Blown Up: Gaming and War is open only to March 2 at Gallery 101 (301-1/2 Bank, near Somerset). Until then, it’s the best place in Ottawa to shoot George W. Bush in the head.
The exhibition has three installations in which “artists from different geopolitical positions in the distribution of war – Germany, Iraq, and the Palestinian diaspora – improvise strategies of engagement with the ever-accelerating relationship of video games to wars,” writes curator Vicky Moufawad-Paul.
Wafaa Bilal, who was born in Iraq and teaches in New York City, has an installation titled The Night of Bush Capturing: A Virtual Jihadi. It’s based on a U.S.-made, shooter-style video game that originally targeted Saddam Hussein, until Al-Qaeda hackers made the target then-U.S. president George W. Bush. Later, Bilal hacked the hacked version to insert himself as a suicide bomber.
Bilal wants people to consider how civilians not in war zones (read, those back home in the U.S.) become desensitized to war and the violence it inflicts on distant populations. After a few moments of shooting U.S. soldiers, all of whom looked like Bush to me, I did feel desensitized, though I’d get the same result after playing any of the many, dreary shooter-style video games available.
Harun Farocki’s two-channel video, Serious Games 1: Watson is Down, shows a roomful of U.S. soldiers training with a sort-of video game, built to resemble an Afghan landscape. A virtual soldier is shot by a sniper, yet the real soldiers methodically tap away on their keyboards, thousands of miles from the battlefield. It demonstrates the bland detachment of drone warfare, which seems only an uncomfortable step removed from a virtual game.
Mohammed Mohsen’s Weak resembles a vintage video game, with simple figures falling and chasing a moveable piece controlled by the player. The purpose of the game was elusive, yet I felt compelled to keep playing even as I had no idea what I, or the game, was trying to achieve, other than trying to stay alive. Perhaps that’s Moshen’s point about video games and life under restrictive regimes, such as Saudi Arabia.
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