The artists I have chosen for my final presentation are
Wafaa Bilal "Domestic Tension 2007" and Antoinette Lafarge
"World of World 2009".
Wafaa
Bilal is an Iraq American artist who was a former Professor at School of the
Art Institute of Chicago and is currently an associate professor at Tisch
School of the Arts at New York University. His most famous art work is
Domestic Tension 2007. Which was a performance piece where he live in this
gallery for a month and had a paintball gun controlled by people remotely
online. The paintball was directed to him and he was shot at multiple times throughout
the month. This will be the art piece I will be discussing for my final.
Antoinette
is a Professor of Digital Media at UC Irvine and her interest are the virtual
world. Such as online gaming and peoples interaction with this world. Her
interest to this world started with make-believe and fiction and then expanded
to include the internet avatars and impersonations. She has created works that
is a mixture of mix-reality performance and installations.
In
the piece for Domestic Tension 2007 Wafaa Bilal's performance was a long and
arduous. Watching the video from his performance there were a few technical
difficulties at the beginning that they had to address in order for the online
server to work with the paintball gun. They had an issue about getting the
paint ball gun to be accurate and shoot when the person online wanted it to
shoot. This was described during the YouTube video "paintball project day
1". When they got the technical issues resolved the next item that gave
him problems was the time that people would actually be active on this project.
He said that the most activity they got was during the time from 12am to 4 am
as describe on "paintball project day 4". Wafaa explains that during
the day it was pretty quiet and he had not a lot real interaction with the
paintball gun because he thinks that people are having lunch, dinner, or they
were just busy doing everyday task that needed to be done.
Wafaa
explains it was interesting to be in that mode where they were in constant
threat of being shot at, even while having dinner. Not only having that pending
threat having a visitor there while having dinner was interesting. While they
were having dinner during "paintball project day 4" they did not get
hit.
The reason to the color yellow for the paintball's was an homage to support the troops. Yellow is the color that we see to on bumper stickers that depicts a yellow ribbon and the statement that says Support The Troops. Very interesting considering the fact that through this performance, he got a sense of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from the constant bombardment of the paintball gun going off and the pending threat of getting shot.
Bilal also talks about his father and brother who died. His brother was killed by American Airplane that had an air to ground missile hit in their home town of Kufa. His father later died from grief for the lost of his son as stated on Art Asia Pacific article. A tragic loss for Bilal and Domestic Tension 2007 helped with his grieving process in a sense.
In
this gallery space he had a bed, computer and a plastic guard that would
protect him from the paintball gun if he needed it. He would also use the
plexiglass to protect his visitors when he had them over. He also describes
that the gallery would be so full of paintball debris because people would
constantly try to shoot him. Keeping the paintball gun stock and keeping the gallery
somewhat clean was a pretty big task.
On
the "paintball project day 6" Wafaa change the springs on the
paintball gun which made it even more lethal. The walls were actually dented in
or cracked. This day he states that he is getting little sleep and also started
a conversation with his online viewers to stop violence. Also to shed awareness
of military aggression for the Iraqi people. The media also came down to visit
him at his gallery to get interviews with him. Just as a note he was not in the
gallery space all day, but he spent as much time as he could there, especially
during peak hours.
At
this point Wafaa states that the paintball gun requires a lot of maintenance
because it had been fired so many times. So he had to get it fixed. Also along
with the paintball gun breaking the plexiglass that was used to protect Wafaa
broke as well too. So they had to turn off the gun and fix the plexiglass.
Other things that started to go wrong was the amount of people trying to use
his site to get control of the gun. There was so many people trying to use the
site or the gun would get overwhelmed so they had to update bandwidth on the
website so it could keep up with the amount of people login on. Along with the
technical difficulties he thought about the loss of his father and brother. He
explained that it made him very emotional and also explained that it was weird
to think that the paintball gun was his company during this time. He explains
that when the gun when down he had more time to think about his loss because he
didn't have to worry about his safety.
Wafaa's
site became very famous that paintball gun would shoot 20,000 paint balls with
in less than 24 hours. Along with that problem is buying more paint balls. He
spend his money to buy the paint balls and maxed out his credit cards. He had
to borrow money from his friends to help pay for this project. Other items that
started to break down where the walls and items he had around the gallery space
like the infamous lamp, tables, etc. And much more important than that Wafaa's
health started to degrade as well too; this was about day 20. He
explained that it could be because of not changing the venue, not getting
enough sun light, not getting enough exercise and not being able to get fresh
air.
There
was a discussion that happened and this discussion was for Wafaa's benefit.
There was a group of people that dedicated their time to move the gun away from
Wafaa. Which would keep him safe from getting shot. People would move the gun
last minute so Wafaa wouldn't get shot or they would keep the gun from moving
by moving it in a different direction so it is not pointed towards him. Wafaa's
project got so famous that he would constantly have to fill the gun.
On
day 30 the paintball gun was going off every second. Wafaa's actually extended
his gallery a day extra for the people who doubted he could do 30 days and also
as a thank you for all the support from people. The community Wafaa manage to
bring together was outstanding. The amount of support he got from people and
the food/items they would bring him was nice. In my conclusion his project
opened the idea of peace not violence. Also, open the conversation to talk
about our issues out in the open. He stated that art is there to educate and
inform people which I think he did a great job with his piece Domestic Tension.
Antoinette
Lafarge is an artist and her works is in mixed reality performance and projects
that is in conjunction of visual art and fiction. An example would be here work
"World of World (2009)". This will be the art work I will be
discussing. World of World is about the video game World of Warcraft with is an
online role playing game that became popular around 2004. This video game is an
online generated world where you can create an avatar/character in which you
can use to interact with this world. You can do online quest, follow a story line,
join guilds to become part of a collaborative group to achieve certain goals
like destroying certain creatures, monsters, so you can collect the rewards
from them.
She
states that these types of online worlds or even worlds we create in our minds
by reading or our imagination has an actuality. In my translations of her
explanation is that these imaginary spaces can have real life effects on how we
feel, interact with other people, our perspective of certain things, etc. Just
talking about the video game WOW is something you can do in the real world and
talking about the experiences you had in the online world just an example. To
elaborate on this I’ll give you an example. Say you go on a quest to find a
certain treasure and you achieve that goal; from there you go to a WOW
convention and talk to people who did that same quest and you share your
experience; she is posing the question what would be the difference if you did
a hunting trip to hunt for deer and then you go to a Hunting Convention to
share your experience with other hunters. It is a very interesting concept.
Other than the obvious that hunting is hard and you are actually in the real
world. But also in WOW that experience could be hard to achieve that goal as
well. But no the less is it a real life experience and has affected the
individual in a certain way. Obviously, the World of Warcraft is a fictional
world and hunting a deer is certainly an unusual comparison but my thoughts are
that she is stating that the experience is the important part of this piece.
Your personal experience with the video game or personal experience after you
have achieve whatever it maybe, being finishing a certain quest, etc.
She
states in a video presentation about her work that we spend so much time looking
at the back of the characters head, she poses the question "what if the
roles were reversed and it was the avatar that was the real person looking into
the player through a window?" It is a perspective that is very intriguing
because you would just see a person sitting there. Also, when you log out of
the game your character just stays in the world, but your character will remain
standing there till you move your avatar again. It was just interesting to me
to think that the avatar would just be looking at someone sitting on a couch
for the most part. In a section of the art pieces she has the avatar looking at
the player doing everyday tasks or activities.
Antoinette
also states the people who play the game WOW live vicariously through their
characters. It is interesting point of view and gives a great perspective to
think about it from the avatars point of view. Her art work "World of
World (2009)" points out an interesting perspective of our interactions
with this video game and how it affects the game players psyche.
In
comparison the two artist had a vision of the message they wanted to present to
the world. They both seem to have a sense of community. Each artist talked
about this in their work, there is a sense of cooperation toward an end goal.
Whether be it an online community or in reality. Their art work seem to thrive
in that community environment.
In
contrast the performances were done in a different way. They were both
performance art. Wafaa used himself as the subject matter where as Antoinette
used a persona. Her avatar (Malbec) was the subject matter for her work. She
also created a persona for her game player called The Player. Antoinette dives
into the mind of the player and actual people who play WOW. She dives into the
effects of WOW in reality. Even though it is a fictional game, but has real
life emotional and physical effects.
In Wafaa’s performance it is his real life
emotional state. His emotional state from not getting enough sleep, thinking
about the loss of his father and brother are real emotions that he dives into
during his live performance.
Antoinette seems to have separated herself
from her avatar. The Avatar and The Player seem to have their own reality. The
have their own persona and Antoinette just watches them from her reality. She
is simply the outside observer to this online world that she has create. This
is parallel to how most players are in the real world, in the sense that real world
players share this in common with Antoinette. The fact that they just see this
video game world as an outside observer is an intriguing insight to the human condition.
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