Spaniards by occupying French troops during the Peninsular War. This portrayal of the unarmed citizenry against the troopers of a then powerful French empire seems to echo in the mechanism of Domestic Tensions, with its unarmed protagonist  facing an armed audience. A century later, Picasso's Guernica would make a similar protest against  an attempted imperial power, as the Luftwaffe was deployed against the civilian population in the town of Guernica as part of the fascist terror campaign against the Republican forces during the Spanish civil war. The editorial element, if I may describe the subjective elemnt of these art works, contrast with the formal elements found in the endurance based performance work of Vito Acconci and more specifically, the Work of Chris Burden. Burden's infamous performance Shoot of 1971 shows the artist being shot with  .22 calibre rifle at close range, and the performance was recorded on film. Many of his subsequent performances dealt with similar tests of his physical limits, such as Transfixed(1974) where he was nailed, crucifixion-style to the hood of a Volkswagon Beetle or Doomed(1975) where he lay beneath a sheet of glass until a random observer interfered with the piece (a security guard moved a pitcher of water to with in Burden's reach, causing him to end the piece after 45 hours).

Shoot was performed infront of a small group of invited friends(2) at F Space gallery in Santa Ana, California(3).

(1) Francisco Goya The Executions of the Third of May 1808. Oil on Canvas 1814

(2) Tumlir, Jan. "Chris Burden - First Break" in Art Forum, Dec 2001 downloaded from http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_4_40/ai_80856183/    19 November 2010

(3)Horvitz, Robert. "Chris Burden" in Artforum magazine, Volume XIV No. 9 (May 1976).pages 24-31. downloaded 19 November 2010

Chapter1 Section 5 Spaces of Conflict within Empire

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

Chapter2 Section 1

The list of some writers who have bearing on an explanation of how Domestic Tension relates to space and virtuality has to start with Wafaa Bilal and his cowriter Kari Lyderson who together wrote his memoir of the piece, his biography and his subsequent work in the book Shoot an Iraqi: life art and resistance under the gun. In the service of thepiecew however, we can also consider the primary sources in the chat room exchanges between Bilal and those that viewed the piece via the internet. Another primary source is the video blogs that Bilal eventually posted to youtube, creating a secondary channel for discussion and contact as the piece proceeded and continued the dialogue after the primary action of the piece had ended. The allusion of the piece to video games can be followed through the lenses provided by Johan Hhuizinga, specifically in his book Homo Ludens, and subsequent writers Nick Dyer-Witheford & Greig de Peuter who discuss the relevance of Digital games to global capitalism.Their work is based on the writing of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, specifically in their book Empire and their subsequent volumes, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire and  Commonwealth. Hardt and Negri's discussion of Empire as they term the space created by globalised capitalism, can be further unpacked via Henri Lefebvre's The Production of Space. 

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.