abstractmachine

For all the English readers out there, I’m sorry, but this one’s going to be en français: the land of « Liberté Égalité Fraternité » is yet again dangerously close to passing what many have been calling a « liberticidal » law, but that might more aptly called a « future-art-killer ». Two days ago, a film opened in New York entitled RiP: A Remix Manifesto; the film has also been distributed under a CC-BY-NC licence and therefore can easily (and legally) be downloaded off of Pirate Bay and other sources; I suggest you see it, and donate to the cause. In it, the filmmakers describe the current cultural battle as a war, and I couldn’t agree more.

With that in mind, here then is my open letter to Christine Albanel, the Minister of Culture, in which I ask her to rethink her position on this current cultural war:

Madame la ministre, demain vous reprenez les débats concernant votre proposition de loi « HADOPI ». Vous nous dites que cette loi est là pour nous protéger, nous les artistes, via une réponse « graduée » et « pédagogique » qui viserait le rétablissement d’un rapport plus équitable entre le public et les créateurs. Il y a eu beaucoup de débats sur cette loi, concernant principalement la question des libertés fondamentales des citoyens et de leur droit d’accès à l’information — autrement dit les conséquences de cette loi en partant du point de vue du consommateur (de la culture). Mais j’aimerais apporter un autre point de vue, partant cette fois-ci du point de vue de l’artiste.

Pour les artistes, cette loi ne répond pas à nos véritables problèmes. Elle en crée même des nouveaux. Ce n’est pas le public en tout cas qui doit nous faire peur, et ce n’est surtout pas le public qui nous empêcherait de créer. Il y a un déséquilibre, peut-être — mais tôt ou tard, nous finirons par nous retrouver. Il serait absurde dans tous les cas d’imaginer un quelconque antagonisme entre les artistes et leur public, encore moins un public de plus en plus demandeur de créations artistiques. Non, la véritable tension se trouverait plutôt entre les artistes et les acteurs qui en vivent — l’industrie culturelle. Il s’agit d’un problème parfaitement classique mais qui nécessiteraient aujourd’hui des renégociations autant sur les nouveaux moyens de diffusion que sur les nouveaux moyens de création. Je dirai même qu’il faut d’abord régler les problèmes du droit de la création, avant de se poser la question de la diffusion. Nous avons besoin de votre aide dans cette rééquilibrage, qui commence par l’arrêt des abus des mêmes systèmes de protection qui étaient sensés nous protéger et que vous déclarez défendre.

L’artiste d’hier n’est pas celui d’aujourd’hui et encore moins celui de demain dont nous ne devinons même pas les contours. Votre loi ne prend pas en compte ces changements; pire, elle fait perdurer un régime d’oppression artistique qui depuis longtemps empêche l’émergence de nouvelles formes qui ne rentreraient pas dans ses modèles de propriété intellectuelle. Où est-il marqué dans votre loi que les artistes du remix, de la détournement des média anciens, seront protégés contre les pratiques draconiennes des industries culturelles qui gardent ces « propriété » tel un cerbère contre toute réappropriation, notamment celle qui leur insufflerait une nouvelle inspiration ? Car c’est ici que les lois supposées nous protéger sont devenues des lois servant à étouffer nos créations. Combien d’artistes doivent être attaqués par les avocats des « majors » avant de réagir en notre défense, en nous proposons des actions (peu importe la forme) qui encouragerait les créations de demain, tout en respectant celles d’hier ? Les formes de censure dont nous souffrons sont avant tout économiques, mais finissent par devenir des formes de censure esthétiques, et qui se transforment même dans certains cas (que je connais malheureusement trop bien) en de la censure politique. L’économie ancienne de la culture nous étouffait, et c’est aujourd’hui qu’enfin nous nous débarrassons de ces lobbies qui ne sont rien d’autre que des défenseurs de la monoculture. Ce sont alors les lois elles-mêmes du droit d’auteur qui doivent être changées, celles créées pour une ancienne forme de création (et de sa diffusion). Et c’est aux anciens gardiens de la citadelle de la culture de s’adapter à la nouvelle donne, et surtout pas l’inverse.

Enfin, ce n’est pas en avançant les dates de sortie des DVD que vous aller inscrire les français dans les enjeux du XXIème siècle. Oubliez la vidéo à la demande, car le public lui-même s’est transformé. La notion de consommation culturelle a muté : ouvrez votre navigateur et vous verrez que l’internaute ne se contente plus de consommer les films, désormais il cherche à en être acteur, se situant quelque part entre curateur, commentateur, et créateur avec une part de moins en moins important de consommation. N’importe quelle loi proposant une harmonisation d’un monde technique et culturel ancien avec le monde nouveau doit commencer par assumer cette nouvelle donne d’une production culturelle en éternelle mutation et bidirectionnelle. Il faut protéger cette nouvelle forme de consommation, cette nouvelle forme de jouissance culturelle, contre les anciens modèles économiques qui sont, malheureusement, incompatibles avec elle. Le public est dans la même posture que nous les artistes, il cherche à créer.

C’est ici d’ailleurs sur ce dernier point que je diverge avec ceux qui prônent la création d’une licence globale : celle-ci est peut-être une solution, mais une solution uniquement temporaire. La licence globale prolonge elle aussi un modèle désuet, basé sur l’idée d’une consommation (passive) des contenus, comme s’il s’agissait de petits paquets de CD ou de DVD, mais distribués sans le support. Alors que l’avenir se trouve plutôt dans des formes audiovisuelles mutantes et algorithmiques qui ne peuvent même pas s’identifier dans telle ou telle copie puisque son raison d’être c’est justement de perdurer dans une adaptabilité permanente. Comment rémunérer correctement ces nouvelles formes tout en encourageant leur distribution ? Nous ne savons pas encore et c’est encore moins votre loi qui nous aidera puisqu’elle est ouvertement hostile aux algorithmes, qui sont suspectés de vouloir détourner ce DRM que même l’industrie culturelle a fini par abandonner. Nous les artistes ont bien moins peur des algorithmes, car nous comprenons que c’est grace à eux que nous oeuvres de demain fonctionneront.

Permettez-moi madame de vous faire une suggestion. Actuellement, vous pouvez téléchargez gratuitement et en toute légalité le film « RiP: A Remix Manifesto », distribué sur Pirate Bay sous la licence Créative Commons CC-BY-SA ou que vous pouvez visionner directement sur le site du National Film Board of Canada. Je vous le recommande très fortement, notamment pour ces valeurs pédagogiques concernant le rôle de la réappropriation dans l’histoire des expressions culturelles. Vous verrez, par exemple, que les droits que vous défendez ne sont peut-être pas aussi propres que vous ne le pensiez. Mais dans ce film, vous trouverez surtout un modèle d’action à la fois politique et artistique, via Gilberto Gil le célèbre musicien et ancien ministre de la culture brésilien : « Nous cherchons toujours à donner aux gens, aux enfants, accès. La nature même de la création, c’est le partage. Tout vient de quelque chose d’autre, c’est comme une réaction en chaîne » (01:12:58). Le rôle d’un ministre de la culture c’est la défense de la culture, de sa création et de son partage. Regardez la magnifique bibliothèque, encore plus grande que celle d’Alexandrie, que les amateurs d’art ont créé grâce au réseau de partage peer-to-peer. Est-ce que les grands industriels de la culture, que vous protégerez que vous le voulez ou non en passant cette loi, peuvent en dire autant ?

// Douglas Edric Stanley, http://www.abstractmachine.net

Some time has passed since my Invaders! installation started something of a $#!¥storm back in August at the Leipzig Games Convention. I tried to give the piece some context and gave a few interviews to responsible journalists, but ultimately the whole thing just blew up as people lost all sense of scale and started taking for granted all sorts of assumptions about the work. Ok, so that’s the backstory, and you can think of all that what you will.

But now that hipster pop acts such as Röyksopp are reportedly referencing the work (I have my doubts) and given that some time has gone by, it is perhaps finally possible to post this video which I have already been showing to crowds at various talks over the past few months. It’s actually not that great of a video, but it does shed a little more light on what actually was going on in Leipzig. As it has been reported elsewhere, there was something of a disconnect between the public reaction to the piece on-site, and people’s reaction on-line. Playing it was apparently very different than just reporting on its visual aspects, especially the types of images at the end of the video, I assume, where you can see the full extent of the damage of the buildings as the game matches ever more closely the historical progression of events (planes, impact, fire, structural damage, jumpers, etc). It would obviously be better to release a more complete video tracing the way in which the game itself mapped the historical events back onto the 8-bit classic, but given that the Games Convention itself wasn’t really the ideal place for this type of analytic meditation anyway, I’ll just go with this video testimony of people playing it, as it was presented. Some people only saw either the Kotaku image, or the Laboral Video, which made for another form of disconnect as people didn’t understand what was actually going on and therefore what the fuss was all about.

Here’s the Röyksopp video by the way:

If it’s true that Röyksopp is referencing my piece, that’s very cool, especially since it’s a great song. Again, I have my doubts since many pop acts don’t really use imagery all that critically, pull $#!¥ in from any direction, and therein pastiche everything into one big self-same pile. It’s always frustrating to see the extent to which music videos often end up whitewashing the images they reference. There is a long history to this tendency, although there is perhaps one recent notable exception: Justice’s « Stress » which was able to reference Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, and recontextualize it with a new political charge which it successfully maintained throughout, going so far as to provoke significant debate in France concerning the ontological status of the image (Is it protest? Is it glorification? Is it criticism?):

Pulling all this back to the Invaders! debate, I actually had an interesting public conversation with Louis Bec last november at the Biennale Figures of Interactivity while presenting this work. According to Bec, there are certain complex calculations in mathematics that require the introduction of a « zone d’ombre» in order to be resolved, and that if you do not in fact include this shadow region, the equation becomes incalculable. Bec tried to draw an analogy by suggesting that September 11th had become culturally unthinkable, and that in order to re-render it imaginable so as to process it, a certain « zone d’ombre » is required, which he suggested comes here in the form of a historical reconstruction (or simulation) of the event which reconstructs the violence in a highly symbolic form so as to able to process it. He went on to create similar analogies with animal simulations of violence and combat in play, and so on. That last part is actually part of the general narrative gamers often use defending the role of violence in video games and I don’t know if I want to get lost down that path because the argument hangs on a certain subtlely that often gets lost in translation. But beyond this idea of simulation, for Louis, the ambiguity of this work « on violence » is merely one of the pre-requisites of needing a shadowy region in order to render the violent act re-thinkable.

There is a new French law currently in preparation on the subject of (yet again) « Création et Internet ». I think you’ve already figured out the translation, but in case you haven’t, it is (yet again) about pitting « artistic creation » against « the Internet ». We’ve already gone through several cycles of this game and still haven’t made any progress on these issues. And yet, here we are, yet again, as if the opposition of art and Internet were somehow an inevitable slow motion head-on accident that only the State could possibly prevent.

Some background. The French have always prided themselves — theoretically at least — on making the effort to defend artistic integrity on the economic world stage, or at least in the case of cinema which included battling the forces of globalization in order to create a « cultural exception » where smaller, culturally important works of art may exist. Again, this is the theory. But an interesting theory nevertheless, because it was understood — thanks to the French appreciation of cinema as a medium, and a medium highly dependant on significant economic forces –, that art forms such as cinema required a mixed form of economy and cultural politics in order for the art form to survive as precisely that, a form of art, and not just a form of entertainment. A complex system was put into place in order to foster that delicate balance that would allow works of cinematic art to emerge — works that without this subtle balance would never be possible in a purely economic logic of the bottom-line. Similar efforts were made in other mediums such as dance, theatre, and music, which as well (and in contradistinction with the visual arts) allowed again for mixed economies and therefore a certain degree of political influence in promoting more diverse forms of expression than purely market-driven economies would have allowed. And beyond the theory, it must be said that some of these efforts have lead, indeed, to forms of expression that would have a far more difficult existence elsewhere.

Fast forward now to the current stage, where the logic of horizontal networks has disrupted not only forms of distribution, but has lead to the emergence of new forms of creation as well. Here again, one would expect that the French — the country of the Minitel — would lead the charge for a new form of mixed economics, in which new forms of distribution would evolve along with the new forms of expression, and in which the State would offer (gasp!) legal and political refuge for artistic expressions attempting to engage these new complex territories — all with the same political will shown previously for, for example, the 20th Century’s recorded arts. Unfortunately, well-fought political alliances are hard to break when their time has come, and the bling bling of cinema has given the French not only a certainly artistic prestige on the world stage (at least as they themselves see it), but also an easy political walk down the Cannes promenade. Everyone loves cinéma in France, and therefore when a politician speaks, they too speak in defense of cinéma as a form of art and not merely of form of entertainment. Subsequently, the political alliance between the audiovisual old guard of cinema, music, and (who else?) television with the french political machine has fallen consistantly on the wrong side of artistic expression when it comes to the emerging forms currently coalescing via the Internet, because these new forms without mistake question many of the comforts enjoyed by the old. And so this alliance has constructed an artificial dichotomy that they are trying to pass as the latest meme of resistance : « création » is under attack from thieves and pirates, and who better to protect the valiant artist, than the State.

The important thing to understand here is that the Internet is being construed, and will therefore be legislated as, nothing but a new form of artistic distribution, irrespective of its capacities as a new locus for artistic creation. This is where the cinéastes have totally lost touch, and despite their claims to the contrary, are nothing but a dying guild defending its territory along with its economic model that has become, to quote their own expression, « obsolescent ».

The problem is that the State is attempting to legislate an issue that would better be served through political action. Cinéma is where it is today not through punative political legislation, but through affirmative political action. And to the contrary: cinéma is not yet dead, and in fact, who the hell said that video-on-the-demand = the Internet? That sounds an awful lot like centralized media in a new form to me. No, I’m not talking here only about VOD — that latest definition, according to the Ministry of Culture, of the cutting edge of the Internet. If cinéma is render itself compatible, it is — yes — going to have to define its relationship to the mashup, to aggregation, to search/index/recontextualisation; in other words, to all the denaturalizing tendencies the new media forms have with respect to the sacrosanct purity of recorded media’s integrity-as-an-untouchable-whole. To use a French expression, cinéma is going to have to stop acting like a Sainte ni touche (I’ll let you look it up). Music’s almost there. Television — thanks to YouTube — is going to be there faster than everyone else. And yes, cinéma will survive the mashup, and yes people will still watch films in their longer, old-skool format and love it. So we still have time to adapt artistically and economically to not only new models of distribution but new models of création and cultural appropriation, and to do so with some political flair. To legislate at this moment is to set into stone an old economic model that is already artistically showing its wear and tear.

Meanwhile, attempts (laudable and laughable) are occasionally made by various institutions (Right/Left, private/public) to fund new forms of emergent media, and find some new solutions to these problems in the current explosion of new media forms. Hey, there’s an idea: let’s see what new media itself can discover in these new forms. But the sheer scale of the discrepancies in funding between the old forms and the new can only be described at best as patronizing, and whatever the case a clear sign about which artistic mediums hold the most power in the upper echelons of power in a country where culture and public financing are intimately tied to one another. As if to make the point all the more clear, at the begining of this year a whole slew of non-profit associations working in new media saw their budgets simply axed. And while I didn’t shed a tear for their loss, given that I had always been skeptical of the relevance of the old funding model, we are still waiting for that more coherent plan of new media funding that we were promised in its place.

There are of course exceptions, but they are significant in their rarity. An inspired moment in the previous debates over digital rights, led to a short-lived vote in favour of a sort of subscription/royalty model for remunerating peer-to-peer shared works (this was quickly rescinded by the government, despite its passing the vote). I don’t know what I think about this idea, but it certainly was worth entertaining. And there was a brief moment in last year’s presidential elections when one candidate fell strongly on the side of free software, the creative commons, and so on. But we also know that — for many reasons, some of which were her own — she lost. And we also know that her opponent was profoundly opposed to any such ideas, and instead arguing for the « protection » of « artists » (uh, more like protecting labels) and their works. So we knew this battle was coming, and that given time the new government would come around to fullfilling its promise.

The fault for our current situation lies of course with the artists and cultural institutions who, unlike the previous generations, have yet to mobilize and stir up enough shit to get some respect, and reframe the debate into something more constructive. But it still does not excuse the current slate of « artistes » who are pounding yet another nail on to their own coffin by designating as their enemy the « Imperialism without limits of the Net », and seeking refuge yet again under the skirt of the State. To mistake the cultural transformations wrought via the Internet with the economic powers of globalization, is to conflate the power nexus of mass media conglomerates (the old battle) with the very public these artistes claim as their raison d’être. Artists looking for legal protections against their very own public as it binges voraciously with every click on their creations? Attempting to create a State lockdown of obscure unknown and inaccessable works, finally unearthed by the adoring hordes (the new battle), previously known as “fans”? Le monde à l’envers, indeed.

Anyway, I write about all this because my friend and colleague Anne Roquigny wrote to me in August to inform me of a new petition being formed by new media artists wishing to take a position against this artificial dichotomy pitting new against old. Their petition has apparently just gone on line today. While I gave her my full support, I decided against signing yet another petition and instead offered some analysis similar to what I’ve argued here. But their movement is nevertheless significant in that we have yet to hear from the new guard of artists in this debate, and if you want to learn more about their positions, you can start here: internetmonamour.

Now, with all that said, there is a future battle of digital (copy)rights that I find far more interesting than the present battle, net.artists or otherwise. Anyone who’s listened to me rant before should see this one coming. After music, after cinema, we will most definitely have the next battle of DRM on the doorsteps of electronic gaming, as well as in other (future) forms of expression that will require algorithmic means not only for their dissemination, but for engagement with the work itself.

A lot of this still has to do with the means. Music was the first to give in, because the files were so easy to distribute. Now cinema is in sights, with Blue Ray merely slowing down its inevitable transformation into something else (who knows?). But gaming has survived still to this day with an amazingly archaic distribution model (little pieces of plastic discs, distributed in bulk) which even as it moves to an all electronic distribution (Xbox Live Arcade, Playstation Network, Wiiware, iPhone App Store) will nevertheless survive far beyond this shift for one simple reason: platform incompatibility and the failure (for now) of the open-source movement to create a common standard (the equivalence of 24-frames-per-second) for algorithmically constructed audiovisual forms. Gaming is software, but it sure still feels like hardware. Platform wars, just like the Mac vs. PC wars, have so far made it difficult to abstract the content from its material conditions. Think of how Microsoft leverages Word, or ties Internet Explorer to Windows. This is software, but you’d never know it by the way its used in the real-world. Emulators of classic gaming platforms have given us somewhat of a glimpse of what a future beyond this pseudo-material tie-in world might look like, but not so the current emerging patch of games which are currently pushing the new platforms to their material limits, and perfectly in tune with the console cycles. The irony is this is an artistic medium profoundly appropriate to the new distribution means. So it will be very interesting to see how this evolves, not only in terms of pure distribution, but how new network forms modify the very nature of what is considered (playing) a game.

To move this argument back now to politics: this would seem an obvious battleground for the defense of new complex economics in the defense of more creative, experimental — i.e. artistically rich — forms of gaming, much as France did for cinéma. It’s a clear win-win for both the politicians, and the “créateurs”. But so far, France, and Europe for that matter, has yet to step up to the plate, despite the occasional political declaration that France will offer the gaming industry similar advantages and protections offered the cinéma industry — as soon, of course, as it figures out what the hell “artistic merit” means in the case of gaming. And there’s the rub, for politically, even critically, no one of any credibility has yet to define what an — ok, let’s go for it — “auteur” form of gaming might represent. And that’s actually a good thing (for the moment), because in the last round of debates on this issue, industry hacks were trying to appropriate the debate, arguing in favor of the “artistic merit” of racing simulators — i.e. because the cars were designed so “artistically” (= they’re damn pretty, right?). Even Miyamoto, who many here consider a genius, is still not the auteur-gaming Europeans would expect from the term. So there’s a lot of good cultural push-back from the cultural sector on this issue. But there are obvious examples out there — the whole Independant Gaming movement is a clear place to start –, only so far no one with any political credibility has stepped up to the plate, and I suspect that the gaming industry will be the last to pitch in on the effort, given that they currently run their production houses quite comfortably as if they were (merely) an industry, and the “product” were (merely) entertainment. But it’s also part of their cultural disconnect, why they are culturally irrelevant, and why Nintendo will continue to eat their lunch.

I’ve been following the various forums commenting my Invaders! installation as much as my busy schedule allows me (I’ll be away for a residency all week, so the assassins will have to start looking elsewhere). At this point, it goes without saying that I am apparently responsible for the latest flash-in-the-pan in the world of video game controversies. It appears that controversy is easier to provoke than more significant forms of experience, and given the current reaction, I suppose the only conclusion I can come to is that the piece has failed in more ways than one. Whatever the case, as ultimately it is not for me to dictate people’s appreciation (or lack of it) and the work has to speak for itself, I have so far avoided trying to justify the work, in any moral sense of the word. Art is not about morality, or is so only at its’ darkest moments. But this does not preclude an ethical approach, and to an ethical discussion of it. And it does not preclude offering some personal context to the work and its inception.

Since this is now a blog eat blog world, and I have been taking advantage these past few years of the platform that blogging offers me, I believe that I have at least some responsibility in taking seriously the many comments, especially from those within the gaming community, and obviously over at Kotaku where the response was the most varied and interesting. So here is an attempt at some context, for what its worth…

• “We do know, however, that the 8-bit tower jumpers and the negative score applied to each WTC tower to indicate damage aren’t going to sit well with, we’re thinking, everyone we know who doesn’t hate freedom.” - Michael McWhertor

Sadly, the work has been discussed, largely (but with some exceptions) based on this early report in which the journalist did not even play the game. For me at least, a video game is at some point always going to be about its gameplay. Ironically, the same journalist finally did play the game, and found some merit in it. But by then, the cat was out of the bag, and we had a media circus on our hands — at which point I simply shut the piece off, and turned off ongoing discussions with the many news outlets that wanted not to discuss the piece, but instead my reaction to the reaction, which again is not really my role. News cycles thankfully are short, and it is my impression that with Leipzig now over, we can all calm down a little and those interested can try again to discuss the game itself. But from the point I was attributed as “hating freedom” (on what merits, please?), the whole thing was basically Game Over as far as I’m concerned, and confirmed my original concern that a commercial games convention might not a viable venue for work of this sort. Somewhere in there, I naively figured that gamers, given all the controversies they have weathered over all these years, would have the sophistication to see in the gameplay itself something else than a simple black vs. white, for vs. against, you are with me vs. you are against me posture, or “message”. There is no real “message” in GTA, and hopefully there is no real “message” in my work, and certainly not that I hate freedom. I continue to believe that the game offers something far different than hatred in fact, and personally I always felt a certain sense of release at the end of each wave, just as in the original game. Just as I felt some very mixed emotions, difficult to neatly organize into “pro” or “contra”, when the whole “War on Terror” kicked in. Sure, there is something definitely ambiguous about defending the towers in a game, and some complex emotions that, indeed, might be a little too raw, or odd, for some, even in an 8-bit representation that is highly stylized and presents itself immediately as such. But whatever one decides in the end, I have heard many a cry within the gaming world that we need to take into account the internal logic of games, and that means actually understanding the mechanics of its gameplay, and respecting its figurative tropes. In this regard, it really surprised me that Kotaku would be the first ones to fall into this trap. I can understand in the case of Fox News and NY Daily News, but Kotaku?

• In his interactive large installation, the players must prevent the catastrophe by controlling the well- known cannon at the lower screen border with their bodies and firing it using arm movements. Like the original, this trial is ultimately unsuccessful, thus creating an articulated and critical commentary about the current war strategy.” Press Release, Computerspiele Museum

This was the press release, made by the organizers of the exhibit, and never a direct quote by me. I should also point out that neither I, nor the organizers, claimed that this piece was “anti anything”. The curator who commissioned this piece called it a “critical commentary”. This is not really the way I would have phrased it, since I don’t believe art is in any way equivalent to commentary, but I don’t see any real problem in his statement either. I was perfectly fine with it, and as I said before “I approved this message”. But I think it important that we understand that the role of “critical” work is not to provide a specific message “against” anything, and I know for a fact that the organizers of the exhibition and I are on the same wavelength on this issue. “Critical”, is often used expediently to describe disapproval, but it is more effective when considered a form of discernment, distancing, or scrutinization. This should be sufficient to explain our willingness to defend the irony and ambiguity of the piece, and should have been an obvious flag that this was not a flippant piece merely seeking to shock. The events of September 11th were in many ways complex, and as I have stated before, a complex, i.e. the site of unprocessed events. This is perhaps the true meaning of the event, and why people are so upset over my rehashing it: perhaps September 11th is entirely un-processable, and that we wish it to remain so. This too is a valid point, and I have noted it.

• “[H]e made the original in 2001. What fucking point was there there? There was none. This guy is a jack-ass. There was no “War on Terror” when he made this piece of shit. He was just trying piss people off. And now he’s coming back and spouting off illogical bullshit that Art Aficionados and Critics will try to defend by creating a message that was never there.” - Ad-hominem at 01:50 PM on 08/20/08

It is absolutely true that there was no “War on Terror” when I originally made this piece. It is also true that this was a very different piece back then. In fact, on September 10th I was simply working on a mod that upon waking up the following day had taken on an eerily new significance. The whole connection happened almost as an accident.

On the first day of the exhibit, I made the following statement to AP: “I originally produced the work for my own needs, as a personal attempt to unravel what had become an ontological knot due to the many symbolic layers that had mixed themselves in with an extremely violent act.” I’m sure I’ve pissed off a people right there with my rhetoric, but I really do mean it quite literally: I had no idea at the time what to make of the whole damn thing, hence the ontological knot. To put it in a manner of speech for those in the forums: I just kept saying to myself what the f@#$ was that!?. On the one hand we had innocent citizens perishing in an extreme violence heretofore unseen in such a public form of witness, and yet the entire thing felt precisely choreographed for us, almost — gulp — sophisticated in its use of our media as a form of warfare. They was frikkin’ with us Americans on multiple levels, and using our own language to boot. They had obviously been watching our movies, and playing our games. At which point I started to realize (and I was not alone in this) that Al Qaeda had somehow tapped, quite intimately, into our collective projections of fear and destruction, and had invoked an often rehearsed metaphor of invaders descending from the sky. Twisted, indeed.

Since then, this whole event has evolved over time, as has this piece, as the cultural discourse on the World Trade attacks shifted. We have seen many different cycles in this process, and many attempts to re-appropriate the symbols and language used to describe the event itself. Meanwhile, we as Americans have resorted to tying ourselves ever tighter to the icon of the terrorist’s explosive-laden belt. At the symbolic level of political theater, it is as if we have decided that in order to give truth to our military resolve, we somehow had to integrate the figure of the terrorist as our figurehead. A strange emblem, indeed.

For my part, I have lived through a very different experience of a city under siege by terrorists, held hostage by random acts of extreme violence that paralyzed us for months, and yes there was gruesome dismemberment and death involved. I am sure those wishing my death will regret to learn that I and members of my family were to have been precisely at the time and location where one of the dismantled bombs was set to go off. It was a sickening prospect, as it was precisely designed to kill and maim children. So I get you, when you tell me that terrorists aren’t f@$#ing around, and that this still is the real deal. I know this very well to be true. And sure, the New York and Washington attacks had no comparison to those that I lived through and give me no understanding of the suffering of those who perished. But it does give me some perspective. And I remember a very different response, and a very different form of military and political resolve. Above all, and this is the point, I remember a very different use of political iconography. These are all choices we make collectively, and it takes place as much on the physical and political battlefield, as it does in the media war. Video games, as many have pointed out, have not been neutral on this front.

But, as you have correctly reminded us — and thank you for looking –, despite all this posturing this was obviously not what the piece was originally about. To suggest otherwise would be absurd. For Leipzig I was simply trying to return to that moment, thick as it is now with the veneer of the current war strategy plastered over it. I still remember a very disturbing emotion, at once very raw, and yet immediately mediated. Against all of the bazillions of quotations that all of us have placed around it, I was attempting to tap back into that instant, and revisit it. Perhaps my choice of a quote here and an icon there suggested a too-obvious form of caricature that has attached itself to this event. Perhaps the idea itself is purely tasteless. Perhaps. Meanwhile, as I switch the channels on my american TV set, commercials bombard me with “World Trade Center Commemorative Coins!” in yet another attempt to bury this moment in insignificance. So, if people out there feel I was trivializing the event in giving it the form I did, I can accept that, and I’m certainly willing to hear their arguments — quite numerous at last count in the various forums. But consider our current context nonetheless.

• “Art. Because the word “pretentious” is just far too long.” - ArcaneDevice at 02:47 PM on 08/23/08

That’s pretty damn funny.

• “So its means that we should fight against terrorism with more than “one cannon”, and that in order to defeat evil/invaders, we must fight it with more force and in multiple ways. I just think you went about it with a poor choice, and at least you tried something.” - ADAM!!! - 25 August, 2008 @ 01:15 am
• “Personally, I quite liked the futility of the game and that you can’t ever win against the “invaders” - very apt.” - Kazzahdrane - 21 August, 2008 @ 04:06 am

The way in which the game play was designed, it is actually possible to endlessly “beat” the game by simply getting enough people to shoot at it with their arms, feet, head, whatever. The Invaders! will of course never give up, but that was also the power of coin-operated games. The “Game Over” screen is an integral part of its narrative arc; one can nevertheless delay that arrival, finding different strategies of keeping it at bay, and that was always the emotional power of this form of gaming.

When Andreas Lange asked me to make the piece multiplayer, one of the first things that I tried to do was to find a balance between playing the game by yourself, and playing it with others. I spent quite a lot of time on this aspect, and ran several different simulations on the frequency required to actually keep the game playing, eternally. In one simulation, the piece had ran over a week, and had an astronomical score. I even changed the bit-width of certain variables, just to make sure that scores could grow big enough. This possibility was programmed-in, if you will, as an extreme possibility, and I was quite hoping to see someone attempt it in Leipzig. Now, since you have to actually move your body with a certain velocity to actually shoot, this will obviously tire you out. But it does not preclude using others to take over while you recuperate, or even mounting some sort of mechanical device in front of the camera and just let the thing play on autopilot. There’s always a way to trick the machine. You can shoot the way I suggested in the instructions, and then there’s how people will actually do it. I’ve seen videos on the web of a fellow that pretty much figured out the necessary velocity to trick the camera into giving him multiple shots (he also looked pretty silly doing it, but at least he got a high score). But my point is that there were some creative strategies to be found there, and I figured that some ingenious soul (American or otherwise) might find their own trick. Who knows how long people could have kept up the fight?

• “1. This guy doesn’t believe video games are capable of being art. He outright said this. 2. He created it September 12th, 2001, not just recently. 3. He himself has changed what he claims the meaning of the artwork is a number of times. He has called it (Himself, mind you) a) A study in Mathematics B) A game in which the common man can fight back against the invaders C) A weak, meaningless piece of work that has been diluted by the Iraq War and D) A commentary on the current warfare plan.” - Ad-hominem at 09:56 PM on 08/22/08

I’ll leave the mathematics part for another debate (I was probably talking about algorithms, but I might be wrong, feel free to send me the quote). But I have definitely said in the past that video games are not de facto Art, which probably — in most discussions — refers to the “fine arts”. It is definitely an “art form”, but I have always said that the whole “games as art” debate is less about art, and what-is-art (yawn, boring!), than about art institutions and therefore respectability. Art institutions have long, complex histories and ideologies, and I’m not sure video games want to be a part of some of these institutions anyway. But they are definitely of a different ilk in their current form, and I also think that video games, the industry, and its most ardent proponents, still have a lot to learn on this front. There is definitely a tendency towards a fairly myopic vision of gaming and its reach, and yes this includes the core gamer crowd. There is a whole world out there of critical gaming, art games, call-it-what-you-will that I suspect many people out there have never heard of.

Oh, and if people think that by creating a minor scandal in a commercial game faire I am somehow moving myself up the art ladder, they clearly have no idea how that world ticks.

• “Yah, this has obviously become more about the artist and the WTC than Space Invaders. Way to steal the thunder from the game itself, jerk.” - art_zombie at 01:45 PM on 08/20/08

Yes, that might indeed be true. But I’ve always signed my work as a form of responsibility — unlike, by the way, some of those making threats not only against me, but against members of my family. If that makes me a “douche bag” who deliberately offends so many people and then tries to pass it off as “art”, so be it. I don’t see the artistic merit in merely offending people, but then again, I think your point is that this work was not really all that successful as a piece of art. And that too, might be true. I would like to mention again, that I think it is a shame that this debate is not discussing the gameplay, or at least starting from that point, instead of vague first impressions concerning the work, riddled as they were with very specific incendiary rhetoric, almost designed for a headline on Fox News. But back to your point, I happen to think that the work was not in any way an insult to Space Invaders, a brilliant game that has taken on its own mythological status, and that in fact my take on it is really something else altogether, and that most people get this, or should. Space Invaders is, in fact, like many Japanese games, a very innocent affair, and joyously so. One fights with no clear political context, and it is as ethically ambiguous as cleaning your bathroom of mold, or shooing away ants while you picnic. So when I allude to certain aspects of that game, I am very obviously reading it on a whole other level. I am, of course, reading history backwards, as if that wasn’t already obvious. If somehow someone confuses this with the original game itself, or its makers, it is unfortunate, and I am indeed very sorry for that.

• “I have an idea for a piece of performance art you might be interested in, it involves me shoving the Eiffel Tower up your ass until you choke on your damn colon and begin to vomit your own lungs.” - Sus - 21 August, 2008 @ 04:06 am

I’ve never been all that big on performance art myself. But if you wanted to make a game of that, I’d definitely want to play it.

Update (27/08): Ok, so it appears that most of the debate has finally turned into something more constructive, even if I still feel that the whole thing is quite overblown and not worthy of our time. However, there remains one final complaint that I find quite valid, and indeed cause for confusion, and that is concerning why I actually took the piece down. I tried to adress this in my original statement, but given the numerous demands for comment, apparently more context is needed there too. Here is more or less what I said to a journalist last night:

The reasons for pulling the work are numerous and complex. There was above all the whole tone of the media circus which I have already commented at length, and of course I had placed the organizers of the Games Convention in something of a bind due to the fact that Taito is one of their clients. On the legal front, we discussed the matter briefly and came to the conclusion that any claims of infringement were untenable, and that it was important to defend a work of art in principle. But unfortunately, other concerns had in the meantime raised their heads, thanks (in part, but not entirely) to the various threats on me (whatever) and my family (wtf!?) — in other words that modern form of the witch-hunt, a favourite sport of our times. It was at this point that I made my decision, which obviously places serious doubts on my credibility (no big deal, I’ll survive), but at least had the advantage of slowing somewhat the momentum of the most extreme elements. For all of these reasons, and others too involved to get into here, I again take full responsibility for the decision to take down the work.

Obviously people will have their own take on all this, and I invite you to think whatever you will.

Ok, so now I’m really pissed. So I’ve bought the damn upgrade, simply because I have so many old projects languishing on this dying platform. I’ve also been getting email from people because some of these projects are online, and no longer work; and instead of saying, “Macromedia, er Adobe, couldn’t move its sorry ass for over two years to get this software working on your platform,” the alert instead says, “please contact the author,” which in its tone suggests that somehow I’m the one who can’t manage my own projects. Okay, okay, so that’s the way software works, fine. So I get the upgrade, figuring I’ll finally fix these problems.

Five minutes later, this brand-spanking new software has crashed. Hmmm. That sucks. Okay, try again. The damn thing crashes again. Hmmm. Well, apparently, it has something to do with font support; okay, avoid that, try again. “Your application has unexpectedly quit,” and so on for days. Try simple stuff, complicated stuff = crash. Cannot open any significant project from pre-Director 11. I give up. Report bugs. Move on to something else.

So I gave it a few weeks, figuring Adobe would solve the problems that are always hanging around as software goes out the door. I even try copying individual media and scripts by hand, avoiding their “updater” which has now just crashed for the gazillionth time. No luck. Or the thing appears to work for a few seconds, then crashes at some random moment. Try another machine, try a clean install, rinse, lather, repeat…

Finally, I go back to their website. Try the forums, no help there. Try another bug report, probably won’t answer just like a few weeks ago. Try technical support…what!? I have to f@#&§! pay forty dollars just to get help making a supported feature actually work!?

The notion that professional software is somehow more efficient, or (gasp) simply professional, is in the end just a hoax. The illusion that actually having paid for the software will somehow give you some service when it breaks? Yeah, right. To compare real-world experiences: last week I had a bug in OpenFrameworks; I just opened up the code, fixed it, and moved on. I lost maybe a few minutes. Where do I turn when I have a bug in Director? Their website is like a fortress. Oh, sorry, I meant so say a crypt…

Also known as: Perceptive Pixel’s multi-touch marvel is no match against Tim Russert’s felt-tip pen. My favorite part is actually all the noise Russert makes as he drags out his chart ;-)

I’m not much for petitions. A pure formality, at best. I’m far more impressed by more creative forms of communication. But given the speed at which events are unfolding, all I’ve found to do concerning the actual crisis in Pakistan is to sign this petition my colleague Jean Biagini suggested to me yeasterday: End the Emergency. For I’ve just learned via Jean that the former director of the National College of Arts in Lahore has been arrested in connection with the crackdown on so-called extremists. While I, like many in the west probably, can easily imagine there is indeed some fire behind all that smoke, it is clear that arresting artists and intellectuals has nothing to do with fighting terrorism and everything to do with consolidating power. I don’t pretend to understand very much about the complexity of internal politics in Pakistan, but I do understand that distinction.

The NCA is a wonderful place, and ever since my workshop there in 2000, I’ve been wanting to return. Perhaps I should work on getting that goal back onto my radar.

Ok people, you can stop sending me emails about Microsoft Surface. I’ve seen it already. And as I mentioned in this interview and this one the experimentation phase of interactive surfaces is over. Everyone knows that Microsoft is the pretty much the last cog in the technology wheel. When they’ve figured it out, well that means that just about everyone else has already figured it out some time ago.

I love that historical timeline on the surface web page. NO REALLY EVERYONE, LOOK, WE THOUGHT OF THIS BEFORE THE IPHONE. NO, HEY, WHY ARE YOU LAUGHING? IT’S TRUE! The funny thing about Microsoft is that they are still actually sincere after all these years. They just don’t get the joke. They really do think that they have invented all these technologies, only they just weren’t savvy enough to make people realize it. For example, to them, OS X’s interface is actually a rip-off of ideas they were already working on in Vista and not the other way around. Back in my little bubble world, we digital artists are always suffering from the same illness — it’s in fact our favorite sport (oh, I was doing that years ago) — but it’s even funnier to see one of the richest companies in the world fretting over their public image: gosh, if people only knew!

But kidding aside, this is a really good thing. I said in the above interviews that when Jeff Han’s solution was shown, it was officially over for surface innovation. I called them Hypertables, Hypersurfaces and Object Oriented Objects, MIT people called them Things That Think amongst other terms (and ages before me), and then before all that there was Bill Buxton and Myron Kruger. So none of this is new. But what we needed was a starting block, a sort of ok, fiddling’s over, time to use this stuff. Jeff solved the fundamental visual-gestural language, and all we had to do from there was to start using it.

I also should mention here what got cut out of the Fast Company interview, in response to the question « are hypertables the replacement for the keyboard/mouse combination? » My answer to that was « look at the Wii ». You cannot seperate the iPhone introduction from the introduction of the Wii controller. Both are looking to phsyicalize algorithms, make algorithms maleable physically, and as far as that goes, the field is still wide open. Keyboards and mice are still workable, so they probablly won’t die, no, beacause people will be writing things for a long time to come. Neither the Wii, nor the iPhone, to Surface, will help you write your blog. Maybe your video blog, but not your text blog.

Or maybe a million little things will complement the keyboard and mouse, or maybe just a half-dozen solutions will turn out to be modular enough to solve most of the things we will want to do. Or maybe Cronenberg is right, and it’ll be your body itself. But in my opinion 1) phyiscal objects are good for abstract thinking, and 2) no single object will be fully modular enough for all uses. There will not be one single system, although touch will indeed solve quite a few of the old ones. But whatever the case, the interfacing will require interfacing algorithmically. And when it comes to interacing algorithmically, nothing beats the Rubik’s Cube.

So now are finally seeing real-world hypersurfaces that we can work with. Personally I was expecting Apple to solve the commercialization problem first, and maybe they will. With that $5000+ tag, Surface still feels like vaporware. But I don’t think Microsoft will have any problems shipping at the end of the year as they predict. Trust me, this is very easy technology. For my installation at the Pompidou Center in 2004, for example, I solved my lighting problem with a 5€ bathroom lamp from the BHV down the street. Now, if I can make Hypertables with household appliances, Microsoft can probably commercialize the thing with more professional processes.*

I’m also intrigued that so many people are offering the same solution. That more or less solves the patent problem right there.

Also, Vista is running behind Surface, and while I think Vista is oh-so Mac 10.2 (which is still just a fancy NeXT machine), it’s ultimately great news that there’s a boring old operating system sitting under that coffeetable. Running Processing or Flash or vvvv or whatever on top of it shouldn’t be all that hard.

This is going to sound bad, but personally I’ve got about a five-year start on what works and what doesn’t in these touch-contexts, and plenty of ideas that have just been waiting for the technology to become a reality. But I’m also a little bored with it as well, so we’ll see if I invest a new round in this technology. Our crew has it’s work cut out for it whatever the case: neither Microsoft, nor Apple, nor Perceptive Pixel for that matter, have proposed any tangeable experience with this technology. So far, we’re just talking about « interfaces ». So artists still have a lot to offer in this field.

So thanks Microsoft. I guess I’m trying to say thanks for being so reassuringly tweed coat and making this technology feel like Daddy’s old jalopy…

Note to readers. Please observe that I am just about to condemn myself from all future speaking engagements by unabashedly biting the hand that feeds; even worse — coward that I am — from the comfort of my little countryside home, after-the-fact, far from stone’s throw. Whatever. Let the chips fall where they may. Some things just have to be said.

I’ve just gotten back from a very strange festival, of the likes I’ve been avoiding for quite some time: Flash Festival, a very well-produced, well-intentioned festival + prix, but with an absolutely vaccuous artistic core. It suffered from being what in French can be considered the worst of all insults: gentil. I say « gentil » and « vaccuous » not because of the invited artists — I have nothing but esteem for many of the speakers, amongst them Christophe Bruno, Michael Sellam, Jean-Louis Boissier, entre autres. But in reality these artists had very little to do with the themes and orientation of the festival, which for its part seems above all to revolve around that very ambiguous thing: the artistic prix. And when it came to the actual prix itself, and the artistic values it defended, I am here to say here are the nails, and if you don’t have the courage to do it, give me the hammer and I will nail that coffin shut for you.

Oh and, as much as I like anonymes, it’s not « net art », which is normally spelled « net.art » by the way, even if in 2007 most people have more or less dropped the term. Net.art traditionally maintains a critical approach to the web as a medium, or form, not just as a means of distribution. Please, oh pretty please, can we bury the cultural CD-Rom past of France once and for all? Maybe we could call Mexico and see if they have any room left next to the [landfill with all the E.T. 2600 cartridges](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.T.theExtra-Terrestrial(Atari2600). There is still this echo of desire that the web will become a pure means of transmission of cultural artfacts, i.e. what in France is called édition: books, magazines, comic books, music, cinéma, … Works that can only be approached from the point of view of its « content », and for which the technological underpinnings have become ubiquitous or banal. The current political climate seems to reinforce this view, making it all the more incompatible with the web 2.0 (or call it what you will). The technological field is still shifting and has not yet coalesced into any one format. I have mentioned it before here, and I will mention it here again and again, but the current powers-that-be are trying to form a wall around content-based media precisely because it is terrified of new algorithmic forms of expression.

At one point, someone for whom I have too much respect to name here, got up on stage and commended the festival for being one of the « last few » to defend works of this sort. Perhaps it should, in fact, be the last. While I know it’s sometimes hard to hear, and we would all like to assume some larger conspiracy, the fact of the matter is that it is also just as often the case that artistic institutions die because it was their time to do so, and that there is some public money that is better spent elsewhere. Most of the Flash-inspired festivals have either died, or matured into something far more complex than some Adobe love-fest.

As for some of the comments I made during my talk on the proximity+distance double-step artists need to maintain with industry, a few clarifications are in store. For one, let it be known that I think that Flash is a great animation program, perfect for people wanting to make stuff like this. It’s also great for cool on-line stuff like this. And during the awards there was a very slick site that won the commercial category: crazyhorse. I can without reservation see the use of Flash for all that stuff. But this is not what Flash is being groomed for. It is currently in the middle stages of a full-scale assault as a closed platform for protected content (ignore recent open-source annoucements, c’est du bluff). And as a platform, it not only is wrong-headed, it is out-and-out dangerous. Can someone explain to me why Microsoft/Explorer has nothing but haters for all the damage it did to the web back in the 90’s, whereas Adobe/Macromedia/Flash has nothing but admirers? Flash is not just about animation anymore, it is about the « full experience ». Are graphic designers really that myopic? The commercial strategies of the two platforms (concerning the web at least) are exactly one and the same: dominate the landscape and become the de-facto web standard, only privately owned. A private standard for the public. A strategy based on protocols as the nexus of control. Are we really that politically naïve?

Also, a word of advice on the role of sponsors in artistic institutions. Many people asked me about this after my talk (cf. Etienne’s comment). I’m all for sponsors — who isn’t? — it’s an absolute win-win for everyone. But there are limits on what that sponsorship gets you.

To explain myself, let me tell you a story about a childhood friend of mine: Jonathan. Jonathan just stepped down from over a decade of stewardship of one really kick-ass festival for digital video shorts. Everyone knows this festival. It’s been all over the world. It’s got a magazine. It dominates the landscape in its own way. Now, I know Jonathan very well, I should because the two of us started our own television show when we were just 16 years old. And back then, he already knew exactly how to work with sponsors. When to say yes, when to say no. Back when we were 16 he was convincing music companies to give us exemptions for music video fees, and he was sending back the tapes of the synthpop wannabies the labels were trying to push on us. He’s got guts that guy. So ten years later, it came as no suprise to me to learn that he had quit what was quickly becoming a world-renowned festival, in part because his partner lacked artistic integrity. As just one example, Apple wanted stage-time to present whatever software it was presenting in the 90’s — in return for the large donations it was making to the festival. I give you this, you give me that, right? Wrong. While his partner caved in, Jonathan knew right away that it was poisoned fruit, promptly quit and started his own festival, leaving the previous one in the dust. Lesson? Street cred and artistic integrity goes a lot longer than you might suspect. People can smell a dirty deal, even Apple, who quickly decided to back Jonathan’s new festival.

You would figure that the Centre Pompidou would balk at inviting Adobe on their stage not only once, but twice. I can understand the pairing in other contexts, like Siggraph, or whatever, but not at the Pompidou. This is not a trade-fair, this is an arts center. They don’t need that kind of funding, do they? They already funnel a huge chunk of the public arts budget already, they can’t be that desperate. I might be wrong on this, maybe Kodak or Canon demo their new cameras at the opening of each photography collection at the Museum of Modern Art, or give out free prints to the participating artists (yeah right). Or perhaps we could look at existing hybrids such as the Hugo Boss Prize — but even there I have a hard time imagining models walking around the opening at the Guggenheim with the new underwear collection. Well, now that I think about it, that might be funny. I’ll have to see if Victoria Secret has its own arts competition…

So let that be a reminder that we need to be techno-power conscious just as in previous battles we needed to have a class consciousness. Today, class consciousness has become public final class consciousness (lame coder’s joke), i.e. an understanding of the social role of programming structures and their function in shaping discourse. Within this context, artists are neither neutral, nor necessarily in a position of inferiority. Processing nicely held its own yeasterday, and I thought it looked pretty damn slick next to Adobe’s offerings. Especially the OpenGL stuff, the PDF examples (more Adobe there), and its interfacing with robotics and sensors of all sorts. Sure, Processing’s built on Java, and that wasn’t officially open-sourced until only a few months ago. Maybe Sun is just a lame competitor to Adobe, and open-sourced because they had to. Maybe. But we still need to be very careful in the current political climate, especially here in France. Meanwhile Silicon Valley itself is embracing open-source en masse (and gasp as an economic model!) while most of the big media companies (outside of the big French holdings) are dropping DRM like it was the plague. Allez la France, encore un effort!

As you may or may not have noticed, I was teaching last month at the Chicago Art Institute. I met some pretty amazing people while there, but the person who really stood out for me was the very charming Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal (cf. http://www.crudeoils.us/) who was preparing an interesting online performance entitled Domestic Tension: all throughout the month he has been living at the Flatfile Galleries where — via a locally housed server — you can chat with him, watch a live video feed of his life in the gallery, and shoot at him with a collective remote controlled gun.

Now, if you somehow think this is either lame (your call) or disturbing (whatever), you should at least know that while Wafaa is enacting this mostly symbolic performance in (relative) comfort as an art student in the United States, the rest of his family is very much enduring the real deal back home — and with very real casualties. So while it is symbolic for us in one way, it is symbolic in an entirely different way for him.

It is also interesting to frame this performance within the larger context of the displacement of the American discourse on casualties and friendly fire in Iraq: there is no longer the whimpy media smoke-and-mirrors proxy-debate that skirted shamelessly around the issue of cadavers within the video frame. The original debate (constructed pro and con by the pentagon) on how to honor lost american solders, has now transformed into a count not only of full cadavers and dead football players, but of all the missing body parts that will never be coming back. And on the backs of those incomplete bodies, we are finally feeling the weight of the enormous the narrative of the Iraqi body count, and particularly the breadth of this body count, i.e. it’s no longer about numbers, it’s about demographics.

Although I tend to yawn at on-line performances, especially heavy-handed ones, somehow I fell for this one. I suppose it’s the ambiguity of the whole thing (and the good nature of Wafaa) that warms me to it. Of course this work references some far more hardcore pieces of Chris Burden such as when he locked himself in a locker for several days, shot at planes, or had a collegue shoot him in the arm. Wafaa is also making some very broad strokes towards other famous works in the construction of an American mythology, for example Beuys’ I like America and America Likes Me.

But when it comes down to it, I have actually only seen the Burden performances via short crappy videos which grow their semiotic gravitas precisely out of of the crapiness of the video qua deficient document. Much of the 60’s and 70’s performance art has been tainted by this documentation process. I’m thinking precisely of the spic-and-span Los Angeles exhibit last year at the Pompidou Center where the contrast was particularly annoying. Coming back to Wafaa’s current plight under the gun makes me wonder to what degree the crappy webcam refreshing every n seconds helps to construct the mythology of the performance.

I had promised to Wafaa that I would post something about this performance, but I couldn’t get a decent enough connection until now to check it out myself. Watch the following video from Day 8 to get a sense of their troubles keeping the gun online: