Witnessing Violence, (Re)Living Trauma: Online Performance Interventions in the
Digital Age
A dissertation presented to
the faculty of
the College of Fine Arts of Ohio University
In partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Jenna A. Altomonte
April 2017
© 2017 Jenna A. Altomonte. All Rights Reserved. 2
This dissertation titled
Witnessing Violence, (Re)Living Trauma: Online Performance Interventions in the
Digital Age
by
JENNA A. ALTOMONTE
has been approved for
the School of Interdisciplinary Arts
and the College of Fine Arts by
Charles S. Buchanan
Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts
Elizabeth Sayrs
Interim Dean, College of Fine Arts 3
ABSTRACT
ALTOMONTE, JENNA A., Ph.D., April 2017, Interdisciplinary Arts
Witnessing Violence, (Re)Living Trauma: Online Performance Interventions in the
Digital Age
Director of Dissertation: Charles S. Buchanan
Since the Persian Gulf War (1990), the rise of the televised/telepresent event transformed the process in which individuals both witnessed and experienced violence.
Defined as a belated reaction to telepresent violence, virtual trauma, or a form of digitized, psychological trauma witnessed through the screen, complicates the act of witnessing and/or experiencing violent events. Considering the development of virtual trauma since the Persian Gulf War and the invasion of Iraq in 2003, this dissertation critically investigates digital-based performances influenced by the violence perpetuated during periods of warfare. Using the following artworks by Iraqi-born artists, Wafaa Bilal and Adel Abidin, and American artist, Joseph Delappe, I explore the various approaches used by each artist in order unpack the power of telepresent violence and the traumatic after-effects produced via the screenic platform: Bilal’s Domestic Tension (2007),
Virtual Jihadi (2008), and 3rdi (2010); Abidin’s Cold interrogation (2004), Jihad (2006), and Abidin Travels: Welcome to Baghdad (2006-2007); and Delappe’s dead-in-iraq
(2006-2011), Twitter Torture/MGandhi in Jail (2009-2010), and Killbox (2015-present).
Each digital-based artwork confronts the various dimensions of telepresent violence and the lasting effects of virtualized, traumatic witnessing.
4
DEDICATION
To Ryan
5
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A special thank you to my parents and Mimi for their love and motivation. I would like to thank my dissertation committee for their support and guidance over the past several years. I am especially grateful for the encouragement offered from my advisor and committee chair, Dr. Charles Buchanan, and my long-time mentor, Dr.
Jennie Klein. Thank you to Dr. Marina Peterson and Dr. Erin Schlumpf for their expertise and direction.
6
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Abstract ...... 3 Dedication ...... 4 Acknowledgments...... 5 List of Figures ...... 8 Chapter 1: Introduction ...... 14 Critical Studies: Digital Performance Interventions ...... 17 Critical Studies: Reframing Trauma in the Digital Age ...... 22 Methodological Approaches: Witnessing and Experiencing Trauma ...... 29 Methodological Approaches: Active Participation and Participatory Performance .. 37 Chapter Outlines ...... 39 Chapter 2: Confronting Personal Trauma: Wafaa Bilal and the Politics of Digial Performance ...... 45 Introduction ...... 45 Understanding Trauma in the Post-9/11 Frame ...... 49 Biography of Wafaa Bilal ...... 56 Domestic Tension (2007), Virtual Jihadi (2008), and 3rdi (2010-2011) ...... 64 Confronting Solitude Online: Domestic Tension ...... 65 Triggering Traumatic Memory ...... 72 Manufacturing Violence in Virtual Jihadi ...... 79 Playing Virtual Jihadi ...... 85 The Traumatized Body: Bilal’s 3rdi ...... 95 Four Dimensions of 3rdi ...... 98 Conclusion ...... 107 Chapter 3: Trauma, Memory, and Laughter: Adel Abidin and the Performance of Satire ...... 109 Introduction ...... 109 Proselytizing Terrorism/Patriotism: Videotaping Violence ...... 112 Mining Humor from Violence ...... 119 Biography of Adel Abidin ...... 121 Finding Humor in Cold Interrogation ...... 122 7
Abidin’s Jihad ...... 130 Humor via Terrorism ...... 135 Tourism during War: Abidin Travels: Welcome to Baghdad ...... 140 Gallows Humor in Abidin Travels ...... 148 Audience and Identity in Abidin Travels ...... 150 Conclusion ...... 156 Chapter 4: Protesting Online Space: Witnessing Joseph Delappe’s War Against America’s Army ...... 158 Introduction ...... 158 Biography of Joseph Delappe ...... 162 (In) Direct Witnessing: Experiencing War through the Screen ...... 165 Occupying Online Space: dead-in-iraq ...... 171 Memorializing the Real in Virtual Space...... 180 Occupying Second Life: Twitter Torture/MGandhi in Jail...... 182 Creating Presence in Second Life ...... 183 Collaboration Online: Killbox ...... 197 Playing Killbox...... 205 Conclusion ...... 215 Chapter 5: Conclusion...... 217 New Methods of Subverting Terrorism and Violence ...... 220 References ...... 228 Appendix A: Excerpt from the DSM-V Diagnostic Criteria for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder ...... 247 Appendix B: Lyrics to "This Land is Your Land" by Woody Guthrie ...... 251
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LIST OF FIGURES
Page
Figure 1: Screen shot from the Persian Gulf War broadcast from CNN, January 17-18, 1991...... 15
Figure 2: Jean-Martin Charcot, Freud’s mentor and successor, demonstrates a method of treatment on a female patient suffering from hysteria with a female patient, Salpêtrière Clinic, 1887 ...... 31
Figure 3: Photograph of a soldier suffering from shell shock, the early term used prior to PTSD. Battle of Courcelette (France), World War I, 1916 ...... 34
Figure 4: A couple watches footage from the Vietnam War in their living room, 1970 .. 36
Figure 5: Wafaa Bilal occupying the FlatFile Gallery, Domestic Tension, 2007 ...... 47
Figure 6: Screen shot from Youtube.com, day 21 of Wafaa Bilal’s Domestic Tension, 2007...... 47
Figure 7: Footage of the Twin Towers after impact from American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, September 11, 2001 ...... 51
Figure 8: People run from a plume of debris after the attacks on the Twin Towers, September 11, 2001 ...... 51
Figure 9: Trench warfare, Iran-Iraq War 1980 ...... 59
Figure 10: Ration disruption, refugee camp near Safwan, 1991 ...... 62
Figure 11: Soldiers check identification documents from refuges, Safwan, Iraq-Kuwait border, 1991 ...... 63
Figure 12: Photograph from the Rafha Refugee Camp in Saudi Arabia, c. 1991...... 63
Figure 13: Interior space of a UAV console for MQ-1 Predator operations ...... 67
Figure 14: Still image captured from a British Reaper UAV ...... 67
Figure 15: EZIO device, Domestic Tension, 2007 ...... 69
Figure 16: Mainpage screen shot from the Domestic Tension webpage ...... 70
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Figure 17: Days of continuous shooting take a toll on Bilal, Domestic Tension, 2007 .... 71
Figure 18: Bilal seeks cover from a barrage of paintballs Domestic Tension, 2007 ...... 73
Figure 19: Paintball insurgency, Domestic Tension, 2007 ...... 78
Figure 20: Screen shot of a post-performance Youtube postings of Domestic Tension ... 79
Figure 21: Photograph of an MQ-9 Reaper ...... 80
Figure 22: Screen shot from Origin Systems Wing Commander ...... 83
Figure 23: Image displaying the format of Operation: Desert Storm (ODS) game, 1991 ...... 84
Figure 24: Main menu page, Quest for Saddam, 2003 ...... 87
Figure 25: Screen still from Quest for Saddam, 2003 ...... 88
Figure 26: Screen still from Quest for Saddam (final phase of the game), 2003 ...... 89
Figure 27: Bilal’s avatar dressed as a terrorist in Virtual Jihadi, 2008 ...... 89
Figure 28: A Quest for Bush screen still, 2006 ...... 91
Figure 29: Image from Virtual Jihadi, 2008 ...... 91
Figure 30: Menu still, Virtual Jihadi, 2008 ...... 94
Figure 31: Bilal receiving his camera implant for 3rdi, 2010...... 96
Figure 32: Wafaa Bilal, 3rdi, 2010 ...... 97
Figure 33: Webpage still image taken from the camera implant, 3rdi, 2010-2011 ...... 99
Figure 34: Image still from 3rdi, 2010-2011 ...... 100
Figure 35: Street scene captured from 3rdi, 2010-2011 ...... 100
Figure 36: Adel Abidin performs a rendition of This Land is Your Land, film still from Jihad, 2006 ...... 110
Figure 37: Footage still of William McKinley’s assassin, Leon Czolgosz, executed by the electric chair, 1901 ...... 113 10
Figure 38: Footage still of Daniel Pearl captured by militants from the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty, 2002 ...... 114
Figure 39: Still image from Muntada al-Ansar moments before the execution of Nick Berg, 2006 ...... 114
Figure 40: Interrogation images of Omar Khadr, Guantanamo Bay ...... 116
Figure 41: Refrigerator components to Abidin’s Cold Interrogation, 2004 ...... 124
Figure 42: Video frame, Cold Interrogation, 2004 ...... 125
Figure 43: Google image search result for Jihad, 2015 ...... 131
Figure 44: Google image search result II for Jihad, 2015...... 132
Figure 45: Google image search result III for Jihad, 2015 ...... 132
Figure 46: Adel Abidin, Jihad, video, 2006 ...... 134
Figure 47: Mike Luckovich. The Atlanta Journal, 2015 ...... 137
Figure 48: Steve Breen, The San Diego Union-Tribune, 2006 ...... 138
Figure 49: Abidin outside the entrance to Abidin Travels, Venice Biennale, 2007...... 143
Figure 50: Travel pamphlet, Abidin Travels, 2007 ...... 144
Figure 51: Figure 51: Screen still from one of the informational videos, Abidin Travels, 2006...... 144
Figure 52: Mainpage to www.abidintravels.com, Abidin Travels, 2006...... 145
Figure 53: Video still, Abidin Travels, 2006...... 145
Figure 54: Adel Abidin, still from Abidin Travels video, 2006 ...... 147
Figure 55: Adel Abidin, stills from Abidin Travels video, 2006 ...... 148
Figure 56: Footage from Hometown Baghdad, 2005-2007 ...... 152
Figure 57: Image still from the “Symphony of Bullets” segment, Hometown Baghdad, 2005-2007 ...... 152
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Figure 58: Still from the “Market Boom” segment, Hometown Baghdad, 2005-2007 ...... 153
Figure 59: Screen shot from dead-in-iraq, 2006-2011 ...... 159
Figure 60: Delappe’s avatar, dead-in-iraq, 2006-2011 ...... 160
Figure 61: Donald McCullin, Shell Shocked Soldier, 1968 ...... 167
Figure 62: Donald McCullin, Vietnamese Father and Daughter Wounded, 1968 ...... 168
Figure 63: Delappe and his collaborates perform Quake III and Friends, 2002-2003 ... 172
Figure 64: Still image from Quake III and Friends, 2002-2003...... 172
Figure 65: Mainpage of the original America’s Army ...... 174
Figure 66: Game footage from America’s Army...... 174
Figure 67: Information page about actual American soldiers and combat veterans, America’s Army ...... 175
Figure 68: Still from dead –in-iraq ...... 178
Figure 69: Screen shot my avatar, JennaBellarc, exploring Second Life ...... 185
Figure 70: Engaging in a ritual session using JennaBellarc, Second Life ...... 186
Figure 71: Other avatars gather for a community meeting, Second Life ...... 187
Figure 72: Footage of Delappe performing The Salt Satyagraha Online: Gandhi's March to Dandi in Second Life, 2008...... 189
Figure 73: Delappe’s avatar, MGhandi, imprisoned within Second Life, 2009-2010 .... 191
Figure 74: Screen shot displaying the textbox in Second Life, 2009-2010 ...... 192
Figure 75: Screen shot to Delappe’s Twitter feed as a transcribes lines from the Torture Memos, 2009-2010 ...... 192
Figure 76: Example of waterboarding. The head of the interrogatee is tilted with a washcloth or rag placed over the face. Water is poured over the rag to induce a feeling of suffocation or drowning ...... 195
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Figure 77: Photograph of Ali Shallal al-Qaisi, a prisoner from the Abu Ghraib Prison, c. 2004...... 197
Figure 78: Delappe performs part of Project 929: Mapping the Solar, 2013 ...... 199
Figure 79: Image still from Cowardly Drone, 2013 ...... 200
Figure 80: Delappe wears his drone from Me and My Predator - Personal Drone System, 2014...... 201
Figure 81: Mainpage from Delappe’s game, Killbox, 2016 ...... 203
Figure 82: UAV launches a missile, date unknown ...... 204
Figure 83: Screen shot from Killbox, 2016 ...... 206
Figure 84: Player 1 option, Killbox, 2016 ...... 206
Figure 85: Command key test, Killbox, 2016 ...... 209
Figure 86: Moments before impact from a missile, Killbox, 2016 ...... 209
Figure 87: Scene after missile impact, Killbox, 2016 ...... 210
Figure 88: Player 2 point-of-view, Killbox, 2016 ...... 211
Figure 89: Player 2 dot-avatar, Killbox, 2016 ...... 211
Figure 90: Aerial UAV hit, moment of impact, Killbox, 2016 ...... 212
Figure 91: Screen after impact as Player 2, Killbox, 2016 ...... 212
Figure 92: Information screen, Killbox, 2016 ...... 213
Figure 93: Screen shot of as ISIS sponsored video game. These games are used as recruiting tools, much like the US version of America’s Army ...... 222
Figure 94: Gallery photo of Abidin’s Yesterday, 2015 ...... 224
Figure 95: PixelHELPER projection on the Embassy of Saudi Arabia ...... 226
13
The aerial bomber’s sights center on a gray fleck of a building far below. The camera zooms closer. A missile speeds toward the target, enters and descends several floors. The base of the building pops like a paper bag, to the unctuous satisfaction of the newscaster. A bull’s eye. Two more shots for no extra money. Nobody talks about casualties. From that height there aren’t any. Iraq is not Belfast. - John le Carré, The Night Manager
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CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
On January 17, 1991, Cable News Network (CNN) broadcast the start of the
Persian Gulf War live via satellite from Baghdad, Iraq.1 John Holliman and Peter Arnett, two reporters embedded in the city, provided commentary on the events of the night. As viewers watched the broadcast, Holliman described the tracer bullets from M16 rounds, while Arnett explained the sounds of a nearby explosion. Play-by-play accounts of F-15 bombing raids from US-occupied bases in Saudi Arabia dominated television programs
(Figure 1). “We are completely loaded with bombs…missiles and twenty millimeter guns” remarked Holliman.2 As CNN continued to broadcast, explosions from bombers and anti-aircraft missiles erupted over the television.3 A topographical layout of Baghdad marked the location of CNN reporters at the Rashid Hotel and informed viewers about the proximity of the raids. Broadcast for the next month, 24 hours a day, the network relayed images of night raids, ground assaults, and aerial bombings, marking the first mass televised war.
1 “As it Happened – The Gulf War on CNN (pt 1), “YouTube video, 4:12, posted by georgepeter, September 1, 2007, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlC60Kef9Mg.
2 Douglas Kellner, “The Gulf TV War Revisited,” Douglas Kellner, last modified 2009, http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/papers/gulfwarrevisited.htm.
3 “As it Happened – The Gulf War on CNN (pt 1),” YouTube.com. 15
Figure 1: Screen shot from the Persian Gulf War broadcast from CNN, January 17-18, 1991
Gathered from the commentary reported by CNN during the early hours of the US intervention in the Persian Gulf, the saturation and accessibility of images from the war zone affected how viewers witness and experience violence. Defined as a televised or telepresent event, this type of witnessing through the digital or screenic platform constitutes a different type of “seeing” when compared to witnessing violence from actual zones of conflict.4 For example, rather than engage war at the actual site of
4 James Der Derian, “Global Swarming, Virtual Security, and Bosnia,” The Washington Quarterly 19, no. 3 (1996): 46, accessed December 2015, https://www.academia.edu/7899332/Global_swarming_virtual_ security_ and_Bosnia. 16 conflict in Baghdad or Mosul, witnesses experience the violence through the television or
Internet.
Considering the turn to the screenic platform, this dissertation examines the digital-based performances of three artists exposed to the violence of the Persian Gulf and Iraq Wars: Iraqi’s Wafaa Bilal and Adel Abidin, and American artist, Joseph
Delappe. Bilal and Abidin’s work focuses primarily on their direct exposure to the
Persian Gulf War and their reaction to the Iraq War from diasporic positions in the
United States and Finland. As an American artist, Delappe’s exposure to war originates via the screenic platform, experienced outside the conflict zone. Their works draw on the concept of virtual trauma, or a belated reaction to violence witnessed/experienced through the screenic platforms like the computer or television.5
Rather than focus on how virtualized trauma limits or impairs witnesses via the screenic medium, I use Bilal, Abidin, and Delappe’s artworks to explore the relationship between violence, trauma, and technology. I seek to diversify and problematize the concept through an exploration of their digital artworks and performances. The following works will be discussed throughout this dissertation: Bilal’s Domestic Tension (2007),
Virtual Jihadi (2008), and 3rdi (2010); Abidin’s Cold interrogation (2004), Jihad (2006), and Abidin Travels: Welcome to Baghdad (2006-2007); and Delappe’s dead-in-iraq
(2006-2011), Twitter Torture/MGandhi in Jail (2009-2010), and Killbox (2015-present).
Each work carefully engages the process of experiencing/confronting the after-effects of war, requiring audiences to actively engage each piece through direct participation via
5 Allen Meek, Trauma and Media: Theories, Histories, and Images (New York: Routledge, 2010), 4. 17 live interaction or revisiting archival footage online. I argue that although the “pixilation of war and game” share the same screenic platform, the after-effects produce much different results.
Critical Studies: Digital Performance Interventions
Considering the online medium employed by each artist, this dissertation primarily contributes to the field of digital performance studies. Discussed through this dissertation, each artist creates digital performances that focus on violent events caused by war, either through direct witnessing in actual space or via secondary witnessing through the “screen.” Before engaging the artworks by Bilal, Abidin, and Delappe, it is necessary to explore the concept of digital performance. According to Steve Dixon, digital performance may be defined as a type of art “where computer technologies play a key role rather than a subsidiary one in content, techniques, aesthetics, or delivery forms.”6 The use of the term within the context of this dissertation centers on the role of performance within technologically constructed spaces like the Internet or a video-game platform. Each digital artwork/performance serves to inform users about the psychological impact of telepresent violence. With the onset of the Persian Gulf War and the subsequent events of 9/11 and the Iraq War, digital art and performance became a tool for understanding technological intervention during periods of war, specifically the dangers and limitations of telepresent technology.
6 Steve Dixon, Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2007), 3. 18
Dixon, in Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance,
Performance Art, and Installation, traces the history and criticism of digital performance art, which relies on the use of computer-based intervention.7 For Dixon, an important component of digital performance derives from its roots in the avant-garde and experimental practices in theater. Specifically, Dixon charts the origins of digital performance by examining the Aristotelian notion of the virtualis or the potentiality of an event.8 In addition, he provides the reader with a historical investigation into moments that shape the early foundation of digital performance. His main argument regarding the advent of techno-based art centers on the Italian Futurists, including Enrico Prampolini’s
Futurist Scenography of 1915, which exemplifies an early representation of virtual bodies.
One of the major sections of Dixon’s text focuses on the issue of liveness and digital technology. He provides an overview of the main purveyors of technology and performance theories, including Walter Benjamin, Peggy Phelan, and Philip Auslander.
He examines the “aura of liveness,” by examining the relationship between the live, actual event and the mediated or recorded byproduct of the original performance. What the relationship between live and mediated performance? The live versus mediated binary remains contested within the field of digital performance. Phelan suggests that
“performance, insofar as it can be defined [is] representation without reproduction.”9 Her
7 Dixon, Digital Performance, 4-5.
8 Dixon, Digital Performance, 23.
9 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 3-4. 19 position states that performance must exist in the moment, complimented by the presence of an audience. When the performance acts within the mediated or televised, digital space, the piece becomes consumable and reproducible, leaving “traces” of the original event. Auslander presents a counter-argument to Phelan’s critique of live versus mediated performance. Rather than place live and mediated in ontological opposition, Auslander engages both concepts in relation to one another. Dixon’s approach to liveness correlates with that of Auslander, in that he focuses on the presence of the spectator and the process of viewing a performance via the screenic or telematics medium.10 By engaging the performance via the screen, the user already exudes a presence to the event, thus re- contextualizing the notion of liveness. The works of Bilal, Abidin, and Delappe, require both live interaction during the performance and online interaction via digital archives.
Thus, their work retains a sense of liveness, as each user-participant interacts with the artist via the digital platform.
The types of digital artworks analyzed throughout this dissertation include video game and website performances.11 One of the main subsets of digital performance art influenced by the Persian Gulf and Iraq Wars focuses on military intervention within
10 Dixon, Digital Performance, 122-124.
11 Ken Robins and Lew Levidow, “Socializing the Cyborg Self: The Gulf War and Beyond, The Cyborg Handbook, ed. Chris Hables Gray (New York: Routledge, 1995), 122. Although the idea the “living-room war” began with Vietnam, the 1990s saw the rise of the Internet and data archiving. The Persian Gulf War soon became associated with the video game, similar to the connection between the television and the Vietnam War. Known through the controversial title as the “video-game” or “Nintendo” war, the use of these monikers reflects a major issue present in the new warscape of the 1990s. Cited by Robins and Levidow, General Norman Schwarzkopf argues that the connection between war and video games presents a dangerous type of detachment. He suggests that war is a game, thus sanitized from actual of death and destruction. 20 popular entertainment platforms. Many of the artworks and performances discussed in this dissertation reinterpret the function of militainment. Defined by PW Singer and
Roger Stahl as a form of entertainment/gaming involving military intervention, militainment was coined around 2003 to coincide with the invasion of Iraq.12 The term appeared in several news stories and print media sources. As CNN aired 24-hour coverage of “Shock and Awe” and subsequent stories related to the war in Iraq and
Afghanistan, the effect produced by the media served as a form of entertainment or
“entertainment with a military theme.” Inspired by the public’s fascination with these wars, media networks soon capitalized on the violence, creating new military-themed television networks, websites, and video games, and driving the term into the modern lexicon.
How can military campaigns be viewed as a type of popular entertainment? In
Militainment, Inc., Stahl views the origins of such ideology with the Futurists, a group set on enhancing the relationship between human and machine. He focuses on a portion of the Futurist ideology that prophesized the rise of war, militarism, and patriotism: “We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for...”13 The influx of war and chaos inspired aspects of the movement, focusing on the power of technology and warfare. The ability to glorify war served twofold: as a means of representing atrocity,
12 Roger Stahl, Militainment, Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2010), 18.
13 Umbro Apollonio, Documents of 20th Century Art: Futurist Manifestos, trans. by Brain, Robert, R.W. Flint, J.C. Higgitt, and Caroline Tisdall (New York: Viking Press, 1973), viola.informatik.uni- bremen.de/typo/fileadmin/.../Futurist_Manifesto.pdf. 21 but also as a consumable entity. The latter appears in paintings, photographs, films, and video games based on acts of war and the destruction. Since militainment thrives off the ability to entertain via military intervention, the film industry, artists, and media outlets profit from the public fascination with war, specifically through the screenic medium of the television, Internet, or video game.
Building on Stahl, James Der Derian makes one of the first comprehensive frameworks for understanding how the military -industrial-media-entertainment network affects global affairs. Der Derian’s major contribution to the field focuses on the role of virtuous war or the sanitization of war via the screen:
In simulated preparations and virtual executions of war, there is a high risk that
one learns how to kill but not to take responsibility for it. One experiences ‘death’
but not the tragic consequences of it. In virtuous war we now face not just the
confusion but the pixilation of war and game on the same screen.14
Whereas Der Derian’s claim about the desensitization of digital warfare makes a compelling argument about the sanitization of combat, the role of responsibility remains a contested position. Argued throughout this dissertation, each artist seeks to complicate how the digitization of the warzone affects user responsibility, namely through participatory art practices like video games.
14 James Der Derian, Virtuous War: Mapping the military-industrial-media-entertainment network (New York: Routledge, 2009), xxxii. 22
Critical Studies: Reframing Trauma in the Digital Age
Building on the work of Sigmund Freud and other authors of trauma studies, the approaches by Ruth Leys, Allen Meek, Marc Redfield, and Griselda Pollock address the connection between trauma and war-based violence. Whereas Leys engages historical gaps in trauma studies in the twentieth century, Meek and Redfield focus instead on the relationship between digital technology and trauma. All three theorists provide important contributions to the field through different applications regarding the role of trauma in post-war studies.
Leys’ Trauma: A Genealogy traces the origins of modern trauma studies from the physical to the psychological. A major condition caused from exposure to war results in
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).15 Although studies involving the relationship between traumatic events and psychology began over century ago, the American
Psychiatry Association did not add PTSD to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders until 1980.16 The concept of PTSD may be defined as a form of prolonged anxiety, stress and/or depression following a traumatic event. Typically, PTSD symptoms occur moments after exposure to a violent or sudden event. However, diagnosis does not follow until months or years later.17 Evident in works by Bilal, individuals suffering from PTSD may re-live traumatic episodes after exposure to
15 See APPENDIX A, excerpt from the DSM-V Diagnostic Criteria for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
16 Matthew J. Friedman, “PTSD History and Overview,” US Department of Veteran’s Affairs: PTSD: National Center for PTSD, http://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/PTSD-overview/ptsd-overview.asp.
17 Acute Stress Disorder, an offset of PTSD, mirrors many of the symptoms of PTSD. However, ASD involves dissociative symptoms, usually occurring within the first month of exposure to a traumatic event. Symptoms include memory loss, de-realization, and spatial disorientation. 23 triggers, or sensorial stimuli that evoke a reaction related to a traumatic event or memory.
Bilal uses several of his performances as a means of activating triggers to inform audiences about the effects of trauma and the lasting psychological implications of warfare.
Leys’ focus centers on the psychoanalytical and psychobiological origins of trauma and PTSD. Her approach to trauma rejects a linear historiography of trauma and instead incorporates Michel Foucault’s idea of “the singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality.”18 Using this method, she examines “reoccurrences” of certain positions over the history of trauma studies, rather than proceeding through a chronological narrative. Throughout the text, Leys’ focuses on the imitative or mimetic and the anti-mimetic qualities of trauma. Concerning the former:
the experience of trauma victims has been conceptualized as involving a kind of
imitation or ‘mimetic’ immersion in the other so profound as to negate any
distinction between the traumatized victim and the aggressor… in the mimetic
model the unconscious imitation of the aggressor or other leads to doubt about the
validity of the victim’s testimony: because victims are understood as traumatized
into a state of imitative-identificatory suggestibility, the mimetic model can’t help
worrying about the question of hypnotic suggestion and the fabrication of more or
less false memories.19
18 Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy, (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2000), 8.
19 Ruth Leys and Marlene Goldman, “Navigating the Genealogies of Trauma, Guilt, and Affect: An Interview with Ruth Leys,” University of Toronto Quarterly 79, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 658. 24
In this model, the process of remembering and forgetting the event remains in continuum.
This renders the victims incapable of recovering, since they constantly relive the event.
With regards to the anti-mimetic model:
Instead of imagining that in the traumatic moment victims are blindly or
hypnotically immersed in the scene of violence, the anti-mimetic model imagines
them as capable of yielding imitatively to the enemy but in a mode that allows
them to remain spectators, who can see and represent to themselves what is
happening. The result is to deny the idea that victims of trauma are immersed in
and hence complicitous with the traumatic violence, and to establish instead a
strict dichotomy between the victim and the external event or aggressor.20
Unlike the mimetic model, the antimimetic position supposes the victim as an outsider. In this case, the traumatic memory exists as an external experience imparted on the victim.
However, both the mimetic and antimimetic approaches place the viewer at a distance from the traumatic event, either as an imitator or outsider looking in. Throughout this dissertation, each artist uses this personal connection to actual and mediated trauma through a spectatorial lens. In this manner, each artist oscillates between the mimetic and antimimetic models, unable to move beyond the traumatic event, yet aware of his position as a victim or witness.
With respect to Leys’ text, Meek’s Trauma and Media: Theories, Histories, and
Images does not use a genealogical approach; instead, he revisits the role of historical trauma in the twentieth century using the Holocaust and 9/11 as primary case-studies.
20 Leys and Goldman, “Navigating the Genealogies of Trauma,” 658. 25
Whereas Leys sought to explore the gaps and voids of trauma studies since the late nineteenth century, Meek focuses his position on the events of 9/11 by examining the after-effects of screenic violence and affective response. His case-studies center on media coverage of 9/11 and how psychic numbing or the oversaturation of violent footage/images destabilizes the ability to process traumatic moments.21 This is evident in the works of Bilal, Abidin, and Delappe, who engage audience responses procured from digital space, avoiding the notion that the screen produces a “numbing” affect.
Meek continues by examining issues produced from mediatized experiences.
Through Jacques Derrida’s theory regarding the relationship between technology and
21 Meek, Trauma and Media, 5. What does Meek mean when he references affect or affective response? In a general sense, affect can be described as intensities, moods, and experiences: ‘Affect…is that realm of feeling that describes our innate value preferences in our experience and particular forms of connection that we seek.’ Early applications of the concept of affectus or affects originate with seventeenth century ethicist Baruch Spinoza and consider the role of cognizance as the basis for affective response. Cognition acts as the bridge between internal responses and external forms or stimuli. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari further the role of affect, postulating that sensations created by the individual consciousness create new affects through aesthetic experiences. For Deleuze and Guattari, affective response results not from “perception of an object, [or] the affections of a subject,” but from the purity derived from the sensation it procures. How does this translate to art constructed by a mediatized body? As outlined in “The Autonomy of Affect,” Massumi explores the role of affect in relation to physical responses generated from witnessing mediatized events, loosely related to emotion, yet autonomous from perimeters associated with emotional response: “Emotion is qualified intensity, the conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits, into function and meaning. It is intensity owned and recognized.” What makes affect necessary when considering participatory reactions to works like by Bilal or Delappe? Generated by the input provided by the participant, affective response derives from the user’s reaction to characters within the gaming environment. Massumi claims to reserve the term “‘emotional’ for the personalized content and affect for the continuation. Emotion is contextual. Affect is situational.” Thus, the sensorial reaction to the violence simulated via the digital frame produces affective responses from the participant. See Katherine O’Donnell, “Aisling Ghear – A Terrible Beauty: The Gaelic Background to Burke’s Enquiry,” in The Science of Sensibility: Reading Burke's Philosophical Enquiry, eds. Koen Vermeir and Michael Funk Deckard (London: Springer, 2012), 147, Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, trans. W.H. White (London: Chatham: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2001), 7; and Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” Cultural Critique, special issue: “The Politics of Systems and Environments,” part 2, no. 31 (September 1995): 88, accessed October 15 2013, http://www.brianmassumi.com/textes/ Autonomy%20of%20Affect.PDF.
26 mourning, Meek attempts to quantify how trauma performs within digital space. 22 He states:
The drive to localize through mourning can never saturate any social space,
because – as contemporary forms of globalization and telecommunications
persistently remind us – it is always already inhabited by another virtual space
which includes all of those tele-presences that increasingly populate our private
and public spaces.23
From a Derridean position, the “spectre” of the image, which inhabits digital space, continuously reemerges within virtual networks.24 The issue with recycling the ghostly referents of 9/11 and the Iraq War destabilizes the violence and chaos created at the actual site of trauma. A disjuncture occurs when the witness attempts to comprehend how the “wound of the event” remains open and maintained within digital space.25
Building on Meek’s position, Redfield focuses on the relationship between media and virtual trauma. In “Virtual Trauma: The Idiom of 9/11,” Redfield examines trauma experienced on and after 9/11. For Redfield, virtual trauma exists as a by-product of the mediatization of traumatic events, circulated in continuum via the Internet and online archive:
22 Meek, Trauma and Media, 187.
23 Ibid., 187.
24 Ibid., 187.
25 Ibid., 189. 27
I risk the term “virtual trauma” here to denote not a condition of psychological
damage, but rather a making-legible, within the medium itself, of violence
inherent to all media technologies, which record and remember the unique only
by effacing and forgetting it. There is a risk to this usage, for such trauma is not
entirely “real,” and, as noted, if anything works to ward off psychic trauma.26
Redfield explicitly separates what is defined as psychic trauma, or a type of trauma experienced in actual space, from the virtual. For actual trauma, the event repeats within the psyche, whereas virtual trauma relies on an experience filtered through digital networks. Redfield continues by stating;
Consumer society understands the media representations that it ravenously
consumes as fundamentally violent, voyeuristic, pornographic. The camera that
records suffering provides a supplemental violation, an obscene repetition of
injury.27
Accordingly, the “obscene repetition of injury” permits the viewer to consume and repeat the violent event. By archiving the event, it replays through external, digital networks, becoming available for spectators to repeatedly witness and experience.
The risk of virtual trauma centers on the idea that emotions procured within digital space somehow remain separate from those experienced in actual environments.
For Redfield, trauma does not necessarily exist as an actual referent to the original site of atrocity, but as an experience achieved within a virtually-constructed space. The
26 Marc Redfield, “Virtual Trauma: The Idiom of 9/11.” Diacritics 37, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 68.
27 Redfield, “Virtual Trauma,” 69. 28 recording, recycling, and reproducing of traumas within the digital frame become intrinsic to it.
While Redfield and Meek examine the use of the term virtual as a type of witnessing via digital outlets and formats, Griselda Pollock presents an alternative framing of virtual trauma:
I think there is a mistaken idea that trauma has to do with an immediate experience
– when something happens to you…Following Freud’s contention that it isn’t the
real event, but the psychic effect that produces trauma, I started to think about the
impact that atrocities have even when they are received second hand through the
media.28
For Pollock, the idea of experiencing trauma secondhand suggests a disjuncture between psychic trauma and events experienced through mediatized space. According to Pollock, there is an “affective residue of trauma” that exists as a byproduct of this media-centric approach. Evident throughout this dissertation, the residual effects of virtual trauma appear throughout Bilal, Abidin, and Delappe’s artworks and performances, forcing the viewer to relive violent moments from the Persian Gulf and Iraq Wars.
Though Meek, Redfield, and Pollock present alternative positions regarding the effect of trauma in the wake of violence events, there lacks a sufficient understanding of how virtual trauma continues to influence and affect the digital spectator. In the vast networks of online archival databases, these spaces act as a type of virtual prosthesis.
28 Griselda Pollock, “Mary Kelly’s Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi: Virtual Trauma and Indexical Witness in the Age of Mediatic Spectacle,” in Mary Kelly: The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi, eds. Miguel Angel Hernandez- Navarro and Isabel Tejada (Region de Murcia: Murcia Cultural Capital Creativo, 2008), 60. 29
Typically, a prosthesis serves as an artificial substitute to a lost extremity that serves to equalize or improve the missing component. However, I position the concept of a virtual prosthesis as an artificial memory device that preserves the screenic remnants of a violent event, permitting the user to revisit and re-experience the event via an online archive. As evident in Bilal, Abidin, and Delappe’s works, viewers are required to experience each performance or installation through online databases, using the digital network as a type of prostheses.
Methodological Approaches: Witnessing and Experiencing Trauma
The primary methodological approach of this dissertation centers on recent theoretical procedures in the field of trauma studies. In terms of critical focus, this dissertation will examine the role of trauma only in relation to the after-effects produced by war. In general, trauma studies encompass a wide array of thematic areas, specifically the Holocaust and discourses on post-World War II survivor testimony. Since the field of trauma studies remains interdisciplinary, this dissertation limits the application of trauma to the effects on victims and witnesses of war (both primary and secondary). Rather than include a modern genealogy of trauma since the nineteenth century, World War I will serve as a starting point to explain how trauma studies changed after a period of major warfare and how it continues to influence current treatment methods.
Historically, the act of trauma typically involved the role of lived experience or the ability to experience an event as it directly happened within the actual space of war.
Descended from the Greek word τραυμα, meaning “wound,” trauma originally constituted physical harm or the actual experience of violence committed against the 30 body.29 Accounts of military/combat related traumas are mentioned in the epic of
Gilgamesh, ancient Greek myths, and biblical passages from the Old Testament Book of
Deuteronomy.30 However, with the onset of modernity and the Industrial Revolution, studies involving trauma centered on the effects produced by war and industrial disasters.31 Hermann Oppenheim first used the term “traumatic neurosis” with regards to the effects of “post trauma” caused by industrial and railway accidents. Individuals affected by factory explosions exhibited behavioral changes, such as memory loss and paralysis.
Austrian psychologists Josef Breuer and Freud first examined the after-effects of trauma derived from warfare. Freud’s early work on the “wounds” of trauma originated from studies on gender and sexuality as a “precipitating cause for traumatic hysteria.”32
Freud’s studies on hysteria at the Salpêtrière Clinic served as the basis for his work involving gendered trauma or types of trauma based on the biological sex of the patient
(Figure 2). Outlined in Freud’s Studies of Hysteria, female patients often suffered from hysteria derived from “passivity” or events involving sexual, patriarchal, or domestic
29 Karolyn Steffens, “Communicating Trauma: Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy and W.H.R. Rivers’ Psychoanalytic Method,” Journal of Modern Literature 37, no 3 (Spring 2014): 37.
30 Marc-Antoine Crocq and Louis Crocq, “From Shell Shock and War Neurosis to Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A History of Psychotraumatology,” Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience 2, no 1 (2000): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181586/. Deuteronomy 20:1-9: When thou goest out to battle against thine enemies, and seest horses, and chariots, and a people more than thou... the officers shall say, What man is there that is fearful and fainthearted? Let him go and return unto his house, lest his brethren's heart faint as well as his heart.
31 M.A. Crocq and L. Crocq, ““From Shell Shock and War Neurosis to Posttraumatic Stress Disorder,” http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181586/.
32 Ann E. Kaplan, Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 27 31 traumas.33 These various types of experiences resulted in psychological or dissociative states.34
Figure 2: Jean-Martin Charcot, Freud’s mentor and successor, demonstrates a method of treatment on a female patient suffering from hysteria with a female patient, Salpêtrière Clinic, 1887.
According to Freud in his early studies of World War I soldiers, the physical byproduct of experiencing a traumatic event resulted in a psychological break. For male
33 Kaplan, Trauma Culture, 27.
34 Shoshana S. Ringel, “Overview,” in Trauma: Contemporary Directions in Theory, Practice, and Research, ed. Shoshana S. Ringel and Jerrold R. Brandell (London, SAGE Publications, Inc., 2012), 2. 32 sufferers exhibiting symptoms related to hysteria, these effects resulted from exposure to active traumas experienced during war or from industrial accidents.35 Individuals exposed to atrocities recalled sensorial reactions to the traumatic event, including the following: witnessing carnage, hearing explosions, tasting gunpowder or lead, touching metal, and smelling burning fuel or flesh.36 Freud devised therapeutic protocols involving the effects of “shell shock,” an early term used to describe symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress. 37 The diagnosis of “shell shock” suggested an inability to cope or comprehend the events experienced in battle.38 He concluded that soldiers or civilians exposed to violence experienced psychological trauma, or a type of trauma defined as follows:
[a] unique individual experience of an event or enduring conditions, in which the
individual’s ability to integrate his/her emotional experience is overwhelmed, or
the individual experiences (subjectively) a threat to life, bodily integrity, or
sanity.39
35 Kaplan, Trauma Culture, 27.
36 Omitted from the 1980 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders III by the American Psychiatric Association, forms of trauma experienced outside the actual event did not come into formal language in the DSM until 1994. This coincides the with post-Persian Gulf War era.
37 Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy, 4.
38 Ringel, “Overview,” 2. Treatment for shell shock was known as psychological first aid. The goal was to treat the symptoms of shell shock as fast as possible in order to return troops back to the battlefield.
39 Esther Giller, “What is Psychological Trauma?” Sidran Institute: Traumatic Stress Education & Advocacy, May 1999, http://www.sidran.org/resources/for-survivors-and-loved-ones/what-is- psychological-trauma/.
33
As defined by Freud, episodes involving memory loss, panic, nightmares, and emotional detachment served as the main symptoms of psychological trauma.40 This type of trauma often correlates with physical trauma, which includes periods of fatigue, insomnia, and violent outbursts (Figure 3).41
By the end of World War II, studies in the field focused on the effects of both combat-related stresses and the atrocities committed in Nazi-managed concentration camps.42 Derived from earlier Freudian studies involving delayed cognition of trauma, subsequent treatment focused on the effects of “belatedness” related to the event.43
Treatment of combat-related trauma centered on cognitive and pharmacological therapies, merging new approaches in situational therapy combined with Freudian methods of psychological treatment.
40 Ringel, “Overview,” 2.
41 “Understanding and managing psychological trauma,” Australian Psychological Society, 2016, https://www.psychology.org.au/publications/tip_sheets/trauma/.
42 For this dissertation, I omit a detailed discussion about Holocaust trauma due to the various approaches to the Shoah or “Event” when compared to studies in combat traumas.
43 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996), 4. 34
Figure 3: Photograph of a soldier suffering from shell shock, the early term used prior to PTSD. Battle of Courcelette (France), World War I, 1916.
After World War II, the rise of mass media production and network broadcasting altered how individuals witnessed and experienced traumatic events related to war. The first war to effectively televise the events of the battlefield via a screenic medium was the
Vietnam in the 1960s. Michael J. Arlen discussed this phenomenon in a short article published on October 15th, 1966 in the New Yorker. He described the visual barrage of 35 media footage from Vietnam as the first “living-room war.”44 Stahl positions Arlen’s observation as an early example of sanitized warfare:
Arlen pointed out that the appearance of war had fundamentally shifted. The
television had smoothed and contained war’s brutality, introducing almost
imperceptibly into everyday life as something habitually consumed at six o’clock
along with supper…In the guise of bringing the home front closer to the
conflict…television news paradoxically alienated the citizen from war, rendering
repetitious and chaotic banality of nightly footage a normal part of domestic
existence.45
Arlen’s statement concerns the act of witnessing “real/live” footage (Figure 4). Two distinct types of witnesses could experience warfare: primary witnesses or those present at the actual site and indirect witnesses or domestic viewers.
Building on Arlen’s position, the most dramatic shift in the trauma studies occurred in the late 1980s/early 1990s. With the implementation of remote warfare technology, 24-hour news networks, and the Internet, the transmission of traumatic events increased exponentially. Individuals far removed from the original site of trauma experienced atrocity through the virtual space of the television and media feeds via satellite.46 With regards to this type of exposure, Roland Barthes states that “trauma blocks our ability to make sense of events, whereas the media, through the production
44 Stahl, Militainment, Inc., 22.
45 Stahl, Militainment, Inc., 22.
46 Meek, Trauma and Media, 172-173. 36 and reproduction of images, are always bestowing meaning.”47 Thus, as the viewer engages a traumatic event through the television, Internet, or gaming console, the direct contact severs within virtual space. It serves to insulate the viewer from the direct catastrophe witnessed through the screen. The media filtration permits the viewer to make a conscious choice: either remain as a witness or turn off the device and disconnect from the event. This choice to experience trauma reflects the shift in how witnesses in past generations experienced atrocity. As an example of this change, artists like Bilal,
Abidin, and Delappe represent this technological modification to cope with personal traumas.
Figure 4: A couple watches footage from the Vietnam War in their living room, 1970.
47 Ibid., 173.
37
Using the power of the screenic medium, this methodological approach to witnessing and experiencing trauma engages with the “repetitious and chaotic banality” of images projected constantly through the television and currently, the Internet.48 How does witnessing a violent event through the screen affect the act of witnessing? Works like Domestic Tension by Bilal, Abidin Travels by Abidin, and dead-in-iraq by Delappe complicate the role of trauma produced within actual and digital spaces. These works engage viewers through the screenic media, using actual and digital bodies as conduits for engaging violent acts. After the violent acts are witnessed online, the viewer must attempt to comprehend the experience and evaluate the traumatic aftermath.
Methodological Approaches: Active Participation and Participatory Performance
As viewers engage each artwork or performance, the role of active participation remains pivotal to understanding the approach of each artist. How does active participation differ from passive? Why is active participation required? This approach centers on how participants interact with performances during mediated events and through online archives and webpages. In general, all live performance possesses a participatory requirement on some level – namely the presence of an audience. Allan
Kaprow referenced the importance of the audience during the 1960s with regards to
Happenings – a type of interdisciplinary performance event involving the active response and interaction of participants. With regards to Kaprow, Richard Schechner references the importance of audience involvement in performances, stating,
48 Stahl, Militainment, Inc., 22. 38
…audience participation expands the field of what a performance is, because
audience participation takes place precisely at the point where the performance
breaks down and becomes a social event.49
The performance space becomes an independent site for exploration, permitting the audience to interact and share experiences. In all the pieces discussed throughout these chapters, audience participation remains pivotal to the interaction with and dissemination of each performance. However, participation does not always correlate with the original
“liveness” of the event.50 Although “liveness” proves the “having-been-thereness” of the participant, the active participation of users within the digital performances differs.
In Liveness, Auslander reinforces the power of the recorded event, tethered to the original, live performance. Since the site of many of these performances remains limited to actual space, participants may only access the piece through online archives and/or digital chat rooms.51 The aura of the live performance is not corrupted using these interactions; rather, it is re-contextualized and formatted specifically for digital interaction. As evident in Bilal, Abidin, and Delappe’s work, the live performance requires secondary interaction from online participants, shifting the role from passive viewership to active, online engagement.
49 James M. Harding and Cindy Rosenthal, “Experimenting with an Unfinished Discipline: Richard Schechner, the Avant-Garde and Performance Studies,” in The Rise of Performance Studies: Rethinking Richard Schechner's Broad Spectrum, eds. James Harding and Cindy Rosenthal (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 46.
50 According to Auslander, the desire to define the term “live” or “liveness” proved unnecessary prior to the invention of recording devices like the camera and video camera.
51 Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (New York: Routledge, 2008), 24-25. 39
To exemplify the role of participatory interaction, chapter three explores the power of user intervention in online space. In Twitter Torture/MGandhi in Jail, Delappe occupied Second Life, a Massive Multiuser Online Role Playing Game or MMORPG for nine months. Using personal experience within the space of Second Life, commentary based on an ethnographic intervention within the same MMORPG will be used as a means of understanding the relationship between actual and digital space, lived through the lens of an avatar. My experience served as a means of social engagement, whereas
Delappe sought to use the space as a means of didactic gaming. I use the term didactic gaming to describe the practice of using videogames as a form of social intervention. The games are not only platforms for entertainment, but serve to educate user-participants about the actual role of violence created in the wake of the Iraq War. Didactic gaming focuses on using videogames as a site for intervention and protest, often subverting or disrupting the original objective of the game.
In Delappe’s other online game, Killbox, I include commentary from my experience playing the video game. Since participation is required in order to activate the piece, user intervention remains pivotal to the overall objective. Thus, the live component of the piece remains active as each user “plays” various components of the game.
Chapter Outlines
Each chapter is organized using the artworks and performances by Bilal, Abidin, and Delappe as the basis for understanding the relationship between trauma, war, and technology. The Second Chapter provides the groundwork for understanding the difference between the actual and the virtual and establishes a clear distinction between 40 both spaces. The distinction serves as a vital component to understanding the experience of virtual trauma. While various applications of the concept of virtual trauma are defined, the main use of the term throughout this dissertation centers on its application to the digital, screenic milieu. Unlike Abidin and Delappe, Bilal personally experienced the effects of Saddam’s regime and 1991 Persian Gulf War. Using memories from his life in the “conflict zone” of Iraq and the loss of his brother to a UAV strike in 2004, Bilal’s art harnesses the digital platform as a means of exposing the detrimental byproducts of telepresent technology.
Each piece by Bilal; Domestic Tension, Virtual Jihadi, and 3rdi, uses a digital platform as a means of expanding the limits and problems associated with technology by revealing social prejudices concerning Arab and Arab-Muslims in the post-9/11 era. In
Domestic Tension, Bilal discloses his personal struggles with PTSD for the public to view, all while confined to the FlatFile Gallery space. Filmed, disseminated, and archived, the footage from the durational performance exposes the vast array of participants in the performance, many using anonymity to commit violent acts using the paintball gun. The work exposes viewers to the ease of telepresent technology by making the shooting mechanism easily accessible via his personal website, www.wafaabilal. com.52 A byproduct of the piece is the polarization of online user engagement by exposing both sadistic and diplomatic interventions.
52 Wafaa Bilal and Kari Lydersen, Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life, and Resistance under the Gun (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2008), 80. 41
Virtual Jihadi harnesses similar elements from Domestic Tension, specifically the online platform, to question the public’s response to telepresent violence. However, instead of using the actual body of Bilal as the focal point of the performance, he performs vicariously through the body of an avatar. Using archaic gaming platforms from the 1980s and 1990s, Bilal’s game derives from a hacked Al-Qaeda version by the
Global Islamic Media Front. Though the user engages in “play,” Bilal highlights the ease of killing via the screenic medium, a theme Delappe also uses in his video-game, Killbox.
In 3rdi, the merger between actual and digital space, body and machine, culminates with the implantation of a camera to the posterior of Bilal’s head. In this section, four dimensions categorize various aspects of the performance: the digital, the corporeal, the public, and the private. Using his body as a conduit for sousveillance, Bilal turns the attention from the body to peripheral space, recording, uploading, and archiving his daily interactions to www.3rdi.com. Bilal’s work serves to test the limits of the human body and power of post 9/11 surveillance technology.
Chapter Three examines how Abidin’s work uses a different approach to confront war and trauma: satire and humor. Abidin also grew-up in Iraq and witnessed the after- effects of the Persian Gulf War. This chapter first examines the effects screenic violence by examining trends in execution and torture videos recorded since the 1990s. Using these videos as tool for examining Abidin’s work, this chapter investigates several frameworks involving the theory of humor and satire in the visual arts. Cold
Interrogation, Jihad, and Abidin Travels: Welcome to Baghdad use satire as means of 42 confronting issues of Arab identity, diasporic limitations, and terrorism since start of the
Iraq War.
Cold Interrogation serves as one of the earliest works by Abidin to confront Arab identity in the post-9/11 frame. Using an actual refrigerator as part of the piece, Abidin installed a video recorder inside the freezer box. Viewers looked through the peephole and engaged a male interrogator who asked questions about Saddam Hussein, terrorism, and Islam. For Abidin, the interrogation serves as a tool for educating participants about the effects of racial stereotyping regarding diasporic Iraqis living outside the Middle East.
Abidin’s performance of Jihad remains one of the more controversial works discussed in Chapter Three. Using common terrorist tropes from execution videos,
Abidin covers his visage with a keffiyeh and faces the camera. However, instead of proselytizing about the dangers of Western culture, he picks up a guitar and sings a rendition of Woody Guthrie’s 1944 anti-war, anti-poverty song This Land is Your Land.
The piece challenges the image of the Arab/Arab-Muslim male figure by subverting stereotypical tropes and including American icons like the flag, guitar, and song. The performance also challenges the application of the term jihad and the current use of the term by Western media sources.
The final piece discussed in Chapter Three, Abidin Travels: Welcome to Baghdad, also uses dark/gallows humor as a means of exposing the limitations of travel to and from
Iraq since 2003. Abidin uses tropes from websites like Expedia and Hotwire as humorous anecdotes. Instead of showing glamorous images of Baghdad, the artist shows the violent aftermath of the invasion and subsequent terrorist attacks. One major theoretical 43 framework applied to the installation is Jane Iwamura’s theory of virtual Orientalism.
Building off Said’s Orientalism, virtual Orientalism examines the representation of
Arabs online, using common search engines like Google or Bing to expose negatives stereotypes.
In Chapter Four, Delappe approaches war and digital culture from a different position then Bilal and Abidin. As an American artist, his exposure to the Persian Gulf
War, 9/11, and the Iraq War stems from indirect witnessing via the screen. The works selected for this section engage telepresence, focusing on UAV technology, MMORPG’s, and video games. Delappe’s work is primarily interpreted as a type of digital protest intervention. In dead-in-iraq, the durational performance uses an avatar created by
Delappe to occupy the MMORPG gaming site, America’s Army. The piece serves as an online intervention, using passive disruption of game play. Instead of shooting other avatars, Delappe uses online message board within the game to type the names of deceased American soldiers killed during the Iraq War.
In Twitter Torture/MGandhi in Jail, Delappe occupies the MMORPG platform,
Second Life. As a supplement to Delappe’s piece, I include commentary from my personal exploration into Second Life in order to understand the relationship between user and avatar. Using an avatar based on Gandhi, Delappe occupied a digital jail cell in
Second Life for nine months. Intermittently each week, Delappe typed sections of the
Bush-era Torture Memos as a means of educating participants and viewers about state- sponsored torture and interrogation methods used by the Bush administration in the
2000s. 44
The last piece by Delappe, Killbox, remains a work in progress and accessible to users via http://turbulence.org/commissions/Killbox/. Like Virtual Jihadi by Bilal, the game uses rudimentary technology when compared to complex gaming platforms like
America’s Army. The game examines the use of UAVs during combat missions and exposes issues with weaponized remote technology. After playing the game, I include commentary about the gaming matrices and active play. The goal of the game seeks to examine the ease of UAV software and the difficultly of distinguishing terrorist cells versus civilian populations. Similar to dead-in-iraq and Bilal’s Domestic Tension, the game invites participants to challenge preconceived prejudices about telepresent technology.
45
CHAPTER 2: CONFRONTING PERSONAL TRAUMA: WAFAA BILAL AND THE
POLITICS OF DIGITAL PERFORMANCE
Technology has not only allowed us to democratize access to art but also the very nature of the production of art, turning it into a collaboration between artist and participant that produces not an object but rather an emotional and cognitive experience that is constantly regenerating itself – through an invisible mirror. – Wafaa Bilal53 Introduction
The sound of paintballs firing from a gun echoes through the partitioned space of the FlatFile Gallery in Chicago, Illinois. It is day 21 of Domestic Tension, performed by
Wafaa Bilal. Dressed in protective goggles and a plated vest, Bilal describes the physical and emotional effects produced by the constant barrage of paintball bullets filling up the gallery space. Through an online confessional, he speaks to viewer-participants logged onto his webpage, www.wafaabilal.com:54
Things are going good and bad. The good thing I see that in the end only 9 days to
go. But the bad thing is that I start to have a lot of health problems. Skin rash,
heavy breathing, then I start showing post-traumatic syndrome… nightmares…as
you can see the shooting has not stopped, in fact [it has] intensified.55
In his commentary, Bilal explains how the constant firing of bullets has awakened post- traumatic stressors or emotional triggers from his past (Figures 5, 6). He continues by
53 Wafaa Bilal, “Invisible Mirror: Aggression and the Thumb Generation Response,” in We Are Iraqis: Aesthetics and Politics in a Time of War, eds. Nadje Al-Ali and Deborah Al-Najjar (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2013), 102.
54 “The Paintball project day 21,” YouTube video, 8:37, posted by wafaa bilal, May 26, 2007, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTNTPBc5jVs.
55 “The Paintball project day 21,” youtube.com. 46 directly addressing online participants that doubt his performance is authentic and is being performed only as a publicity stunt to garner attention. Bilal’s purpose for performing the piece lies not in the desire for infamy or attention; instead, he confronts the power of technology and the effects produced by traumatic conditions. Stated by Bilal with regards to the piece, the use of the metaphorical “invisible mirror” plays a significant role in how participants engage his performance. Evident throughout this chapter, Bilal’s work will serve as a type of mirror, reflecting our “own attitudes, prejudices, lives, and behaviors” within the greater social context of the post-Persian Gulf
War, post-Iraq War era.56
Domestic Tension serves as a focal point in Bilal’s oeuvre for examining the relationship between trauma and technology. He reflects on the presence of trauma in an era where war bifurcates between actual space and digital networks. Confronting trauma in the visual arts originates from a need to represent personal and collective experiences associated with atrocity. For artists working in the post-Persian Gulf War frame, forms of representation shift with regards to the rise of interactive media and virtual space.
Exemplified in Bilal’s art, virtual space becomes a platform for expounding personal traumas and experience within digitally constructed media forms- like video games and the Internet. Bilal, both a victim and witness to the atrocities committed by Saddam
Hussein in the late 1980s and early 1990s, seeks to engage audiences by changing their role from a passive viewer to an active participant.57 For Bilal, the digital edifice serves
56 Bilal, “Invisible Mirror,” 94.
57 Bilal and Lydersen, Shoot an Iraqi, 76. 47 as a form of spatial disjuncture between the performer and viewer, separated by screenic distance across the World Wide Web.
Figure 5: Wafaa Bilal occupying the FlatFile Gallery, Domestic Tension, 2007
Figure 6: Screen shot from Youtube.com, day 21 of Wafaa Bilal’s Domestic Tension, 2007
48
Considering the biography of Bilal and his primary exposure to war and violence, this chapter examines his choice to use digital performance throughout his oeuvre. The first portion of this chapter examines various definitions and limitations of the term virtual when compared to the term actual. Two applications of the term will be identified: virtual as a synonym for the digital and virtual as the potential to be traumatized. The concept of trauma will also be defined using current approaches within the field since the 1970s. Prior to the Persian Gulf War, the manner in which trauma was experienced relied on direct (primary exposure) or secondary contact (i.e. story-telling) to the traumatic event. For example, discourses in trauma studies focused primarily on victim or witness testimonies from war, sexual assaults, abuse, and/or imprisonment.
Secondary exposure to trauma concentrated on the offspring of primary victims/witnesses, influenced by volatile behavioral and psychological episodes from parents, relatives, or guardians.
With regards to the role of trauma, the next section details Bilal’s biography. This section examines how his exposure to war and violence influenced his later works. The primary focus of the biography centers on his movement from Iraq to the United States.
Using both the theoretical and biographical components, the third section examines performances by Bilal that harness themes associated with technology, trauma, and his relocation from Iraq to the United States. He provides the viewer-participant an opportunity to witness the effects of primary trauma performed in digital space and experienced via online dissemination. Three digital performances serve to explicate the effects of trauma on performance art: Domestic Tension (2007), Virtual Jihadi (2008), 49 and 3rdi (2010-2011). Each performance seeks to strain, break, challenge, and test the physical and mental limits of Bilal.
The first piece, Domestic Tension, centers on the role of physical violence, guided from an online, digital system. In the performance, the artist remains at the mercy of the viewer-participant, imprisoned by the machine and left to interact with anonymous users in cyberspace. The second piece, Virtual Jihadi, removes the physical, corporeal entity from the primary equation, using an avatar within the online gaming environment to perform violent acts against virtual bodies of American soldiers. The piece examines how online violence possesses the capabilities to produce traumatic after-effects. In the final piece, 3rdi, Bilal returns to the physical manipulation of his body by implanting a camera into the back of his head. The piece acts as a form of sousveillance, complicating the relationship between pedestrians and the artist. The piece examines the limits of our vision, capturing and archiving invisible space around the artist. This section will be divided into four dimensions: the digital, the corporeal, the public, and the private.
Within the greater context of his oeuvre, each piece “speaks” to the viewer about the effects of trauma, both lived and witnessed, within actual and digital environments.
Understanding Trauma in the Post-9/11 Frame
When the first plane crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center on
September 11, 2001, the method of experiencing trauma changed dramatically for mass viewership around the world. Unlike news reports from the Vietnam War or the Persian
Gulf War, footage of the burning towers immediately aired via news outlets and the
Internet. Images of fire, smoke, and chaotic street scenes of victims running through 50 plumes of debris appeared for weeks following the event, ingrained in the memories and experiences of witnesses. The media referred to the footage and documentation of the event as “like a movie” due to the surreal nature of the disaster in downtown New York
City.58 Why was the event described as “movie-like?” Slavoj Žižek referenced this issue with regards to the spectator:
When we watched the oft-repeated shot of frightened people running toward the
camera ahead of the giant cloud of dust from the collapsing tower, was not the
framing of the shot itself reminiscent of spectacular shots in a catastrophe movie,
a special effect which outdid all others, since . . . reality is the best appearance of
itself?59
Like the images produced during the Persian Gulf War, the footage projected by the media on and after 9/11 was “overwhelming” for the spectator (Figures 7, 8).60 For the spectator, the overflow of emotional output created a sense of incomprehensibility, a failure to properly filter or interpret the event. The method of experiencing trauma changed, altering the manner in which trauma is experienced, witnessed, and processed.
How does this type of virtualized witnessing affect the practice of experiencing trauma?
How does it differ from actual types of witnessing?
58 Marc Redfield. The Rhetoric of Terror: Reflections on 9/11 and the War on Terror (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 33.
59 Marc Redfield, “Virtual Trauma: The Idiom of 9/11,” Diacritics 37, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 66.
60 Redfield, “Virtual Trauma,” 67. 51
Figure 7: Footage of the Twin Towers after impact from American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, September 11, 2001
Figure 8: People run from a plume of debris after the attacks on the Twin Towers, September 11, 2001 52
Before embarking on a discussion regarding the differences between the actual and the virtual, the concept of the virtual must be addressed due to the various uses and applications of the term. There are two main definitions of the virtual that must be separated: the first involves the ontological application of virtual; the second serves as a substitute for the term digital.61 With regards to the first application of the term, Henri
Bergson’s definitions of the actual and the virtual serve as a foundation for understanding the difference between both concepts. In Matter and Memory, Bergson positions the virtual as a potential surrounding the space of the actual. Gilles Deleuze enhances Bergson’s position in his Dialogues, suggesting that the “actual surrounds itself with a cloud of virtual images,” in which the virtual occupies fleeting, albeit temporary fragments of space:62
Representation is there, but always virtual -being neutralized, at the very moment
when it might become actual, by the obligation to continue itself and to lose itself
in something else. To obtain this conversion from the virtual to the actual it would
be necessary, not to throw more light on the
object, but on the contrary to obscure some of its aspects, to diminish it by
the greater part of itself, so that the remainder, instead of being encased in
its surroundings as a thing, should detach itself from them as a picture.63
61 There are numerous definitions of the virtual, specifically in cyber theory/studies. For this chapter, two definitions will be used as they relate to trauma.
62 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. Eliot Ross Albert (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 148.
63 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1911), http://www.reasoned.org/dir/lit/matter_and_memory.pdf. 53
The virtual has the potential to affect the actual as a means of “transcendental experience,” but never lived through. Deleuze claims that “the virtual is opposed not to the real but to the actual- thus, the virtual is fully real in so far as it is virtual.”64 Brian
Massumi elaborates in his Autonomy of Affect, where he states:
Since the virtual is unlivable even as it happens, it can be thought of as a form of
superlinear abstraction…that is, it is organized differently but is inseparable from
the concrete activity and expressivity of the body. The body is as immediately
abstract as it is concrete; its activity and expressivity extended, as on their
underside, into an incorporeal, yet perfectly real, dimension of pressing
potential.65
Articulated by Massumi, the virtual serves as both an active and inactive form of abstract potentials within the pull of actual bodies. He further claims that, “the virtual is a lived paradox where what are normally opposites coexist, coalesce, and connect; where what cannot be experienced cannot but be felt-albeit reduced and contained.”66 When it crosses into the actual, lived experience reifies via virtual-actual correspondence.
Within the context of Bilal’s work, the second application of the term virtual serves as the foundation for understanding virtual trauma as a type of “digitized” form of psychological trauma. The virtual, within the field of cyber studies and computer science,
64 Gilles Deleuze, Differences and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 208.
65 Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” Cultural Critique 31 (Autumn, 1995): 91.
66 Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” 91. 54 lacks a singular definition since it varies from hardware devices and software platforms.
A common trait, however, refers to the screenic medium or anything viewed or experienced via the computer, television, or smart phone/tablet device. For practitioners of trauma studies using the digital realm as a site of psychic exploration, the virtual serves as a substitute for the term digital. It is through the use of the digital that Bilal’s work will be addressed, using the concept of virtual trauma to closely refer to a type of digitized witnessing.
Positioning Bilal’s work in the digital frame relies on an understanding of how reality and virtual reality interact. Since the 1990s, debates on how to articulate experiences within actual and virtual spaces began out of necessity. Dixon provides an accessible mapping about the difference between actual environments and virtually- constructed spaces: “VR [virtual reality] is an industrial computer graphics format simulating navigable three-dimensional environments and requiring considerable computing horsepower.”67 For Dixon and other purveyors of virtual theory, simulated space created within the digital edifice suggests a platform for the imagination to converge within a shared environment.68 Adequately organized into three criteria,
Howard Rheingold further explicates a distinct frame that virtual reality must observe:
67 Dixon, Digital Performance, 364.
68 Ibid., 364. 55
One is immersion, being surrounded by a three-dimensional world; another one is
the ability to walk around in that world, choose your own point of view; and the
third axis is manipulation, being able to reach in and manipulate it.69
Thus, virtual space relies on the control of the active participant to manipulate movement, perspective, and interaction within the technologically constructed environment. Virtual space exists as a subset of the actual, prevailing as an extension of the corporeal body.
Whereas users move within actual space through a system of biologically constructed movements, the body in virtual space exists as an amalgamation of digital codes, manipulated by the participant. The ability to manipulate and control the digital body as an extension of the actual form further complicates the tension between spaces.
As a reference to the relationship of the body in actual and virtual environments, a similar issue can be addressed regarding the participant’s identity within cyberspace. In
“Cyborgs and Consoles: Gender Performativity and the Liberatory Potential of Video
Games,” Jaqueline Potvin examines the relationship between user and avatar within virtual gaming spaces. Defined as a virtual self or a digital extension of the user, an avatar diametrically opposes the actual body of the participant.70 Users may create avatars resembling actual bodies or create fantasy characters that exhibit super-human components, anthropomorphic traits, or bionic prosthetics. Potvin postulates that the
69 Ibid., 364.
70 Jacqueline Marie Potvin, “Cyborgs and Consoles: Gender Performativity and the Liberatory Potential of Video Games,” (conference paper, Visions of Humanity in Cyberculture, Cyberspace and Science Fiction, Oxford, England, 18-20 July 2013), 3. 56 identity of users and avatars essentially “slip” between actual space and the virtual gaming edifice:71
Not only do gamers embrace their connection to machines, creating new
embodiments and subjectivities, but by playing multiple games, in multiple virtual
worlds, and through multiple avatars, we embrace the partiality of our identity in
the fusing of our self with multiple, fictional, and changeable selves through our
interaction and identification with avatars and consoles.72
Potvin posits her example in terms of gender performativity in the digital gaming field.
However, her position applies to ways in which all users engage with virtual bodies.
Users seek to construct and perform new identities in virtual space. As Potvin suggests, virtual space limits the manner in which bodies are constructed and how codes, whether gender or race specific, manipulate the user’s performance within the gaming environment.73 Bilal uses both his actual body and an avataric form to exemplify the relationship between actual and digital spaces. The connection between both bodies serves to exemplify the power of digital technology and the use of telepresence during active warfare.
Biography of Wafaa Bilal
Bilal’s biographical narrative plays an essential role in understanding the relationship between trauma, technology, and war. Works like Domestic Tension, Virtual
71 Potvin, “Cyborgs and Consoles,” 4.
72 Ibid., 4-5.
73 Ibid., 2. 57
Jihadi, and 3rdi, explore themes associated with traumatic witnessing, diasporic movement, and the after-effects of war. These themes play a significant role in how Bilal educates the public about his biography via performance art. Born in Kufa, Iraq in 1966,
Wafaa Gize Kadhim Bilal grew-up in the early years of the post-Hashemite era of the new Republic regime.74 General ‘Abd al-Rahman’ Arif served as the newly appointed
Iraqi president in the spring of 1966, following the death of his brother in a helicopter crash.75 His rule existed as a short bypass to the 1968 Revolution, a result of the rising power of the Ba’athist Party and the dire fractures of the political and economic infrastructure of Iraq. After his exile, Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr, motivated by his subordinate Saddam Hussein, gained control of the government, implementing systematic purges of political rivals, Communists, and businessmen associated with Western corporate interests well into the 1970s.76
While the political climate in Iraq remained in turmoil, Bilal grew up in an unstable environment that paralleled the shifting regime. In Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life, and
Resistance under the Gun, Bilal discusses the instability of his childhood, namely through the mental and physical abuse committed by his father:77
74 Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 142-143.
75 Tripp, A History of Iraq, 179. The foundation of the infamous Republican Guard pre-dated Arif’s rule by several years, under the presidency of ‘Abd al-Salam ‘Arif. The Republican Guard served to protect the president and his hierarchy from coup attempts by political rivals.
76 Ibid., 206-208
77 Bilal, Shoot an Iraqi, 9-13: Bilal’s father suffered from a number of compulsive and violent behaviors. Bilal recalls his penchant for gambling and domestic violence, resulting in institutionalization at a mental health facility. 58
For my father, the family was always an inconvenience, a burden standing
between him and the desires he felt were his right. He’d often tell us, ‘I’m sick
and tired of you. Go find someone else to take care of you.’78
Exposed to violence in the domestic space of his home and in the streets of Kufa and
Baghdad, Bilal sought sanctuary in the arts and literary texts, often traveling to the local mosque in his hometown to study or escape.
By September 1980, the Iran-Iraq War began with the invasion of Iran by
Saddam’s forces (Figure 9). As a means of avoiding persecution, Bilal attended Ba’ath
Party meetings, tempted by the opportunities provided to party members.79 Bilal served as an oil pipeline guard on the Saudi Arabia – Iraq border in the north, using the job as an excuse to leave his home and avoid his father. Seeing little action, he recalls the isolation of the job:
Wanting more time to myself and not to face my father at home, I volunteered to
stay on alone and wait for our relief group. So I had the desert all to myself, and
all the time in the world to read, write and draw and think.80
The solitude of the desert and the power of isolation reappears in several of Bilal’s performances, specifically in Domestic Tension.
78 Ibid., 17.
79 Those that deferred meetings or refused membership found themselves singled out by party leaders for persecution
80 Ibid., 44. 59
Figure 9: Trench warfare, Iran-Iraq War 1980
In high school, Bilal excelled in the humanities, showing talent in the visual arts.
Once he passed his exams, he enrolled in the University of Baghdad to study art.
Unfortunately, he did not pass the drawing test required of all art majors at the time, and thus enrolled in the geography program at the university. Rumors circulated that his denial into the program likely stemmed from a cousin’s association with the Dawa Party, an opposition group to the Ba’athists. Saddam viewed the arts as an area in which protest and social dissidence could be represented; therefore, only certain individuals were granted full permission to study the field.81 Outside the university curriculum, Bilal
81 Ibid., 56.
60 devoted his time to painting, using his spare time to perfect his craft. He recalls the following about his early influences:
I churned out provocative political pieces, full of self-righteousness and cynicism.
I mocked Western culture and created Dada-esque anti-art, fighting everything
and everybody. Then I started photographing poor people in Baghdad’s indigent
neighborhoods and painting them in a realistic style. This was something the
regime did not want to see. One of my shows was closed down. Some of my
paintings were seized and I was questioned and harangued by security officials.82
Bilal shifted from realism as a means of shielding his politically-charged works, choosing abstract methods. This did not protect Bilal from scrutiny, which resulted in his detainment by party officials regarding the content of his work.
By 1990 the war with Iran ended, resulting in the redirection of interest to Kuwait by Saddam. For Bilal, the August invasion coincided with the start of his final year at the
University of Baghdad. Under orders from Saddam, Ba’athist party members infiltrated all institutions of higher education, seeking recruits and unearthing potential dissidents.
After denying allegiance to the party and refusing to “volunteer” for service, Bilal received threats from faculty and subsequently left the university to avoid persecution.83
Bilal, like many other artists and intellectuals, lived in constant fear of the impending influences of Saddam’s regime. The censorship was a far cry from the rule of General
Abdul Kerim Qassim, who reigned in the post-Revolution years of the late 1950s. Under
82 Ibid., 65
83 Ibid., 68. Many Iraqis were forced into the Ba’ath Party under threats of torture or death. 61
Qassim, the profile of Iraqi artists increased through the commissioning of public artworks and the foundation of public art institutions, including the National Museum of
Modern Art.84 Now under the rule of Hussein, censorship diminished decades of artistic prosperity and intellectual exploration.
Bilal spent time between Kufa and Naja, hiding from Ba’athist party members.
During the bombings of Kufa by Saddam’s troops, Bilal stayed behind and witnessed the destruction of his home.85 Fearing for his life as Saddam’s troops advanced, he fled and eventually ended up passing near the border city of Safwan on the Kuwait-Iraq border
(Figures 10, 11). Bilal recalls the following about traversing the Kuwaiti border on foot, exhausted and seeking refuge during his first night in the refugee camp:
We were abruptly awakened by the shouts of soldiers shining flashlights in our
eyes. I thought they were Iraqis at first, but soon realized they were
Kuwaitis…before we could explain ourselves, they beat us with braided cables,
screaming at us the whole time.86
Life in the Kuwaiti refugee camps was precarious, albeit short-lived. By April of 1991, the United States, in conjunction with the United Nations High Commission, approved refugee evacuation flights to the Rafha Refugee Camp in Saudi Arabia (Figure 12).87
84 Ulrike al-Khamis, “An Historical Overview: 1900s-1990s,” in Strokes of Genius: Contemporary Iraqi Art, eds. Maysaloun Faraj (London, Saqi Books, 2001), 25-26.
85 Bilal and Lydersen, Shoot an Iraqi, 99.
86 Ibid., 109-110.
87 Alan Sipress, “U.S. Flies Iraqi Refugees to Saudi Arabian Camp,” Philly News (Pennsylvania), April 29, 1991, http://articles.philly.com/1991-04-29/news/25780432_1_iraqi-refugees-rafha-saudi-arabia. 62
Unlike Kuwait, the camp in Rafha provided stable shelter and more protection from
Ba’ath Party members and Republican Guard spies. For Bilal, the camp signified a transition from the “conflict zone” of his familial homeland in Kufa, Iraq. He recalls the basic comforts provided during his early residence, including food and sanitation.
However, with the massive influx of refugees, the camp “deteriorated rapidly,” namely because the Sunni Muslims running the camp oppressed the Shia Muslims arriving from
Iraq.88 Subpar sanitary conditions and food shortages plagued inhabitants, coupled with abuse, violence, and corruption.
Figure 10: Ration distribution, refugee camp near Safwan, 1991.
88 Bilal and Lydersen, Shoot an Iraqi, 114.
63
Figure 11: Soldiers check identification documents from refuges, Safwan, Iraq-Kuwait border, 1991
Figure 12: Photograph from the Rafha Refugee Camp in Saudi Arabia, c. 1991
64
Bilal spent over two years in the camps, aiding in construction projects and sanitary work to pass the time. He built a small home, eventually turning the space into an art studio for camp refugees. Though the space of the camp was meant to be a refuge from the oppression experienced under Saddam, Bilal and other artists were still censored by religious fundamentalists who viewed his art projects as dangerous. By the end of
1992, the United States agreed to open visas for refugees seeking asylum, and Bilal was granted approval to immigrate to the US, eventually settling in Albuquerque, New
Mexico. In an interview in 2008, Bilal explained:
…though my consciousness and memories are forever connected to the conflict
zone and is Iraq (and so many other war-torn countries across the world), my
present reality has become the same comfort zone. I have a warm bed in a
comfortable apartment, a hot cup of coffee…I live in complete comfort and
security, even when I am constantly worried about my family and my people.89
The demarcation between these two “zones” signifies a dichotomy of opposing spaces, one based in trauma, and the latter as a space for reclamation and reflection. Bilal’s physical body serves to explicate the tension, using the Internet to expose issues of suppression still present in his homeland.
Domestic Tension (2007), Virtual Jihadi (2008), and 3rdi (2010-2011)
The role of technology, violence, and trauma present in Bilal’s early life serves as the primary fodder for his performances. In this section, each of the following works,
89 Alan Ingram, “Experimental Geopolitics: Wafaa Bilal’s Domestic Tension,” The Geographical Journal 178, no. 2 (June 2012): 126, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1475-4959.2011.00455.x/pdf. 65
Domestic Tension (2007), Virtual Jihadi (2008), and 3rdi (2010-2011) will serve to connect the biographical elements of Bilal’s life to theoretical applications of trauma experienced through primary testimony and exposure to war. Through his performance pieces, Bilal addresses the bifurcation between the homeland of Iraq and the host-land of the United States. Each piece will first be examined through format, methodology, and dissemination. This section will then examine how each piece works through the various traumas present in Bilal’s oeuvre, harnessing components from the “conflict zone” of his past to the “comfort zone” of the present.
Confronting Solitude Online: Domestic Tension
In 2007, Bilal witnessed a television interview by an American airman discussing the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) during the Iraq War. A missile or UAV aircraft ordered from the United States could reach the city of Baghdad by remote guidance systems.90 Bilal’s family suffered a direct result of the transnational penetration of UAV technology. In 2004, he lost his brother Haji in a UAV strike attack, after US military intelligence surveyed him and a group of Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahaid Army brandishing AK-47s at a border crossing in Iraq.91 Like many Iraqis, Bilal speculates that
Haji was forced into working for the Mahaid Army under threats of violence propagated
90 Ingram, “Experimental Geopolitics,” 126.
91 Ibid., 125. Moqtada al-Sadr is responsible for leading Shia Muslim terrorist groups, beginning in 2003. He is also responsible for training civilians in anti-American rhetoric and committing violence against US and coalition troops. The Mahaid Army was originally organized by al-Sadr to counter US forces after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. After the death of Saddam, al-Sadr remained in power of the Mahaid Army, renaming Saddam City to Sadr City. His army is known for some of the most violent attacks against Iraqi civilians and Western troops. He currently resides in Iran. 66 by Saddam and al-Sadr. He recalls the following, using testimony from friends and primary witnesses:
Haji [was] involved in working as a contractor with [the] Americans…They
thought, well, this is going to free them from the dictator [Saddam]. But the
opposite happened. Americans were in their barricades in their camp, leaving Iraq
to disintegrate into a chaos. And at the beginning, Haji helped in supplying just
some material for building. And as a consequence, he was labeled as a
collaborator by Muqtada al-Sadr. So, for one evening, to show good faith to the
people of Kufa and Muqtada al-Sadr, he stood in a checkpoint outside Kufa while
Americans were advancing. And at that point, that missile came and struck him,
and he died on the spot.92
Reports indicate that a piece of shrapnel penetrated his heart, killing him instantly. For
Bilal, the idea that his brother’s death resulted from UAV operators initiating strikes thousands of miles away in the United States, indicated a de-bordering of the warzone
(Figures 13, 14). In a sense, those living in the comfort zone penetrated the conflict zone from a safe distance, using long range weapons under the guidance of digital computer systems and manned via human interface. The flow of interaction from human to computer to machine back to human intrigued Bilal, specifically due to the actual disconnect between operator and victim. How does this disconnect between humans, bisected by technological devices, affect the implications of war?
92 Wafaa Bilal, interview with Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! March 9, 2010, http://www.democracynow.org/2010/3/9/105_000_tattoos_iraqi_artist_wafaa. 67
Figure 13: Interior space of a UAV console for MQ-1 Predator operations
Figure 14: Still image captured from a British Reaper UAV
68
To explicate this disconnection, Bilal created Domestic Tension to inform audiences about the plight of the Iraqi victim affected by modern warfare. For 31 days in
2007, Bilal performed the piece at the FlatFile Gallery in Chicago.93 The piece was created with assistance from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professor/artist Shawn
Lawson, and two professors from the Art Institute of Chicago, Ben Chang and Dan
Miller.94 Bilal secured the technology needed to create both the soft and hardware devices for the project. The hardware consisted of a mounted paintball gun attached to a robotic arm and an Easy input/output board (EZIO).95 From the EZIO board, external computing devices interacted with the robotic arm, controlling the direction of the paintball gun
(Figure 15).96 This device linked up to the software program via an online webpage. By logging onto www.wafaabilal.com, users could access the mainframe and read a list of instructions on how to interact with Bilal. Users could either choose to shoot Bilal with a paintball by simply clicking on the “shoot” button or chat via a text box (Figure 16).97
The actual space of the gallery served as Bilal’s home for the entirety of the performance. Two distinct sections were created in the space: on one side of the room, he
93 Ingram, “Experimental Geopolitics,” 126-128. The original title, Shoot an Iraqi was changed to Domestic Tension by the gallery owners. The owners feared the public may misconstrue the title to mean an Iraqi was being shot in the gallery with an actual gun.
94 Bilal and Lydersen, Shoot an Iraqi, 16.
95 One major issue with the piece centered on the legal limitations of using a paintball device within the city limits of Chicago. Though the piece used three separate guns for the performance, police and city officials did not stop the performance.
96 Paul Catanese, “What is the EZIO Board?” Director Online, http://www.director- online.com/buildArticle.php?id=943.
97 Bilal and Lydersen, Shoot an Iraqi, 18-20. 69 created a living area with a bed, lamp, desk, computer, chair, and table. Located across the living space, Bilal mounted the EZIO board and paintball gun. A movable Plexiglas screen was also placed within the room to assist Bilal with some reprieve from the constant barrage of bullets and to protect his computer. His daily interactions were recorded from a mounted camera used to document and update viewers on his psychological and physical conditions. A real-time webcam focused on the living quarters of the gallery, allowing users visibility into the space and the location of Bilal.
As users logged on to the webpage, a data-log sheet archived the coordinates of each user’s Internet protocol (IP) address, permitting Bilal access to the geographical location of each participant.
Figure 15: EZIO device, Domestic Tension, 2007 70
Figure 16: Mainpage screen shot from the Domestic Tension webpage
At first, one of the developers expressed concern about overuse and abuse of the gun by online participants. It was ultimately decided to permit unlimited access to the page, providing a platform for sadistic behavior to ensue. Video footage of the performance was posted on Youtube.com and transcripts of the chat sessions were archived.98 Regarding the role of cyberspace and usership in Domestic Tension, Bilal stated:
98 Ibid., 18-20. 71
In normal cybergames the player[s] controls their own character[s], whereas in
Domestic Tension they could attack me, but not ultimately control me. In other
words, they could take shots at me, but they could not become me.99
His body became a site in twofold: one, as a biological, corporeal entity and the other as a user-driven avatar, affected by the control of online users (Figure 17).
Figure 17: Days of continuous shooting take a toll on Bilal, Domestic Tension, 2007
99 Ibid., 22. 72
Via the digital interface, users from all over the world entered www.wafaabilal.com, committing a variety of acts, both sadist and merciful. A typical data log reads as follows:
Shoot him again for jesus.
Send him to guantanamo.
I want to blast him again.
Where’s the towelhead?
Holy crap. I just saw him run across the room. He genuinely looked
frightened. I hope he doesn’t get hurt at some point.
This guy has heart.
Ohshit it’s that guy that’s on the run with bin laden.100
Recorded in the archive and located through their IP addresses, Bilal recorded participants from 136 countries, coupled with 80 million hits on the webpage.101
Indirectly, Bilal’s piece created a live, global community, harnessing users from a multitude of geographical, political, and economic spheres.
Triggering Traumatic Memory
Within the gallery, the constant barrage of paintballs triggered Bilal’s PTSD, causing him to feel overwhelmed and paranoid within the space. In one of his video commentary pieces, he recalled feeling trapped within the confines of the gallery, a reference to his experience during the Persian Gulf War bombings in his hometown of
100 Ibid., 80-81.
101 Bilal, “Invisible Mirror,” 96-97. 73
Kufa (Figure 18). When compared to the formation of psychic trauma, the repetitive, mediatized violence enacted on the body of Bilal unearthed past traumas and memories:
The traumatic event is that which is experienced ‘too soon,’ too quickly,’ or too
fast…however the event may be relived, with great clarity, through such insistent,
involuntary phenomena as instructive thoughts, nightmares, flashbacks, or
hallucinations. It is the post-traumatic repetition of the Real that was missed at the
time trauma belatedly manifests itself.102
By reliving the violent barrage of bullets, in a repetitive cycle for 31 days, the traumatic experience became both a psychic experience of suffering and a mediatized spectacle, disseminated live through the World Wide Web.
Figure 18: Bilal seeks cover from a barrage of paintballs Domestic Tension, 2007
102 Paul Crosthwaite, Trauma, Postmodernism, and the Aftermath of World War II (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 35-36. 74
With regards to witnessing Bilal’s physical and psychological abuse, the liveness of the performance affected user-participant via the online platform. According to Philip
Auslander, the notion of liveness within the mediated space of the Internet changes the way in which the performer and audience interact. He states:
When a website is first made available to users, it is said to ‘go live.’ As is true of
the computer, the liveness of a website resides in the feedback loop we initiate: it
responds to our input to create a feeling of interaction arguably comparable
(without being identical) to our interactions with other people.103
Accordingly, Auslander suggests that technological innovations like cyberspace change the traditional notion of “live” performance.104 For Bilal, this notion applies directly to
Domestic Tension: how does the Internet allot for liveness? Auslander continues by affirming that:
…spatial co-presence has become less and less important for a performance to be
defined as live, while temporal simultaneity has remained an important
characteristic, to the point that technologies that enable us to maintain real-time
contact with others across distances that are thought to provide experiences of
liveness.105
103 Philip Auslander, “Live and Technologically Mediated Performance,” in The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies, ed. Tracy C. Davis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 111-112.
104 Auslander, “Live and Technologically Mediated Performance,” 112.
105 Ibid., 112. 75
In Domestic Tension, the geographical distance between user/participant and Bilal compresses through the digital edifice. Only when the piece enters an archival platform, posted on youtube.com, does the performance lose the “liveness component,” relying only on textbox comments.
Michael Laguerre argues that digital space connects global users/participants; however there are consequences that exist inside the cyber frame.106 Defined as a space for geographically or psychologically displaced individuals within the cyber frame, the digital diaspora serves as a mechanism for promoting connectivity and accessibility for the global community. Laguerre explains how digital space affects diasporic populations:
A digital diaspora is an immigrant group or descendant of an immigrant
population that uses IT connectivity to participate in virtual networks of contacts
for a variety of political, economic, social, religious, and communicated purposes
that, for the most part, may concern the homeland, the host land, or both,
including its own trajectory abroad.107
Unlike diasporas located in actual or physical space, cyberspace creates a common placeness for global users living within sites of displacement or outside areas of origin.108
106 Michael S. Laguerre, “Digital Diaspora: Definition and Models,” in Diasporas in the New Media Age: Identity, Politics, and Community, eds. Andoni Alonso and Pedro J. Oiarzabal, (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2010), 50.
107 Laguerre, “Digital Diaspora: Definition and Models,” 50.
108 Furthered by Andoni Alonso and Pedro Oiarzabal, the “digital diasporas differ from virtual communities and nations because in digital diasporas, there are strong ties with real nations…” Within the performance, Bilal’s relived his experiences from the “conflict zone” within the space of the “comfort zone.” For Bilal, the homeland remains in flux, suspended by the brutal memories of genocide and torture under Saddam’s rule. Coupled with his diagnosis of PTSD from the periods of torture he experienced in Kufa and Baghdad, he remains connected to the collective trauma experienced by Iraqis during the early 1990s, however individualized through his own diasporic movement away from the original site of trauma. 76
Though Bilal sought to interact with users through his webpage, the premise of his performance piece resulted in unforeseen violence from participants across the world.
At one point during the performance, social media site Digg.com advertised the link to
Domestic Tension, causing hundreds of users to the site. One user stated:
You just hit digg. Get ready to crash
You just hit digg, protect your nads!!109
As Laguerre mentioned, the digital space connects global participants in a nexus of interactive exchanges; however, there are consequences that exist inside the cyber frame.110 By reposting the link to Bilal’s performance piece, the community of users expanded, facilitating a larger global audience of participants and collaborators. While the spread of participation diversified the community of users on www.wafaabilal.com, it also uncovered the vulnerability of the community by exposing Bilal to malicious users whose sole intent was destruction rather than facilitating dialogue. Coupled with the threat of sadistic participants, the presence of “hackers,” or users seeking to evade digital securities and create disorder within the cyber frame, became apparent after the site was reposted on other social networking sites (Figures 19, 20). 111 By expanding the network of users, hackers infiltrated the software network and created an automatic code for the paintball gun to shoot repeatedly at Bilal. Tens of thousands of paintballs sprayed the
109 Bilal, Shoot an Iraqi. 79.
110 Laguerre, “Digital Diaspora: Definition and Models,” 50.
111 Richard Power, “The Dangers Confronting Computer Users, Corporations, and Governments, “PBS Frontline, last modified 2013, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/hackers/risks/dangers.html. 77 interior of the gallery for days, preventing Bilal from sleeping or eating. 112 Domestic
Tension partially removed Bilal as the primary focus of the performance, elevating the interaction of users, whether malicious or empathetic, to active collaborators within the digital platform.113
Because of the mass migration of users to his webpage, the piece no longer focused primarily on the plight of the Iraqi war victim. Bilal’s performance enabled users from various locations around the world to interact as members of the global community.
With regards to the outcome of Domestic Tension, Bilal recalls:
Personal narratives were then inserted into the project as a whole, and strands of
dialogue began to inform each other –constantly and continually changing the
face and outcome of the piece. Instead of being told what the eventual outcome of
the project would be, everyone was given equal opportunity to participate in its
writing.114
Thus, the influx of global user presence reinforced the community created at www.wafaabilal.com. The controversial nature of the piece permitted users a platform to express personal grievances and protests concerning the project and the war in Iraq. The site facilitated conversations between users and Bilal, offering a platform for individuals to discuss stories about surviving war. Referencing the “invisible mirror” metaphor,
112 Bilal, Shoot an Iraqi. 79-82. Eventually, Bilal disconnected the EZIO board from the paintball gun after the automatic hacking software became too intense.
113 Bilal, “Invisible Mirror: Aggression and the Thumb Generation Response,” 95.
114 Bilal, “Invisible Mirror,” 97. 78 participants used the site to reflect upon personal prejudices and issues with violence, elevating the performance to a conversational platform for discussing the after-effects of war-related trauma. 115
Figure 19: Paintball insurgency, Domestic Tension, 2007
115 Bilal, Shoot an Iraqi, 79. 79
Figure 20: Screen shot of a post-performance Youtube postings of Domestic Tension
Manufacturing Violence in Virtual Jihadi
In response to his experiences in Iraq during the reign of Saddam, Bilal created
Virtual Jihadi to focus awareness on victims caught in spaces of terror. The piece serves as a reminder of the accessibility of telepresent violence in the age of the digital battlefield. As a witness to the destruction of his hometown, Bilal’s experience with
UAV-initiated bombings thematically informs his work (Figure 21). 116 Bilal exemplifies this tension in a personal memory from his youth:
So I stayed in Kufa through weeks of US bombings that destroyed the whole
city’s infrastructure, and most of the country’s electricity generation,
communications and bridges…the reverberations shook the house and all the
116 Ibid., 76. 80
surrounding buildings, sending tremors through my bones…there were pieces of
flesh and twisted metal everywhere.117
Unlike Domestic Tension, the premise of Virtual Jihadi centers on the role of an avatar to commit acts of violence within digital space. Virtual Jihadi seeks to connect the actual user to the digital space occupied by the avatar. The objective: kill American soldiers, find George W. Bush, and assassinate him before time runs out. A violent act must be committed by the user-participant to fulfil the objective of the performance. In order to shoot an American soldier or George W. Bush, the participant must engage the game and disconnect from the embedded moral and emotional onus of the body.
Figure 21: Photograph of an MQ-9 Reaper
117 Ibid., 73. 81
This disconnect remains at the center of Virtual Jihadi. With regards to modern warfare, the relationship between actual users and virtual entities began during the
Persian Gulf War. Often referred to as the first “postmodern war,” the Persian Gulf War challenged traditional modes of experiencing warfare, violence, and trauma.118 In his controversial text, The Gulf War did not take place, Jean Baudrillard suggests that the dissemination of trauma and violence experienced during the war “did not take place.”119
He argued that television and radio broadcasts become “mirages” created in unreal, uninhabitable environments.120 Informed by recent developments in telepresent technology, Baudrillard’s statement regarding the Persian Gulf War emphasizes the distancing of the war zone from actual, traumatic spaces to sterile, technologically- constructed settings. Seated at consoles, US military personnel remotely launch precision-guided munitions (PGMs) and UAVs from facilities in the United States to targets in Iraq without physical interaction with perpetrators (or victims).121 These consoles act as remote gaming units, reinforcing the moniker, “video game war,” to describe the technological format.
How are the lines between actual military operations and simulated games blurred within the digital edifice? To explicate this issue, two games released during the Persian
118 Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War did not take place, trans. Paul Patton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 61-62.
119 Baudrillard, The Gulf War, 61-62.
120 Ibid.,61-62.
121 Andrew Callam, “Drone Wars: Armed Unmanned Aerial Vehicles,” International Affairs Review 18, no. 3 (Winter 2010): http://www.iar-gwu.org/node/144. During the Persian Gulf War, it was the first time Republican Army troops surrendered to a drone aircraft. 82
Gulf War parallel the console-based remote guidance systems used by the US military in the early 1990s. Origin Systems created Wing Commander in 1990, a flight-simulator game. In Wing Commander, the objective centers on achieving the highest rank within the fictitious Terran Confederation.122 From a perspectival position, the participant engages the game through the lens of an avatar, complete with a call-sign. The view- screen within the virtual cockpit serves as the main source of witnessing incoming insurgents. Once insurgents enter the screen, the participant checks the left and right video display units (VDUs), speedometer, radar systems, armor and shield indicators, and fuel systems.123 The user experiences the game without creating a digital body, instead using pre-set characters to perform necessary tasks. Within the virtual cockpit, the user only views the avatar’s right hand and upper thighs (Figure 22).124 Unlike later games where the full body of the avatar appears, the bodies in Wing Commander exist as partial extensions of the actual participant.
122 “Wing Commander: Special Edition,” ed. Warren Spector, Clawmarks 1, no. 4 (1990): http://download.wcnews.com/ files/manuals/Wing%20Commander%20-%20Claw%20Marks.pdf.
123 “Wing Commander,” http://download.wcnews.com
124 Ibid. 83
Figure 22: Screen shot from Origin Systems Wing Commander
Released in 1991, Operation: Desert Storm (ODS) became the second game created in the midst of the Persian Gulf War. Bungie Software created ODS as a rudimentary, top-down, tank-simulator video game (Figure 23).125 With only a few thousand units sold during the first year of the war, the game simulates the desert terrain of Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia and Iraq. The game also comes equipped with a glossary of military terminology available to the users. As the user begins the game, a simulated “Pentagon Security Clearance” frame opens, asking participants to answer a trivia question in order to follow the mission. Once the user correctly answers the question, the narrative continues. The main objective of the game is to correctly
125 Manouk Akopyan, “Bungie Jump Up to Disney,” Yerevan Magazine, November 5, 2013, http://manoukakopyan.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Alex-Seropian-Web-PDF.pdf. Bungie Software developed the Halo series. 84 answer trivia questions and to proceed to the final battle scene where the participant defeats the over-sized head of Saddam Hussein.126
Figure 23: Image displaying the format of Operation: Desert Storm (ODS) game, 1991
In both Wing Commander and ODS, many of the control units and terminology mimic the format of actual console devices used to operate UAVs by the US military.
Considering the game’s fictitious, virtual environment, the simulated space and actual warzone converge through user intervention. To reference Diane Carr’s theory of gaming, “the console umbilically links the off-screen participant to the onscreen world
126 Akopyan, “Bungie Jump Up to Disney,” http://manoukakopyan.com. 85 and enables their agency within that world.”127 The participant controls the digital body within the gaming environment, permitting the avatar to execute actions controlled by the user. Thus, the dialogue enacted between avatar and participant forms a relationship that does not exist in actual war “games.” For operators of PGMs and UAVs, their actual bodies serve as the direct link between the destructive device and the perpetrator. Their commands do not filter through an avatar, but exist as an extension of the physical body.
Playing Virtual Jihadi
Though Wing Commander and ODS predate Bilal’s digital performance game, the method of procuring responses in fictitious, virtual environments remains at the crux of his work. Bilal’s work on Virtual Jihadi relies on the response and interaction of the viewer, performed en masse via the Internet or digital platform. His artist statement reads:
I think the objective is to engage people. But now more than ever, artists have a
lot more powerful tools to play with…[A]rt does not have to be confined to a
physical space, the gallery or museums, but now we have the power of the
Internet, when we could enter people’s homes and offices and engage them in the
dialogue. Art is not only there to educate. Art is there to agitate, as well.128
Bilal attempts to “agitate” people within comfort zones to make aware the traumatic conditions in Iraq and other war-torn regions. Exemplified in Virtual Jihadi, the
127 Jon Dovey and Helen W. Kennedy, Game Cultures: Computer Games as New Media (Berkshire: Open University Press, 2006), 91.
128 Roxanne Samer, “Wafaa Bilal: Art as Agitation,” Gender Across Borders, April 16, 2010, http://www.genderacrossborders.com/2010/04/16/wafaa-bilal-art-as-agitation/. 86 participant learns how technology repositions/reconfigures the role of the perpetrator.
Unlike past wars where the perpetrator remained physically connected to the battlefield, in the virtual age, the perpetrator may commit violent acts thousands of miles away. The interaction no longer centers on human presence, but on simulated, virtual spectatorship and intervention.
Bilal created Virtual Jihadi in 2009. He based the game on the schematics from
Quest for Saddam, a rudimentary first-person shooter game. Typical of first-person shooter games, participants witness the perspective of the digital character they are
“playing” within the space of the game.129 In Quest for Saddam, the individual gamer hunts down a cyber-version of Saddam Hussein, killing digital terrorists in the process
(Figure 24).130 At the start of the game, the user enters cyber-Iraq, performing the role of an American soldier shooting terrorists and maneuvering terrain designed to mimic real terrorist training facilities.131 The final objective: find cyber-Saddam and to shoot him using a variety of weapons collected throughout the game. Along the way, the gamer must decide which characters to shoot and which to manipulate in order to progress to the next level. Once the user discovers cyber-Saddam, the gamer must assassinate the character using the body of the avatar as the catalyst for performing the final, violent act.
129 Zach Whalen, “Quest for Bush/ Quest for Saddam: Content vs. Context,” Gameology, last modified September 26, 2006, http://www.gameology.org/reviews/quest_for_bush_quest_for_saddam_content_vs_context.
130 Brian Boyko, “Interview: Wafaa Bilal casts himself as terrorist in Virtual Jihadi,” Geeks are Sexy, last modified 2012, http://www.geeksaresexy.net/2008/ 03/03/ interview-wafaa-bilal-casts-himself-as-terrorist- in-virtual-jihadi/.
131 Whalen, “Quest for Bush/ Quest for Saddam,” http://www.gameology.org/. 87
Figure 24: Main menu page, Quest for Saddam, 2003
By the mid-2000s, the Global Islamic Media Front obtained a copy of Quest for
Saddam and changed the tonal appearance, visage, and clothing of the American soldiers
(Figures 25, 26). The role of protagonists switched from US troops to terrorists. The title also changed to Quest for Bush, reflecting the role reversal of the game’s characters. 132
This appropriation also reversed the objective of the game: instead of killing cyber-
Saddam, the new goal centered on the assassination of cyber-President George W.
Bush.133 By obtaining the Global Islamic Media version of the game, Bilal created his
132 Ibid.
133 Boyko, ‘Interview,” http://www.geeksaresexy.net. 88 variation of the piece. In Virtual Jihadi, the participant plays Bilal as a digital terrorist
(Figure 27). In his version, users recruit members for Al Qaeda and aid in assassinating
President George W. Bush.134 The participant moves through the digital gaming field, using Bilal as an avatar to explore the cyber terrain and to attempt to fulfil the objective of the game.135 Like Quest for Saddam, the main goal of the game centers on annihilating enemy threats to the character. As the participant explores the digital terrain, the individual chooses to shoot virtual bodies of American soldiers while navigating the simulated combat zone.
Figure 25: Screen still from Quest for Saddam, 2003
134 Ibid. An hour before Bilal gave his talk at the opening of Virtual Jihadi, police shut down the exhibition due to ‘code violations.’ A month later, the exhibition lasted one day before Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute closed the exhibition.
135 Kate McKiernan, “Cease Fire: A Look a Virtual Jihadi,” The Escapist, last modified August 18, 2009, http://www.escapistmagazine.com /articles/view/issues/issue_215/6393-Cease-Fire-A-Look-at-Virtual- Jihadi. 89
Figure 26: Screen still from Quest for Saddam (final phase of the game), 2003
Figure 27: Bilal’s avatar dressed as a terrorist in Virtual Jihadi, 2008 90
With regards to the participant’s reaction shooting avataric bodies, Virtual Jihadi focuses on the desensitization of the individual’s emotional response. In Virtualpolitik,
Elizabeth Losh posits the following:
In the virtual environment of traumatic combat…the mnemonic assets acquired in
moving through the 3-D world are associated with emotional rather then
intellectual value systems. In the final analysis…virtual reality simulation is
designed to solve a much more difficult problem than merely remembering
traumatic circumstances, since the user must ultimately also distance him…from
these violent events by relegating them to the past using the discursive device of
the personal narrative.136
Whereas virtual trauma signifies a trend in the changing edifice of technology in the post-
9/11 era, some cyber-communities of gamers working within virtual space experience a level of disconnection.137 Similar to the manner in which trauma experienced a virtualization, virtual space removes the participant from direct interaction with victims, simulated or real (Figures 28, 29). As technology progresses and further removes the actual body from violent environments, do our impulses and responses feel genuine or are they simulated by-products of the virtual gaming environment?
136 Elizabeth Losh, Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2009), 110.
137 Redfield, The Rhetoric of Terror, 50-51. 91
Figure 28: A Quest for Bush screen still, 2006
Figure 29: Image from Virtual Jihadi, 2008
92
In Virtual Jihadi, a relationship forms between the actual user and the avatar
“played” within the game. The participant views the gaming field through the perspective of the avatar, committing violent acts from the vision field of the digital body. To posit this reaction within the context of the video game, Mark Hansen suggests that the affective response derives from a synesthetic reaction to the violence of the game:
An affective-overflow occurs in our bodies when we are unable to correlate the
sensations generated by the video game with some appropriate action on our
parts…in contrast to Deleuze’s typology, affection here is not a modality of the
cinematic image, but rather a “faculty” of our embodied singularity, and the
source of our affective crisis is not an opening of the cinematic image to the force
of time, but the concrete excess of our singular bodies.138
This “overflow” created by the participants acts as an extension of the corporeal response to the digital images. As the participants commit violent acts, they are forced to react and consider their actions within the game. The excessive incongruity of “feeling” through the avatar reinforces Hansen’s notion of overflow.139 The sensations produced by shooting the digital body of an American soldier in Virtual Jihadi do not necessarily reflect the corporeal reaction of the user. Instead, the affective responses exist within a system of excess. Thus, the user’s reaction exists as phenomena between actual, physical impulses to synesthetic responses. How can one quantify this response when the very nature of affect remains unquantifiable? As Hansen further articulates: “By actualizing
138 Mark B.N. Hansen, Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media (New York: Routledge, 2006). 167.
139 Hansen, Bodies in Code, 169. 93 the virtual dimensions of the artwork, the viewer-participant simultaneously triggers a virtualization of her body, an opening onto her own ‘virtual dimension.’”140 The “virtual dimension” becomes a space for the body to perform responses via the avatar. Thus, virtual space permits users to explore affective and physiological responses generated by avatars via the video game.
Virtual Jihadi’s ability to generate responses from participants, viewers, and users strengthens the synesthetic nature of technology as a vehicle for producing affective experience (Figure 30). The original exhibition site received numerous protests. Some of the protesters accused Bilal of terrorism, calling the game a “pro-terrorist piece.”141 The affective response generated by non-participants of the game added a new dimension to the work’s performance. Though Bilal used Virtual Jihadi to procure a reaction from audiences and users, his work exemplifies a disjuncture between both spaces of participation. As a participant, the impulse to commit violence within the space of the game affectively provokes emotions, reactions, and subjective experiences. The user does not drop actual bombs on civilians or shoot actual American soldiers; however, these actions generate a response. Does this virtual, traumatic experience enable the user to empathize with Iraqi victims? Harnessing the concept of virtual trauma, Bilal’s game disturbs this notion by examining how technology replaces the direct link between individuals in actual space and the body of the avatar in the virtual realm. The simulated,
140 Ibid., 144.
141 Ibid., 144. 94 virtual edifice serves as an alternate space for experiencing violence, removed from actual space by the gamer and separated via the screen.
Figure 30: Menu still, Virtual Jihadi, 2008
The Traumatized Body: Bilal’s 3rdi
Like his performance in Domestic Tension, Bilal returns to the use of his body as the main source for activation, mutilation, and traumatic intervention. 142 In 3rdi, Bilal
142 Guillermo Gomez- Pena, “Culturas-In-Extremis: Performing Against the Cultural Backdrop of the Mainstream Bizarre,” in The Performance Studies Reader, ed. Henry Bial (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004), 352.
95 had a digital camera surgically implanted to the back of his head using titanium rods embedded in his skull to support the device. A USB cable connected the camera to a laptop held by Bilal. Through live video feeds recorded from the camera, he archived still images and recordings and uploaded the content to www.3rdi.me (Figures 31, 32).143 As the content uploaded, users interacted with the piece online, participating in the performance via cyberspace. Bilal’s body served as an unfiltered recording device, tracing his movements through various spaces and archiving his daily interactions.
The piece originated as an installation commission from the Mathaf (Museum of
Modern Art) in Doha, Qatar in 2010 as part of the Told/Untold/Retold exhibition.144
Using three separate spaces within Mathaf, participants started by walking through a private entryway preceding the main exhibition space. Inside the small entryway, users could read the artist’s statement and view a short documentary about 3rdi. The second room presented the viewer with a large photograph of the camera embedded on the posterior of Bilal’s head. Participants walked around the head, entering an area rigged with LCD screens. Each screen displayed an image/segment recorded from 3rdi. As patrons walked towards the screens, sensors reacted to the movement of the participant, turning the screen white and obfuscating the image to the periphery. This affected the visibility and clarity of the images, much like gazing out of the corner of one’s eye while walking down the street. The third section of the installation presented the participant with a live-feed of the camera mounted on Bilal’s head.
143 Wafaa Bilal, “3rdi,” http://www.3rdi.me/.
144 Ibid., http://www.3rdi.me/. 96
Figure 31: Bilal receiving his camera implant for 3rdi, 2010
97
Figure 32: Wafaa Bilal, 3rdi, 2010
For Bilal, the camera apparatus acted as a lens, highlighting the performer as narrator. He often cites Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller” as inspiration for his performance of 3rdi:
Benjamin has described the storyteller as one ‘who could let the wick of his life
be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story’…In this way I become
locked to the story as its teller, passing the interpretive mode to an audience with
little context so it may be transformed for their subjective interactions and
subsequent expressions. Using this narrative triangle, the work will comment on 98
ways in which imagery is used for the telling and retelling of stories, whether they
belong to us or we make them ours.145
Bilal’s technically-fused body promotes actual interactions with users. The placement of the camera on the back of Bilal’s head serves to “capture images that are denoted rather then connoted, a technological-biological image.”146 Therefore, the body and camera merge into one cybernetic entity. 3rdi promotes the relationship as a symbiotic platform for connecting participants to Bilal via the Internet.
Four Dimensions of 3rdi
The piece may be thought of as a division into four main dimensions: the digital, the corporeal, the public, and the private. Each dimension provides the participant various levels of experience, using both the Internet and body of Bilal as sites for social engagement.
The first dimension, the digital, serves as the main storage space for capturing information filmed in real time via the implanted camera. Like Domestic Tension, the images and footage captured from the camera remain available in an online archive and accessible for mass dissemination via Bilal’s personal webpage. Throughout the performance, the camera recorded still images every minute during the day, transmitting the data for participant-viewers to observe online. Many of the images appear abstracted, blurred, or incomprehensible based on the pace and movement of Bilal in real time. Each
145Ibid., http://www.3rdi.me/.
146 Ibid., http://www.3rdi.me/. In the case of 3rdi, Bilal developed an infection around the implant site and had to have the device removed. His actual body “rejected” the digital body. 99 image- appears with a set of coordinates – longitude and latitude – and a time stamp of
Bilal’s movement throughout places like New York and Indonesia (Figures 33, 34, 35).
The information was logged and data- archived in order to permit participant-viewers a temporal and spatial map of Bilal’s movements throughout the day. As the viewer, the images are only visible once they are captured by the camera from Bilal’s head.
Figure 33: Webpage still image taken from the camera implant, 3rdi, 2010-2011
100
Figure 34: Image still from 3rdi, 2010-2011
Figure 35: Street scene captured from 3rdi, 2010-2011
101
One of the main drives for capturing footage from the posterior of his body presents a twofold issue: one regarding blind space and the second involving the ephemerality of memory. Bilal states the following with regards to his 3rdi:
During my journey from Iraq to Saudi Arabia, on to Kuwait and then the U.S., I left
many people and places behind. The images I have of this journey are inevitably
ephemeral, held as they are in my own memory. Many times while I was in transit
and chaos the images failed to fully register, I did not have the time to absorb them.
Now, in hindsight, I wish I could have recorded these images so that I could look
back on them, to have them serve as a reminder and record of all the places I was
forced to leave behind and may never see again.147
The experiences in Iraq and the refugee camps left Bilal with incomprehensible traumas, including memories that remain obfuscated by temporal amnesia. He states, “the 3rdi arises from a need to objectively capture my past as it slips behind me from a non- confrontational point of view.”148 Some of the memories include violent events, like the physical abuse from the refugee camp in Kuwait. However, juxtaposed to these violent memories, banal, mundane experiences also fill the excess-moments between traumatic events. 3rdi permits Bilal to capture the mundane while also storing these moments as a type of digitized memory, carefully logged, classified, and disseminated based on time and location. The digital component permits the artist and participant-viewers access to
147 Ibid., http://www.3rdi.me/.
148 Ibid., http://www.3rdi.me/. 102 spaces otherwise hidden within the periphery, archived and available for reexamining online.
The second dimension within 3rdi focuses on the body of the artist. Like
Domestic Tension, an element of personal, corporeal trauma acts upon the body of the artist. The process of taking a mechanical device and inserting the hardware onto the body requires a form of mutilation and physical distress. The process of grafting the camera onto the skull of Bilal required a level of commitment 24 hours a day, seven days a week. To mount the device, Bilal travelled to Los Angeles to a piercing and body modification studio that specialized in this type of transdermal implantation.149 In order to hold the camera in place, three titanium plates were surgically inserted into the center of the parietal bone on his skull, fastened with the aid of screws. A camera was then mounted to the plates and a wire connected the device to a laptop secured in a bag next to
Bilal.
Unlike the projection and accumulation of the archival images within the digital platform, Bilal’s body revealed the limitations of technological interventions on the body.
In cyber studies, the marriage between body and technology is a precarious position.
When the body is maimed, ill, or incapacitated, the addition of technological components may be viewed as a positive addition to normalize the body to homeostasis.150 For
149 Ashley Rawlings, “Remote Repercussions: Wafaa Bilal, ArtAsia Pacific Magazine, (March/April 2011): http://images.driscollbabcock.com/www_driscollbabcock_com/Bilal_Art_Asia_Pacific_Mar_Apr_2011.pd f
150 In this context, the “normalized” body refers to a body hindered by amputation, diseases, or infection that results in the loss of extremity, mobility, or physical dislocation. 103 instance, the addition of a mechanized prosthetic leg equalizes the gait of an amputee or the implantation of a pacemaker controls the heart rate. However, when a mechanized component is added to an otherwise normalized body, the result yields a different response. In the case of Bilal and the implant, the body became a site of surplus in terms of technological advancement. The surplus permitted Bilal to see an otherwise concealed point of view, with the added ability to recall via a digitally archived database. The common definition used for this type of person is a cyborg.
The cyborg, according to Donna Haraway, serves as a hybrid entity, merging elements of the biological and mechanical within the space of the body.151 The cyborg challenges identity, namely by absorbing foreign elements into the body as means to improve or subvert functionality. In the case of his implanted camera, Bilal sought to complicate the manner in which the body associates with the technological additions.
With regards to the merger between camera and body in 3rdi, the function of the mechanical device served as a political statement about the limits of the body. According to Charles Garoian and Yvonne Gaudelius,
Performance art enables us to use the cyborg metaphor to create personal
narratives of identity as both a strategy of resistance and as a means through
which to construct new ideas, images, and myths about ourselves living in a
151 Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” in The Cybercultures Reader, eds. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy (London: Routledge, 2000), 292-293. 104
technological world…In doing so, the performance of the self as cyborg
represents an overt political act of resistance in the digital age.152
Even though the piece enhanced the visual field of Bilal, it remained a form of passive viewing. Instead of confronting his subjects on the street, the camera captured fleeting interactions, refusing direct engagement. Instead, the footage disseminated online in a digital archive. Only when uploaded to www.3rdi.me were participants permitted to interact with the images produced by the camera.
With regards to traumatic intervention on the artist’s body, the surgical implantation of the camera resulted in serious complications. After several months of use, the skin around the camera became infected, forcing Bilal to seek medical attention to avoid serious medical issues. The infection may be viewed as an important byproduct of the performance – a serendipitous result from the marriage between human and machine.
Bilal recalled panic attacks and anxiety from the camera, namely from the discomfort of the implant and the pain from the metal rods. In this sense, this dimension of the performance results in an incongruous relationship between the digital and the biological.
Building on the relationship between the digital and corporeal, the third dimension examines the role of public space. How does public intervention affect the performance? The role of the public varies within the performance, specifically how participants interact with the piece. One of the concerns centered on the invasion of privacy via the camera’s recording of unassuming subjects within the topography of the
152 Charles Garoian and Yvonne Gaudelius, “Cyborg Pedagogy: Performing Resistance in the Digital Age,” Studies in Art Education 42, no. 4 (Summer 2001): http://www.jstor.org/stable/132107, 337. 105 city of New York. Since 9/11, the digitized, spatial invasion of closed-circuit television cameras (CCTV) and aerial surveillance (UAVs) complicates privacy rights regarding federal use of public surveillance devices. For Bilal, the power of such surveillance arises from his personal experiences growing up in Iraq:
It's a region that endures double surveillance…People take it for granted that they
are being watched by their own governments, but they also have to endure the
surveillance of the US, so people there identify with what I'm trying to do.153
Public concern about the encroachment of digital surveillance increased with the inception of Yahoo, Bing, and Google map software. These applications add to debates about the rights of citizens and the definition of public versus private space. For Bilal, this issue serves as a byproduct of the camera’s intervention. According to J. MacGregor
Wise,
The entire universe also unfolds unnecessarily on your home screen…there is a
presence of the in-between-moments when there is little to no action or presence
of self, but of space…this is also [a] reference to the longue duree.154
At the center of 3rdi, viewers find themselves able to relocate images captured from the camera into a space of personal consumption. The results from the public recordings is a
“making aware” of the banality of the everyday. No significant acts of violence,
153 Rawlings, “Remote Repercussions,” 5.
154 J. McGregor Wise, “An Immense and Unexpected Field of Action: Webcams, Surveillance, and Everyday Life,” in Global Visual Culture: An Anthology, ed. Zoya Kocur (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell Ltd., 2011), 197. 106 disruption, or dissonance is recorded by the cameras (save for an occasional jaywalker).155
The role of sousveillance bleeds into the fourth dimension of the performance, namely the role of private space. 3rdi uses a type of sousveillance or the recording and dissemination of material by the citizen, rather than a governing state of power or institution. The participant possesses the ability to edit banal imagery produced from the camera, re-visiting the digital, corporeal, and public spaces and re-contextualizing meaning. Since the closing of the exhibition at the Mataf, the only available footage of
3rdi remains online, largely viewed within the private space of the home or office by a single participant. When a user accesses http://www.3rdi.me/, an image greets the viewer, cropped and framed within the screen. The screen displays a sideways square, illuminated by the black border surrounding the shape. A city sky-line is visible in the lower portion of the illuminated space, suggesting an open window. In the upper left of the screen, a yellow target is placed above a map near the city of Bekasi in Indonesia.156
Next to the map segment, a red square displays an icon that opens into an archive of images from the day- in this case, day 369. A time stamp with the day, date, and time is placed next to the image archive. On the lower left portion of the screen, links to the extended archive of images, information about the performance, and a public forum/chat space remain available for users. The forum connects the public, permitting private users a conversation platform with other participant-users across the World Wide Web. Like in
155 Rawlings, “Remote Repercussions,” 4.
156 Bilal, “3rdi,” http://www.3rdi.me/. 107
Domestic Tension, the public forum connects users within private spaces, providing an exchange of ideas across the screenic medium.
Other than the forum, the performance remains limited to the webpage. Without knowledge about the objective, the page serves as a compilation of disconnected images with little to no narrative present or contextualization. It is up to the participant to create a chronological and spatial narrative of Bilal’s movements. Like Bilal’s other archived performance online, each private access to the page starts with a new narrative, unique to the user’s location, time, and place. One image may appear banal to one user, yet may evoke a memory or sense of placeness for another. This remains a constant theme throughout Bilal’s performances and politically-motivated works, serving as a tool for exploring the manner in which trauma is understood, experienced, conceptualized, and disseminated in the wake of modern warfare.
Conclusion
Using both digital and actual space, the performances by Bilal serve as a platform for exposing the relationship between technology and trauma. As evident in Domestic
Tension, Virtual Jihadi, and 3rdi, Bilal uses the digital platform as a means of engaging in dialogue with users and participants. Each piece selected in this chapter served to explicate the after-effects of trauma imparted on the artist through his direct exposure to violence/oppression during his early life in Iraq and subsequent movement to the United
States. However, even though he now lives within the physical space of the comfort zone, the remnants of the conflict zone still echo within many of his performances. Evident throughout his performances, fragments from his traumatic past surface as reminders of 108 past atrocities. Evident in the next chapter, artworks by Adel Abidin further engage the relationship between modern warfare and digital technology, using humor as a means of subverting and confronting trauma.
109
CHAPTER 3: TRAUMA, MEMORY, AND LAUGHTER: ADEL ABIDIN AND THE
PERFORMANCE OF SATIRE
As humans, we have a basic need to express ourselves. Art is the only tool that I use to express myself. So I begin at that level. But I also consider my viewers by trying to deliver the work in the most universal way as I can, so anyone from any background can feel my production of meaning and interact with it. I believe art is a social act and that the viewer needs to be involved in this process to complete the cycle of communication, but I never work for a specific audience. – Adel Abidin157 Introduction
A male gazes at the camera, positioned in the center of the frame dressed in a white thobe with a checkered keffiyeh covering his face. A large flag hangs behind the figure, juxtaposed against the static white wall. At first glance, the figure embodies the post-9/11 trope of an Al-Qaeda or Taliban terrorist, proselytizing radical religious ideologies to an idle audience (Figure 36). Considering the types of videos released to the public in the months after 9/11 and during the Iraq War, the Western viewer expects an assault of hateful rhetoric, aimed at condemning certain nations and religious ideologies.
Instead, the figure picks up a guitar and begins singing the following in English for three minutes and twenty-two seconds:
157 Adel Abidin, The Beauty of Conflict: Adel Abidin, interview by Erin Joyce, UltraUltra, December 7, 2012, http://www.ultraextra.org/interviews/2012/12/7/the-beauty-of-conflicts-adel-abidin. 110
Figure 36: Adel Abidin performs a rendition of This Land is Your Land, film still from Jihad, 2006
This land is your land, this land is my land, from California, to the New York
Island, from the Redwood forest, to the Gulf Stream waters, this land was made
for you and me.158
The figure sings a rendition of This Land is Your Land, an American folk tune written by
Woody Guthrie in 1944.159 Not only do the lyrics subvert the anticipated diatribe, but also the figure sings the song against the backdrop of a large American flag. Why utilize
158 Adel Abidin, “Jihad, 2006,” Adel Abidin, http://www.adelabidin.com/selected-works/jihad.
159 There are numerous versions of the song, beginning in 1944. Over the years, portions of the lyrics have changed, omitting components of the original. 111 quintessential American icons, like the song and the flag, to subvert, even satirize terrorist videos?160
Titled Jihad, the singer performing the piece is Iraqi-Finnish artist Adel Abidin.
In the piece, he uses contradictory signs to unearth issues of representation regarding
Arab/Arab- Muslims since 9/11. Using the performance by Abidin in Jihad and others like it, this chapter seeks to evaluate current methods of depicting traumatic acts influenced by war and terrorism. Using digital performance and installation art as a catalyst for examining these issues, the first portion of Chapter Three examines the traumatic effects produced by interrogation and execution videos proliferated during the
Iraq War. The content of these videos typically presents two distinct bodies at play: an
Arab terrorist harming a Western prisoner of war or an American soldier interrogating a suspected Arab terrorist. Unlike war footage produced by CNN or FoxNews, these types of videos were created without sanitized censorship. Many of these videos disseminate online, lacking minimal context; instead the viewer contextualizes and critically evaluates the subject without broadcast intervention. Evident in pieces like Cold Interrogation,
Jihad, and Abidin Travels: Welcome to Baghdad, the power of these videos challenge viewer perceptions about stereotypes outside the sterile space of mass media broadcasting. 161
160 Raymond Pun, “Digital Images and Visions of Jihad: Virtual Orientalism and the Distorted Lens of Technology,” CyberOrient 7, no (2013): www.cyberorient.net/article.do?articleId=8391.
161 William Pym, “A Protest Song: Adel Abidin,” ArtAsiaPacific 73 (May/June 2011): http://artasiapacific.com/Magazine/73/AProtestSong. 112
After an examination of these videos, the next two sections detail the power of humor and satire in the visual and performing arts, focusing on the role of humor as a means of disarming tragedy. The third part of Chapter Three examines Abidin’s biography. Like Bilal, his connection to the “conflict zone” of Iraq influences his creative approach, namely through his direct exposure to violence perpetrated during the Persian
Gulf War. The fourth section of this chapter examines three pieces in detail by Abidin:
Cold Interrogation, Abidin Travels: Welcome to Baghdad, and Jihad. Each piece will be analyzed through the lens of satire/humor. His work harnesses events from his past, using humor to offset the effects of trauma and violence. He accomplishes this using satire, or as he states, “through a sharp palette of irony and humour.”162
Proselytizing Terrorism/Patriotism: Videotaping Violence
Filming and photographing violent events began as early as the 1860s.
Documentary images from the Civil War captured the violent after-effects of military conflict. Several decades later, the first filmed execution on camera occurred in 1901, with the electrocution of President William McKinley’s assassin, Leon Czolgosz (Figure
37).163 The short video features Czolgosz in the center of the screen, surrounded by his executioners. The film captures his moment of death, archived and made available for viewers to re-watch via online archival databases. The photographing and filming of violent events continued throughout the twentieth century, namely during major periods
162 Adel Abidin, “Biography,” Adel Abidin, last modified 2016, http://www.adelabidin.com/biography.
163 “Leon Czolgosz and the Trial,” Pan- American Exposition of 1901, last modified 2016, http://library.buffalo.edu/pan-am/exposition/law/czolgosz/. 113 of conflict. With the advent of modern warfare and the availability of mobile cameras and recording devices, the accessibility of footage increased exponentially. Beginning with
Saddam’s regime in the 1990s, video evidence of interrogations and executions circulated online, providing unfiltered access to millions of users. For example, videos produced by
Al-Qaeda affiliates depict the executions of American contractor Nick Berg and journalist Daniel Pearl. Leaked footage from US-Coalition forces at Abu Ghraib illustrate the violence imparted on suspected Arab terrorists (Figures 38, 39).
Figure 37: Footage still of William McKinley’s assassin, Leon Czolgosz, executed by the electric chair, 1901 114
Figure 38: Footage still of Daniel Pearl captured by militants from the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty, 2002
Figure 39: Still image from Muntada al-Ansar moments before the execution of Nick Berg, 2006 115
Some of the most notorious interrogation videos may be found by simply accessing an Internet search engine. By typing in “interrogation videos” or “terrorist execution videos” into the search bar, over 1,500,000 results become immediately available to users.164 Although explicit violence involving beheadings or brutal beatings remains censored to some extent, a deeper, unfiltered search results in footage from Al-
Qaeda and Islamic State (ISIS) interrogation videos and recordings from Guantanamo
Bay.165 LiveLeak.com, a UK-based webpage that characterizes itself as a shock site, permits open access to these types of videos.166 Shock sites cater to audiences seeking violent or unfiltered footage, including car crash videos, decapitations, and terrorist bombings. Users can easily watch Nick Berg scream in pain as he is decapitated or watch suspected terrorist Omar Khadr’s emotional breakdown under interrogation at
Guantanamo Bay (Figure 40). After perusing through thousands of videos, common tropes emerge: an Arab male often acts as a perpetrator/interrogator or victim/interrogatee, while a Westerner (typically from the US or UK) serves as the perpetrator/interrogator or victim/interrogatee. The interrogation rooms also reflect similar tropes. Typically, the videos are filmed in a small chamber with monochromatic
164 More uncensored images are immediately available via Bing rather than Google. Since 2012, Google has limited content involving graphic nudity and violence. Thus, the images/footage are more difficult to access.
165 The Islamic State has used many names in the past several years, including ISIS, ISIL and IS. For consistency, ISIS will be used throughout this dissertation.
166 LiveLeak, formerly Ogrish.com, began in the same vein as other shock sites like rotten.com and goregallery.com. Over the past several years, the site administrators made efforts to reduce videos glorifying ISIS-based executions in an effort to diminish the terrorist organization from using the site as a platform for their ideologies and graphic displays of violence. 116 walls. In the majority of videos, the victim/interrogatee sits directly in front of the camera while the perpetrator/interrogator sits behind the victim/interrogatee or out of camera view.
Figure 40: Interrogation images of Omar Khadr, Guantanamo Bay 117
Often, the videos result in a decapitation, stoning, or brutal beating. In a sense, these types of videos permit the viewer to “participate” in the carnage via the screen. Sue
Tait explains the role of spectatorship with regards to violent terrorist films:
Visual imagery is always the reduction of another’s experience to a surface,
excising the subjectivity of presence - the smell, touch, and sound of the ‘real-’yet
a number of posters conceive of their ability to look at graphic representations as a
step toward being able to witness and participate in the reality signified.167
Though the user lives vicariously through the actual perpetrator or victim, the viewer possesses the power to relive moments of violence in continuum. The ability to relive and re-watch each interrogation or execution serves as a type of entertainment of torture, or as
Tait describes, a form of pornographic spectatorship within the online realm.168 In this form, the pornographic actions are not driven by a sexual act, but by the degradation and victimization of a person via an act of torture. The videos become acts for consumption, available as a depraved form of entertainment for the online masses.
Though the Internet has permitted users to engage violent footage, mass media dissemination of terrorist/torture videos dates back to the 1970s. In June 1974, Brian
Michael Jenkins explained the relationship between mass media and terrorist videos/broadcasts. He argued that the power of these mediatized acts of violence turns the act of torture or killing into a form of entertainment. Jenkins makes the following
167 Sue Tait, “Pornographies of Violence? Internet Spectatorship on Body Horror,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 25, no.1 (2008): 106. doi: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/10.1080/15295030701851148. 106.
168Tait, “Pornographies of Violence?” 96-97. 118 statement with regards to the powerful relationship between perpetrators/terrorists and the media:
Terrorist attacks are often deliberately choreographed by the terrorists to achieve
maximum publicity, particularly to attract the attention of the electronic media or
the international press. Often the drama is increased by holding hostages whose
survival then depends on the meeting of certain demands. The dead or destruction
of specific targets is not the primary purpose of terrorism, since terrorists cannot
totally destroy their adversary physically, but rather the effect that is achieved by
these acts. Terrorism is psychological warfare. It is theater.169
Though the outcome of Al-Qaeda, Taliban, and ISIS hostage videos since 2014 has increased in the percentage of recorded executions, Jenkins correctly assesses these types of videos as a form of entertainment or as theater. Characteristics associated with theatrical performances appear in each video, including: dramatic displays, rehearsed monologues, and an audience. Elements of pornographic spectatorship drive viewers to face these violent videos as entertainment, albeit a disturbing form of theatrical viewing.
Abidin merges the theatrical components of terrorist videos with humor as a means of disarming the traumatic effects produced by the content.
169 Brian M. Jenkins, “Terrorism and Kidnapping,” The Rand Paper Series, June 1974, 3.
119
Mining Humor from Violence
The relationship between humor and trauma seeks to defuse political, religious, and/or social tensions.170 In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), Freud examines how humor manifests from the unconscious. Why tell jokes? Freud characterizes jokes and humor as forms of repression, similar to the manner in which dreams operate. A joke or satirical rendering may be defined as a moment in which the joker or humorist reveals parts of her/his unconscious fantasies, fear, or desires.171 It relies upon the audience to process the joke and fully understand the intentions of the joker or humorist. For many individuals engaged in joking, the intention may be malicious, intent on “shocking,” or rousing discomfort in the audience.
Why do artists use this dark/gallows humor with regards to violence or stressful situations? Humor may serve as a therapeutic tool. Abidin harnesses the concept of gallows humor as an attempt to cope with the after-effects of violence. It may be defined as:
170 “Gargantua,” Brandeis Institutional Repository, http://bir.brandeis.edu/handle/10192 /3930. In the nineteenth century, humorous undertakings in the arts were often found in print media. Honoré-Victorin Daumier dominated political satire through his etchings of Louis Philippe as Gargantua in the French weekly publication, La Caricature in 1831. Francisco Goya also captured political and social discrepancies in his nineteenth century etchings, depicting outrageous displays of human suffering with exaggerated, corporeal renderings. In these works, the role of humor and satire amongst dark, political events, served as a didactic tool for understanding moments of destabilization and social decline.
171 Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, e-book translation, 1905, 3-4.
120
Humor that treats serious, frightening, or painful subject matter in a light or
satirical way. Joking about death fits the term most literally, but making fun of
life-threatening, disastrous, or terrifying situations fits the category as well.172
In artworks like Cold Interrogation, Jihad, and Abidin Travels: Welcome to Baghdad, the pieces incorporate personal experiences produced by the Persian Gulf and Iraq Wars. In many ways, the content extracts an uncomfortable reaction from viewers, namely due to the merger of humorous, satirical components with serious content. He states, with regards to the use of humor in his work:
I use my cross-cultural background …to create a distinct visual language often
laced with sarcasm and paradox, while maintaining an ultimately humanistic
approach. This sarcasm I use is nothing but a medium of provocation to serve the
purpose of extending the mental borders of the artwork beyond the limits of the
exhibition space. I am always interested in creating opportunities to prolong the
discussions beyond my artwork by enabling the audience to convey mental
elements from the work into their daily life.173
Like Bilal, Abidin’s personal connection to the “conflict zone” of Iraq suggests a need to inform the public about the issues associated with war, violence, and the failures of diplomacy.
172 Katie Watson, “Gallows Humor in Medicine,” Hastings Center Report 41, no. 5 (2011): 38.
173 Abidin, “Biography,” http://www.adelabidin.com/biography. 121
Biography of Adel Abidin
Abidin’s personal history parallels events from Bilal’s early life. He merges his personal memories and experiences from Baghdad with current issues present in the
Middle East.174 Born in Baghdad in 1973, Abidin grew up during a major transition in
Iraq’s political history, framed by the events of the Second Iraqi-Kurdish War (1974-
1975) and the Iran-Iraq War beginning in 1980. After studying Industrial Management at
Mansour University in Iraq, Abidin enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts (AFA) in
Baghdad to pursue a degree in painting, a medium he still employs in his mixed-media installations. 175
His transition to the digital platform started after graduating from the AFA –
Baghdad. In 2000, he decided to leave Iraq for relationship reasons and moved to
Helsinki, Finland. He changed his primary mode of creative practice from painting to mixed-media/digital arts. He earned an MFA in Time and Space Art from the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki in 2005.176 With regards to his MFA training, Abidin states:
“Real education comes from being aware and perceptive of the surrounding world. It is based on the information that we constantly gain from our environment.”177 He relishes the shifting political and social environments in which he creates, challenging his current
174 Abidin, “The Beauty of Conflict,” http://www.ultraextra.org/interviews/2012/12/7/the-beauty-of- conflicts-adel-abidin. Abidin describes his childhood as “ideal,” impervious to the violent events occurring in Iraq during his youth.
175 Abidin, “The Beauty of Conflict,” http://www.ultraextra.org.
176 Ibid, http://www.ultraextra.org.
177 Ibid, http://www.ultraextra.org. 122 position as a diasporic artist and pushing his personal narrative into his installations or digital works. Abidin addresses his diasporic identity, stating:
I will tell you that there is nothing better than living in your own home country,
but being abroad gives you the chance to see and get to know the Other, and that
will lead to you to a third, hybrid culture, that becomes your own. Sometimes, it's
good to see the full part of the glass.178
His work may be defined as unrestricted, an exploration of interstitial spaces shaped by narratives concerning war, technology, and diasporic movement along the periphery.
The role of identity remains pivotal to his oeuvre, especially when examining his use of common media tropes since the early 2000s. In 2005, he attempted to return to
Baghdad after living in Scandinavia. However according to the artist, “the threat of Mr.
Bush” kept him in Finland.”179 His subsequent work produced in the mid-2000s serve to confront social prejudices and travel restrictions placed on diasporic and exiled Iraqis.
Cold Interrogation, Jihad, and Abidin Travels: Welcome to Baghdad, Iraqis confront the traumatic effects of the Iraq War and how diasporic populations cope with living abroad.
Finding Humor in Cold Interrogation
In 2004, Abidin created Cold Interrogation to expose prejudicial remarks directed at him while living in Finland. Against a stark white wall in the corner of the Gallery
Huuto in Helsinki, Abidin placed a medium-sized refrigerator. Using common tropes found in many American kitchens, he covered the surface of a refrigerator with magnets,
178 Ibid, http://www.ultraextra.org.
179 Ibid. 123 personal photos, pictures, and a “Support the Troops” ribbon decal in red, white and blue
(Figure 41). Centered on the top portion of the refrigerator, a small eyehole provided access to the interior of the freezer space. Instead of seeing frozen TV dinners or left-over condiments, viewers directly gazed upon the face of a man. Wearing glasses and projecting an apathetic expression, the man directly gazed at the viewer through the eyehole (Figure 42). After several seconds, the man asked the following questions:
Where are you from?
How did you end up in Finland?
Do you think there will be a war on Iraq?
Where were you during the first war
What do you think of Saddam Hussein?
Did you see Baghdad burning?
What do you think of George Bush? What about Tony Blair?
Tell me about Bin Laden.
What do you think of 11th of September?
Do you drink any alcohol in Iraq?
You don’t look like one from Iraq.180
The questions are directed at the viewer using an interrogative approach. These are the types of questions an individual accused of terrorism or sympathy with terrorism may face when dealing with US, UK, or Interpol authorities or uninformed members of the
180 “Works/Cold Interrogation,” AV-ARKKI, http://www.av-arkki.fi/en/works/cold-interrogation_en/. The actor portraying the interrogator is Dr. Mika Hannula, an artist and curator and former directory of the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, Finland. 124 public. The actor portraying the interrogator quickly changes from one question to another, rapidly “interrogating” the viewer. The questions and comments made by the actor reflect actual conversations between Abidin and Finnish citizens. According to the artist, he still faces these lines of questions on a daily basis, whether concerning his art, his identity as a diasporic artist, or both.
Figure 41: Refrigerator components to Abidin’s Cold Interrogation, 2004
125
Figure 42: Video frame, Cold Interrogation, 2004
As the viewer engages Cold Interrogation, many of the questions do not pertain to the identity of the participant. Rather, the viewer experiences elements of oppression and racial profiling through the position of the Other. In 1978’s Orientalism, Edward Said critiques the relationship between “two unequal halves, the Orient (East) and the
Occident (West).”181 The construction of this binary builds upon colonial power systems dating back to the Middle Ages. Said’s method of positioning the Orient as a construct of the European imagination predetermines the status of the Oriental Other, more specifically, the Iraqi Other, as a subordinate to the colonial power systems.182 In works
181 Jane Iwamura, Virtual Orientalism: Asian Religions and American Popular Culture. Oxford (Oxford University Press, 2011), 7.
182 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 5. 126 by nineteenth century artists like Eugène Delacroix and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, both artists captured Western ideals of the East by representing Arab culture as “Europe's collective day-dream of the Orient.”183 According to Said, they “are the lenses through which the Orient is experienced, and they shape the language, perception, and form of the encounter between East and West.”184 Paintings of women in repose, surrounded by turbans and hookahs signified the “exotic East.” Travel accounts, pieces of literary fiction, and historical documents also added to the romanticized “day-dream” of
Westerners looking East. Linda Nochlin described such scenes as “a visual document of nineteenth-century colonialist ideology, an iconic distillation of the Westerner’s notion of the Oriental couched in the language of a would-be transparent naturalism.”185 Evident in these works, the figures appear idle, consumed by sloth, sexual licentiousness, or in some cases, forced servitude.186
However, since the rule of Saddam and the events of the Persian Gulf and Iraq
Wars, the vision of the “Orient,” specifically Iraq, no longer reflects the “exotic” imagery
183 VG Kierman, quoted in Edward Said. Orientalism.: Western Conceptions of the Orient (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 52.
184 Said, Orientalism, 51
185 Linda Nochlin, The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society (New York: Harper-Row, 1989), 35.
186 Ottoman painter and “revisionist” of European Orientalist art, Osman Hamdi Bey, sought to represent Arab figures performing tasks of intellectual inquiry, devoid of lustful poses, violent interactions, or passive indolence. In two pieces by the artist, Two Musician Girls (1880) and Theologian (1907), the figures remain fully clothed, displaying expressions of concentration and focus. In Two Musician Girls, the figures appear in richly patterned tunics, hyper-focused on the stringed tambur and the brass tambourine. In Theologian, a male figure concentrates on a Qur’anic manuscript. In these examples, Hamdi Bey favors practicality over desire, intellect over garishness. See Emine Fetvaci, “The Art of Osman Hamdi Bey,” in Osman Hamdi Bey and the Americans: Archeology, Diplomacy, Art, eds. Renata Holod and Robert Ousterhout (Istanbul: Pera Museum Publications, 2011), 119. 127 depicted in paintings by Delacroix or Ingres. Instead, the brutal, violent figure of the Iraqi perforates online and print sources, reminiscent of anti-Muslim/Arab artwork from the
Middle Ages. With regards to this shift, Said states,
The European vision of Islam became particularly important for the emergence of
Orientalism. Islam, due to its attack on European borders during the Middle Ages,
was regarded as a threat: Not for nothing did Islam come to symbolize terror,
devastation, the demonic hordes of hated barbarians. For Europe, Islam was a
lasting trauma.187
This “lasting trauma” remains problematic in post-invasion discourses, particularly with the aid of digital media spaces like the Internet. In many of these popular media forms, the Iraqi/Muslim body correlates with words like “terrorist” and “anti-American.”188
Specifically after the fall of the Twin Towers, equating Iraqis with terrorism grew exponentially in online spaces, furthered by the dissemination of misinformed news reports and xenophobic rhetoric from mass media sources.
Said’s argument concerning the disjuncture between Western nations and Iraq remains central in current media discourses perpetuated by the lasting tension between both spaces. The power of the media to dictate the image of the Iraqi or Iraqi-Muslim serves as a problematic byproduct of the digital age. For Said, “the possibilities the
187 Said, Orientalism, 59.
188 Raymond Pun, “Digital Images and Visions of Jihad: Virtual Orientalism and the Distorted Lens of Technology,” CyberOrient 7, no (2013): www.cyberorient.net/article.do?articleId=8391. 128
Internet offers today are precious, especially for the Arab world.”189 However, the manner in which the West uses mass media as a tool for espousing anti-Iraqi, anti-Islamic rhetoric remains contested. Previously, television and print media served as the main sources for marginalizing the Orient, however with the rise of the World Wide Web, the practice of disseminating media changed. In “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global
Cultural Economy,” Arjun Appadurai frames the importance of the dissemination of images, text, and data through digital networks like the Internet and television.190 He refers to these spaces as mediascapes:
What is most important about these mediascapes is that they provide (especially
in their television, film and cassette forms) large and complex repertoires of
images, narratives and ‘ethnoscapes’ to viewers throughout the world, in which
the world of commodities and the world of ‘news’ and politics are profoundly
mixed. The lines between the ‘realistic’ and the fictional landscapes they see are
blurred, so that the further away these audiences are from the direct experiences
of metropolitan life, the more likely they are to construct ‘imagined’ worlds’...191
As referenced by Said, Appadurai further explicates issues of mass media dissemination through images and narratives. Within cyberspace, the coded identity of the Other
189 Edward Said, “The Last Interview,” interview by Brigitte Caland, Al Jadid, http://www.aljadid.com /content/%E2%80%98-last-interview%E2%80%99-edward-said.
190 Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy, “in The Globalization Reader, eds. Lechner, Frank J. and John Boli (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 99.
191 Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” 98. 129 becomes part of a “digital accumulation,” lacking context and points of reference.”192
Appadurai further states,
The Internet is the bastion of the diasporic body. Diasporic politics, as opposing,
antagonising and competing with national politics, is part of the growing culture
of cyberpolitics, which in turn is largely transnational and which adopts tactics of
connecting offline locations (and politics) with online transnational networking
activities.193
For Abidin, digital media outlets, like the Internet, provide access to geographical regions suppressed by governmental restrictions and regulations.
In Cold Interrogation, the piece becomes part of the digital accumulation of videos and footage online, requiring contextual placement. Since the piece remains as a digital byproduct of the original installation, it has the potential to educate mass audiences about stereotypical assertions regarding Arab identity. However, with the artist statement listed below the video on Abidin’s webpage, the piece acts as an important political and satirical act within his performance repertoire. The piece informs the participant not only about Abidin’s personal interactions in Finland, but also about the greater social implications of stereotyping individuals based on their ethnic or racial background. Though the satirical nature of the installation attempts to defuse the seriousness of racial profiling, it does create a powerful point of discussion regarding the role of Iraqi identity in the post-invasion era.
192 Pun, “Digital Images,” www.cyberorient.net/article.do?articleId=8391.
193 Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” 39. 130
Like Bilal’s experience in refugee camps, Abidin’s interrogation by Finnish citizens reflects the traumatic after-effects of diasporic movement. Even through Abidin lives outside the conflict zone, his identity as an Iraqi remains tethered to negative stereotypes associated with war, terrorism, and violence. Although Cold Interrogation sought to expose audiences to prejudicial acts/questions, Abidin’s work on Jihad seeks to complicate the image of the Iraqi/Arab by using terrorist tropes common in Al Qaeda and
ISIS execution videos.
Abidin’s Jihad
Using similar elements as Cold Interrogation, Abidin’s performance of Jihad harnesses the relationship between terrorism and Arab stereotypes. Between
2006-2007, the most violent and turbulent period of the Iraq War occurred. Circulated via television programs and online webpages, horrific images of death, destruction, and torture exposed the public to the violence aborad.194 Photos and film clips of terrorists in keffiyeh head wraps, wielding guns at American troops and executing Western journalists filled nightly news reports and newspaper covers.195 A basic Google or Bing search of
Berg and Pearl’s names still unleash a plethora of gruesome photos, many depicting anonymous terrorists in the center of a room, holding a severed head or pointing a weapon at a doomed victim. In all the videos, footage of men outfitted in bulletproof vests, wielding scimitar swords and Kalashnikov rifles, proselytizing against Western
194 Borgna Brunner, “Iraq Timeline: 2006,” Infoplease, last modified 2014, http://www.infoplease.com/ spot/iraqtimeline5.html.
195 Pun, “Digital Images,” www.cyberorient.net/article.do?articleId=8391. 131 policies and Islamic fundamentalism filled online news and media outlets. These images became common in search engine results of Iraqi, Arab, and/or Muslims, incorporated as stock photo archives for the Associated Press (Figures 43, 44, 45). The preoccupation of the Arab/Arab-Muslim body turned into a fixation by Western media sources, often to the detriment of civilians living in the Middle East and in diasporic spaces abroad.196
Figure 43: Google image search result for Jihad, 2015
196 Prior to 9/11, images of the Arab/Arab-Muslim male consisted of similar, stereotypes perpetuated by the Western media during the First Gulf War. 132
Figure 44: Google image search result II for Jihad, 2015
Figure 45: Google image search result III for Jihad, 2015
133
One of Abidin’s most controversial works, Jihad, subverts the traditional codes associated with Western media perceptions of the Arab/Arab-Muslim male. In Jihad,
Abidin outwardly performs the role of a terrorist. In the short video, he stands in the center of a white-walled room flanked by an American flag and dressed in a white thobe and red and white keffiyeh. Rather than give a speech condemning America, he starts with a line from the Quran, stops reading, picks up an acoustic guitar, and sings Woody
Guthrie’s 1944 anti-war song, This Land is Your Land.197
The song serves two purposes within the performance piece. The context of the song originated as a reaction against the saccharin, overtly patriotic lyrics of Irving
Berlin’s God Bless America from 1918.198 Woody Guthrie’s version subverts Berlin’s song using satirical lyrics. The song serves as a battle cry against oppression, economic depression, class separation, poverty, racism, and the plight of American laborers during the 1930s. Over the years, the song changed with lyrical interventions by Woody
Guthrie’s son, Arlo Guthrie, and Pete Seeger. Both singers added anti-war elements to the song in the late 1960s, refocusing themes about class struggle and inequality toward an anti-war rhetoric (Figure 46).199 For Seeger, the song is not limited by a single moment in history, but serves as a tool to educate the public about current social and political issues. He states:
197 Mark Allan Jackson, “Prophet Singer: The Voice and Vision of Woody Guthrie” (dissertation, Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, 2002), 15.
198 Jackson, “Prophet Singer,”15.
199 Ibid., 33-34. 134
The best thing that could happen to the song would be for it to end up with
hundreds of different versions being sung by millions of people who do
understand the basic message.200
Abidin’s appropriation of the song harnesses both the satirical nature of the original performance by Woody Guthrie and furthers the anti-war, political agenda of his successors.
Figure 46: Adel Abidin, Jihad, video, 2006
200 Pete Seeger, “Portrait of a Song as a Bird in Flight," Village Voice (New York, NY), Jul. 1, 1971, quoted in Mark Allan Jackson, “Prophet Singer: The Voice and Vision of Woody Guthrie” (dissertation, Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, 2002), 34. 135
Abidin uses Jihad to confront the politized use of the term used by the Western media, using the classic American song as a form of satire. Said argues, “we, meaning the
Westerner, cannot be the terrorist committing the atrocity, only the redeemer against
Muslim, Communist, and Arab perpetrators.”201 In the wake of the media spectacle created after the destruction of the Twin Towers, the “Other” terrorist became an iconic referent, signifying anti-Western rhetoric. Using his body as a means of subversion,
Abidin performs this stereotype to undermine the image of the Arab male via the mediatized lens.
Humor via Terrorism
Considering the spectacle created by the video, Jihad questions participatory engagement, specifically how the performance is received and disseminated via digital outlets.202 As with Cold Interrogation, the role of satire and humor may be used to alleviate the horrors of war or violence. However, the performance of Jihad by Abidin presents two types of traumatic undertones: the first, through the visual tropes of the performer as terrorist, and the second through the application of the term jihad. In the first case, the appearance of a figure dressed in a white thobe and keffiyeh does not indicate a threat of violence, only of Arab identity. The thobe and keffiyeh are articles of clothing specific to the Arabian Peninsula and bordering regions like Libya, Pakistan, and
Lebanon. However, since the Persian Gulf War and in the years after 9/11, the thobe and
201 Stephen Morton, “Terrorism, Orientalism and Imperialism,” Wasafiri 22, no. 2 (June 2007): 2, accessed April 2 2104, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02690050701336774.
202 The performance may be viewed via Abidin’s webpage, www.adelabidin.com or via public share sites like youtube.com, dailymotion.com, or vimeo.com. 136 keffiyeh symbolize negative attributes in Western media outlets. For example, a cartoon from The Atlanta Journal by Mike Luckovich displays an Arab male, dressed in a thobe going through a TSA checkpoint with a bomb (Figure 47). In a 2006 cartoon from The
San Diego Union-Tribune by Steve Breen, a similar figure appears in the same garb, wielding a sword with an enraged expression on his face (Figure 48). Abidin considers these negative stereotypes, using the performance as a means of inserting irony into conversation. David Monje positions irony as an outlet used by artists to focus attention on political and social issues:
Irony as a discursive strategy always has at its foundation in the most serious
matters (Hutcheon, 1995). Contrary to asserting that nothing is real, and that
nothing matters, irony in this sense is an effort to highlight the seriousness and
exigencies of the real by exposing fallacious rhetoric, false assumptions, and other
misrepresentations of a given state of affairs.203
In the case of Jihad, Abidin uses common tropes from terrorist videos to complicate assumptions about Arab and Arab-Muslim identity. Instead of picking up a Kalashnikov rifle or scimitar, he holds an acoustic guitar. Instead of displaying an ISIS or Al-Qaeda banner, he stands in front of an American flag. He does not proselytize hateful rhetoric or condemn foreign nations and cultures; rather, Abidin sings an anti-war, pro-labor song made famous by American folk singers in the mid-twentieth century. The piece takes a humorous approach to power tropes prevalent since the onset of the Persian Gulf War,
203 David Monje, “Neoliberalism, Irony, and the Cartoons of Jeff Danziger,” in A Decade of Dark Humor: How Comedy, Irony, and Satire Shaped Post-9/11 America, eds. Ted Gournelos and Viveca Greene (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), 187. 137 namely the symbol of the American flag and the body of the terrorist-executioner. By merging these tropes and re-contextualizing the power narratives present in both the flag and presumed terrorist, the piece serves as an ironic play on power in the post-invasion era.
Figure 47: Mike Luckovich. The Atlanta Journal, 2015
138
Figure 48: Steve Breen, The San Diego Union-Tribune, 2006
With regards to the second type of satirical trauma present in the piece, the focus on media and technology seeks to question the agenda of both terrorists and American troops. Redfield argues how the role of the media, specifically in the post-9/11 era, fetishizes violence into a consumable object.204 Abidin’s Jihad, plays on the media- obsession with language and technology associated with violence during the Iraq War.
Used in the title of the performance, the term “Jihad” emphasizes a certain coded reaction from Western audiences. In the aftermath of the attacks in the US, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the term “Jihad” equates violence and destruction with Islam. This misinterpretation of the term gravely influences Western perceptions of Muslims and individuals from the
Middle East.
204 Redfield, “Virtual Trauma,” 69. 139
The role of jihad differs from the violent “holy war” translation espoused in the
Western media.205 Jihad may be described as “an internal struggle to maintain faith, the struggle to improve the Muslim society or the struggle in a holy war.”206 The “holy war” component does not originally correlate with modern applications of jihad. Raymond Pun examines the problems associated with the term in post-9/11, Western media sources.207
Pun focuses on the Google search engine and other online database sites. He chronicles the types of images that appear when users insert the term “jihad” into the search bar.208
The results include a “collective look of ‘angry’ and ‘armed’ Muslims and/or Middle
Eastern men ready to commit a jihad [war] against America.”209 When the images are easily accessed and disseminated online, it creates a disassociation between the actual
Muslim and the media-constructed body of the Muslim. Thus, Abidin’s use of the term situates Western audiences in a position to view the piece in relation to terrorist violence and anti-American rhetoric.
With the recent increase in media coverage by terrorist groups like Al-Shabaab and ISIS, violent videos of radicalized organizations saturate the Internet and television.
Though Jihad served to explicate the atrocities committed during the Iraq War, the piece
205 Pun, “Digital Images,” 1-2.
206 Ibid., 1-2.
207 Ibid., 1-2.
208 Ibid., 1-2.
209 Ibid., 3. Webpages like www.Jihadwatch.com and the Terrorism Awareness Project have promoted anti- Muslim, anti-Arab rhetoric in the post-9/11 era through cultural stereotyping and the demonizing of non- Christian persons. 140 reinforces Western hegemony by subverting the image of the Arab/Arab-Muslim. Pun defines these types of images used by Abidin as “technologically-accumulated visual representations of Islam [that] form harrowing structures of patriarchal, racial and religious hierarchies.”210 The original intent of the piece challenged viewers to rethink media stereotypes of the Arab male. In an attempt to reverse the lens of stereotyping the
Arab Other, Jihad, remains caught in a space of contradiction by perpetuating both violent symbols associated with execution videos and by serving as a didactic tool for informing the public about Arab/Arab-Muslim identity in the post-9/11 era.
Tourism during War: Abidin Travels: Welcome to Baghdad
Though Jihad sought to engage audiences using the online platform, the third piece created by Abidin served as an interactive, media-based installation for the 2007
Venice Biennale. The piece, titled Abidin Travels: Welcome to Baghdad, invited participants to enter a multi-roomed gallery space to interact with the new “war tourism” agency founded by Abidin.211 The installation sought to provide a synesthetic experience for participants and viewers, inundating users with graphic videos of violent beheadings, looting, and vandalism, coupled with the sterile environment of the gallery-turned-travel agency. The images and videos created for the installation challenged the intervention of
Western military powers used during the Iraq War. Abidin’s digital performance
210 Ibid., 3.
211 “Adel Abidin,” Musee d’Art Contemporain du Val de Marne. http://www.macval.fr /english/residences/residence-archives/article/adel-abidin-5042 141 installation reveals issues associated with cultural stereotypes during periods of war and strife.
Abidin Travels debuted in 2007 at the Venice Biennial in the Nordic Pavilion. 212
Participants entered the installation and walked through a series of rooms similar to a travel agency office. Above the entry door frame, a neon sign read, “abidin travels” in hot pink and blue. Juxtaposed with the text, the silhouette of a fighter jet, encased in a neon blue circle, brightly illuminated the entryway (Figure 49). Once inside the installation, the gallery separated into several sections. In one space, pamphlets adorned the gallery walls, offering historical information about the city of Baghdad. Inside the pamphlets, stock-photos of ancient Middle Eastern artifacts contradicted images of US tanks and burned-out city streets (Figure 50). One of the top tourist sites in the pamphlet focused on the antiquities collection at the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad. However, a section of the pamphlet warned the reader that “all the beautiful places that you might have read about are either destroyed or have been looted. There really are no sites left."213
In one of the other gallery spaces, participants encountered a computer kiosk that guided visitors to “BOOK YOUR TICKET www. abidintravels.com.” Located on the
212 Amanda Duhon, “Contemporary Art of Iraqis and Categorical Assumptions of Nationality: An Analysis of the Art and Narrative of Hana Mal Allah, Adel Abidin, and Wafaa Bilal” (thesis, Louisiana State University, 2008), 31-32. It is important to understand why Abidin exhibited at the Nordic Pavilion, rather than the Iraq: due to political and social limitations, Iraq did not have a national presence at the Biennale until 2011. At the 2011 event, Abidin exhibited under the nation of Iraq rather than in the Nordic area.
213 Marks, “Adel Abidin’s "Baghdad Travels,"’ http://universes-in-universe.org/content/view/print/9014. This was created after the infamous looting of the Baghdad Museum in 2003. 142 mainpage of the website, users could plan trips to the city of Baghdad.214 Like other travel pages, the webpage provided a flight-booking section and informational links to tourist sites within the city (Figure 51). However, instead of photos depicting luxurious hotels and spas, the images on the mainpage display beaten bodies and corpses. One of the images on the mainpage includes a photograph of a blindfolded hostage surrounded by men in black face masks and body armor. Superimposed on the image, a flashing red sign offers “free-sightseeing!” for potential travelers (Figure 52).215 In the upper right corner, a counter tallies the Iraqi civilian body count, providing locations of recent execution sites. The webpage also allows participants to arrange arrival and destination locations, input the number of travelers, and choose to purchase travel insurance for an extra $399,999 USD.216 Rental car options are also advertised in the form of tanks and armored Humvees, recommended as a precaution against the occasional roadside bombing or RPG attack (Figure 53).
214 “Abidin Travels, 2006,” http://www.adelabidin.com/video-installation/abidin-travels.
215 Ibid.
216 Women are not permitted to book flights alone on the webpage without a male chaperone and children are prohibited. 143
Figure 49: Abidin outside the entrance to Abidin Travels, Venice Biennale, 2007
144
Figure 50: Travel pamphlet, Abidin Travels, 2006
Figure 51: Screen still from one of the informational videos, Abidin Travels, 2006 145
Figure 52: Mainpage to www.abidintravels.com, Abidin Travels, 2006
Figure 53: Video still, Abidin Travels, 2006 146
In conjunction with the pamphlets and webpage, Abidin includes informative travel videos in English, Arabic, French, Swedish, and other Scandinavian languages.217
In one of the videos, a female narrator provides commentary in English about the top tourist sites around the city of Baghdad. As she narrates the video, censored footage of mourning women, public executions, and car bombs play in the background. A transcribed excerpt announces the following:
You can find wonderful souvenir shops and boutiques and cafes. And at the end
of Nahir Street is Al-Khesa where the old Ottoman rulers were situated. And
don’t forget the beautiful churches and mosques with their elaborate signs and
intricate arches…all part of the rich heritage of this city. And don’t forget the
museum and galleries that reflect the great history of this city.218
The commentary sounds like a generic travel video; however, the footage contradicts the narrator’s enthusiast description of pre-invasion Baghdad. Instead of the souvenir shops, weapon venues full of assault rifles and RPGs fill the market booths and kiosks. Rather than show busy street vendors selling their goods, the film footage from Nahir Street displays burned-out cars and skeletal remains. When describing the museums and galleries, images of broken Assyrian vessels and plunderers escaping through side doors replace scenes of the pristine gallery. Depicted within the videos, images of American
217 “Abidin Travels, 2006,” Adel Abidin, accessed March 27 2014. http://www.adelabidin.com/video- installation/abidin-travels.
218 Marks, “Adel Abidin’s "Baghdad Travels,"’ http://universes-in-universe.org/content/view/print/9014. 147 soldiers drinking alcohol, laughing, and frisking Iraqi civilians contradict the scenes of mourning women (Figures 54, 55). 219
Figure 54: Adel Abidin, still from Abidin Travels video, 2006
219 In this paradigm, the joke or satirical reference is linked to a real event, often gruesome or incomprehensible (i.e. 9/11, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, etc.). It is then combined with an innocuous counterpart, like a game or commercial, or in the case of Abidin, a travel agency. When the gruesome event and the harmless reference combine, it creates a humorous anecdote to an otherwise serious situation. Satirical or humorous jokes or cartoons about the Twin Towers falling or the execution of terrorist victims serve as examples of disaster jokes, or “sick jokes based on an incongruity between the gruesome and the innocuous (Kuipers, 21). 148
Figure 55: Adel Abidin, stills from Abidin Travels video, 2006
Gallows Humor in Abidin Travels
The merger of both components serves an important role in coping with trauma.
In “Trauma Treatment Techniques: Innovative Trends,” Jacqueline Garrick uses a variety 149 of case-studies involving traumatized patients exposed to abuse, violence, or high stress environments. The use of gallows humor to diffuse stress and alleviate symptoms associated with PTSD aides in the healing process, even though the humor or jokes may be viewed as inappropriate due to traumatic circumstances.220 The choice to juxtapose these images with the narrator’s commentary reflects a satirical approach. Once again, why does humor serve as a focal point in Abidin’s work? Unlike Cold Interrogation, which used humor and the language of interrogation and Jihad, that subverted violent tropes associated with execution and interrogation videos, Abidin Travels takes a different approach to satire and violence. In this case, the installation uses actual footage of blown up cars, corpses, and violent street footage from Baghdad in 2003. According to
Giselinde Kuipers the use of violent imagery in satire or humorous works may be defined as a type of aggressive political statement about the wars in Iraq and/or Afghanistan.
Satirical or humorous jokes or cartoons about the Twin Towers falling or the execution of terrorist victims serve as examples of disaster jokes, or “sick jokes based on an incongruity between the gruesome and the innocuous.”221 In this paradigm, the joke or satirical reference is linked to a real event, often gruesome or incomprehensible (i.e. 9/11, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, etc.). It is then combined with an innocuous counterpart, like a game or commercial, or in the case of Abidin, a travel agency. When the gruesome event
220 Jacqueline Garrick, “The Humor of Trauma Survivors: Its Application in a Therapeutic Milieu,” in Trauma Treatment Techniques: Innovative Trends, eds. Jacqueline Garrick and Mary Beth Williams (New York: Routledge, 2014), 173-174.
221 Giselinde Kuipers, “The Functions of Laughter after 9/11,” in A Decade of Dark Humor: How Comedy, Irony, and Satire Shaped Post-9/11 America, eds. Ted Gournelos and Viveca Greene (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), 21. 150 and the harmless reference combine, it creates a humorous anecdote to an otherwise serious situation.222 By using of graphic imagery, coupled with the satirical atmosphere of the travel agency, the installation provides an environment that fosters a dialogue about war and the limitations of travel to spaces of conflict.
Audience and Identity in Abidin Travels
As previously referenced with regards to Said and Appadurai’s positions on the role/construction of the Other in pieces like Cold Interrogation and Jihad, Jane Iwamura applies issues associated with virtual networking and the representation of the Other to online spaces. Iwamura specifically examines the role of the online Other vie the theory of virtual Orientalism, a contemporary approach to Said’s Orientalism. Virtual
Orientalism may be defined as “cultural stereotyping by visual forms of media [that] rely heavily on new seemingly uninterrupted flows of representations and their easy access.”223 Images produced after 9/11 of the gun-wielding, angry Arab-male exemplifies a type of stereotyping associated with virtual Orientalism. These types of images, primarily found through database searches, appear due to the mass dissemination of images via the Internet.224
As an alternative to Abidin Travels, the web-video series Hometown Baghdad presents the city of Baghdad through the lens of Iraqi civilians. Created in the mid-2000s
222 The role of community also plays a major component to the role of the humor in Abidin Travels. Rather than experience the traumatic images alone, the installation provided participants a public space to view and screen the images. In this sense, the piece provides the opportunity to experience violent images with other participants, sharing in a universal experience associated with the war in Iraq.
223 Pun, “Digital Images,” www.cyberorient.net/article.do?articleId=8391.
224 Ibid., www.cyberorient.net/article.do?articleId=8391. 151 during the Iraq War, the series documents and archives the daily lives of three Iraqi civilians living in Baghdad (Figure 56).225 Rather than focus primarily on the violence, the series highlights the hobbies, conversations, and daily activities of three individuals: students, Saif and Ausama, and rock musician, Adel.226 Using hand-held cameras and
Flip devices, the series countered many of the post-9/11 images of the Iraqi by capturing daily events experienced by the participants. In one short segment, “Symphony of
Bullets,” Adel attempts to travel to his university to study for exams (Figure 57). He becomes trapped in his dorm due to the barrage of gunfire occurring outside his room. He jokes about his ability to identify American rounds versus terrorist bullets.227 In another short film, “Market Boom,” two of the men travel to a local open-air market to purchase travel gear for a month-long trip (Figure 58). One of their friends enters the apartment, stating that a sniper shot pedestrians and police, killing several in the process. A bomb also destroys part of Al-Arabi market in downtown Baghdad. As these events unfold, the men seem unfazed, joking at the random violence as if it is a common nuisance.228 By comparing Western media images produced by CNN or Fox News, the videos from
Hometown Baghdad counter the constructed images of the Arab-Muslim body created in the post-9/11 era. The men in the videos are not depicted as “barbaric” or violent,
225 “Hometown Baghdad,” Chat the Planet, accessed April 3 2014, http://chattheplanet.com/index.php?page= about&cat=82.
226 “Hometown Baghdad,” http://chattheplanet.com/index.php?page=about&cat=82.
227 Ibid., http://chattheplanet.com/index.php?page=about&cat=82.
228 Ibid., http://chattheplanet.com/index.php?page=about&cat=82. 152 wielding guns or knives. Instead, they are presented as civilians engaged in daily, routine activities while a war occurs around them.
Figure 56: Footage from Hometown Baghdad, 2005-2007
Figure 57: Image still from the “Symphony of Bullets” segment, Hometown Baghdad, 2005-2007
153
Figure 58: Still from the “Market Boom” segment, Hometown Baghdad, 2005-2007
Considering the language and images represented in the videos and Abidin’s travel webpage, the intended audience for Abidin’s performance relies on interactions with Western participants. Abidin fractures the romanticized, Middle Eastern aura of the spice market and bazaar. Instead, he chooses to display the markets as ruined spaces, a byproduct of the US raids and terrorist car bombs. The inherent issue with Abidin’s work, however, focuses on the role of the audience and the intention of the piece. When compared to the images projected in Hometown Baghdad, Abidin’s work emphasizes the stereotypical role of the Middle-Eastern Muslim. He intends to satirize Western perceptions of the post-9/11 Muslim body; however, his piece reinforces many of the stereotypes he attempts to subvert. Laura Marks argues one of the issues in Abidin
Travels: 154
On one hand, Abidin is more intimately aware than are most of his Western
interlocutors of the specific suffering of Iraqi people; and on the other, he can
only describe this suffering in generalities that his audience will grasp.229
What are these “generalities” in regards to the Western audience? Reflecting on
Iwamura’s critique of representations associated with virtual Orientalism, Abidin indirectly subverts the body of the Iraqi. Represented in Abidin Travels, he represents the gun-yielding, male Iraqi body and the grief-stricken, mourning women in hijabs. These media tropes reference the iconic symbols of the post-9/11 Iraqi stereotype. Iwamura challenges this issue of “the iconic” representation with regards to the Iraqi Other:
Virtual Orientalism relies on this repetitive promise, on the reliability of iconic
performance, and on a Western audience’s spiritual needs and desires, as it masks
the ideological interests and geopolitical concern that invisibly drive its cultural
imperialist enterprise.230
The dependence on repetition in Abidin Travels relies on the interaction of the visitors to the performance. As participants log-on and interact with the travel site or view the videos online, the performance repeats through archival networks. This allows the participants instant access to the images and videos, fulfilling the desire for immediacy.
Dereck Gregory positions bodies of Iraqis as “collections of objects not congeries of people.”231 In Abidin Travels, a commodification of the Iraqi body serves as a form of
229 Marks, “Adel Abidin’s "Baghdad Travels,"’ http://universes-in-universe.org/content/view/print/9014.
230 Iwamura, Virtual Orientalism, 161.
231 Dereck Gregory, The Colonial Present (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 201. 155 representing the inferior “Other” in relation to the hegemonic, Occidental presence.
Abidin uses the Iraqi as objects of social commentary, an anti-war reference to the atrocities committed during the Iraq campaigns. However, Abidin’s choice to commodify the body of the Iraqi as a representative object, cut and cropped from the original site of trauma, also applies to the manner in which he categorizes the Occident.
As a critical counter to Said’s Orientalism, Fernando Coronil furthers the concept of
Occidentalism, not necessarily a counter to Orientalism, but a challenge and repositioning of the lens in which the West is viewed by the Orient.232 He states:
Occidentalism…is thus not the reverse of Orientalism but is a condition of … its
dark side (as in a mirror). A simple reversal would be possible only in the context
of symmetrical relations between “Self” and “Other” – but then who would be the
“Other?” …its serves to restore some balance and has relativizing effects.233
Considering Coronil’s position in relation to Abidin’s work, the bodies of the American soldiers also become fetishized objects, presented as stereotypical icons of the Western world. They are depicted in dominant positions: blocking roadways with tanks and
Humvees, laughing at the demise of the Iraqi civilian, consuming alcohol near sacred mosques, and launching weapons into the city of Baghdad. They are stereotyped, satirized, and thus, lose power within the context of the videos. Instead, they become coded objects associated with tyranny and suppression.
232 Fernando Coronil, “Beyond Occidentalism: Toward Nonimperial Geohistorical Categories,” Cultural Anthropology 11, no. 1 (Feb 2006): 55-56, accessed April 19 2014, http://www.unc.edu/~aparicio/WAN/CoronilBeyondOcc.pdf.
233 Coronil, “Beyond Occidentalism,” 57-58. 156
Although Coronil’s theory of Occidentalism supposes a gradual decline in
Western hegemony, his concept still posits the role of the Orient in a subservient position to the Occident. In order for a dialogue on the role of the Other to appear, it must be constructed in relation to the established language already associated with the hegemonic
West. When applied to Abidin Travels, Abidin’s attempt to subvert the bodies of the
Westerner as the “barbaric occupiers” of his homeland fails to adequately succeed in fostering a dialogue centered on Middle East-West relations. Instead, the piece becomes a mockery of both Western military failures and the Iraqis’ inability to respond to intrusive powers.
In the years after Abidin’s performance, images associated with the Arab –
Muslim Other remain constant in media networks and Internet archives. With US military operations declining in Iraq and Afghanistan, the images produced in the years after 9/11 remain fixed as iconic constructions, byproducts of the Western media. As Iwamura postulates, these images remain caught in digital spaces and disseminated in continuum through the Internet and online networks.234 However projects like Hometown Baghdad remedy issues involving the subversion of the Iraqi Other by capturing relatable moments in the lives of the Iraqi civilian. Similar projects currently appear in Pakistan and Egypt, using handheld devices to capture both violence and relatable, daily events.
Conclusion
The works presented throughout this chapter use satire and humor to disarm the traumatic after-effects produced by the war in Iraq. Abidin also uses each piece as a form
234 Iwamura, Virtual Orientalism, 7. 157 of confrontation, either directly, as noted in Cold Interrogation and Abidin Travels, or indirectly via the performance of Jihad. Each work serves to expose and problematize the representation of the Arab/Iraqi since the invasion of the Iraq. Once viewers bypass the veneer of dark humor, each piece reveals the limitations and prejudices imposed on Iraqis living within the borders of Iraq and diasporic communities abroad.
158
CHAPTER 4: PROTESTING ONLINE PROTEST: WITNESSING JOSEPH
DELAPPE’S WAR AGAINST AMERICA’S ARMY
Who is remembered? Who is mourned? Who is responsible for remembering and mourning, and how can artists respond? – Joseph Delappe Introduction
The camera pans out of a city street. Parked at the end of an alley, an armored
Humvee sits against a brown wall, juxtaposed with dust-covered buildings and high extension wires. A Kalashnikov rifle lays discarded in the center of the screen. In an instant, the sound of a sniper round pierces the speakers, causing the camera to fall sideways and hit the ground. The view changes, showing the body of an American soldier face down in the center of the screen (Figures 59, 60). The camo suggests an Army
Combat Uniform (ACU), the designated pattern used by US soldiers in Iraq prior to 2010.
His face remains hidden, obfuscated by the ground. No longer in use, his weapon falls out of the frame. His limbs twitch and contort, shortly before they cease to move. No evidence of blood or scorched flesh appears within the screen. Around the body of the soldier, sounds of gunfire continue to piece the speakers. A voice states: “Your squad has been eliminated.” Gunfire continues, as the screen fades to black.
The scene parallels a combat scenario experienced by US and US-Coalition troops in an urban warfare site in Iraq or Afghanistan. However, the scene described does not come from archival footage or headcam recordings; instead, the scenario originates from digital space, created in an online environment. The dusty buildings and discarded weapons exist as digitally constructed objects in a Massive Multiplayer Role Playing
Game or MMORPG. The dead soldier is not an actual American body, but rather an 159 avatar created by American artist Joseph Delappe. The sound and visual effects were recorded as part of a 2006 online performance protest piece by Delappe. The piece involved the occupation of a digital recruiting tool by the US Army, titled America’s
Army.235 Delappe’s presence in the game serves as a performance intervention, focused on informing other users about the deaths of American soldiers since the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Figure 59: Screen shot from dead-in-iraq, 2006-2011
235 Joseph Delappe, “dead-in-iraq” Joseph Delappe, http://www.delappe.net/project/dead-in-iraq/. 160
Figure 60: Delappe’s avatar, dead-in-iraq, 2006-2011
Like Bilal and Abidin, Delappe seeks to use his work as a didactic tool, a platform for informing the public about violent after-effects of modern warfare, particularly through the use of the digital edifice. However, Delappe lacks the direct connection to
Iraq that Bilal and Abidin possess. Instead, his position as a non-diasporic, American artist presents a unique position on how the war in Iraq may be viewed and experienced within US/domestic space. He presents a position inclusive of many indirect witnesses, by creating works that detail the effects of vicarious viewing. This chapter seeks to evaluate and position Delappe’s work through the lens of an American witness, without any personal or familial connection to Iraq. His work examines the role of digital gaming 161 devices and technological intervention used by the US during the war in Iraq, particularly the impact of telepresent technology on civilian populations abroad.
The first part of this chapter focuses on Delappe’s biography. Whereas Bilal and
Abidin lived in Iraq during periods of war, Delappe’s experience originates from the living in the United States. His exposure to war derives from the screenic platform or indirect witnessing otherwise known as secondary witnessing.236 Freud developed the notion that all trauma, even direct exposure, may be experienced belatedly.237 However, with regards to the role of virtual experience, the notion of indirect witnessing refers to individuals who experience violence via the screenic platform. This type of witnessing plays a pivotal role in several of Delappe’s works. Since he did not directly witness the death of a family member or trudge through the streets of Baghdad after a gunfight, his involvement relies on his indirect experience of war.
The second part of this chapter builds upon Delappe’s biography, focusing on his political influences and formal training practices in the digital arts. The third portion of this chapter elaborates on three works by Delappe, dead-in-iraq, Twitter
Torture/MGandhi in Jail, and Killbox, a collaborative video-game project. Each piece harnesses some aspect of the digital edifice, requiring users to engage the works via the screenic medium. Dead-in-iraq, Twitter Torture/MGandhi in Jail, and Killbox each rely on the intervention of the participant, forcing the user to actively maneuver the online
236 Terms for indirect witnessing include: belated witnessing, outside witnessing, vicarious witnessing, and secondary witnessing.
237 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 4. 162 game or role-playing environment. Apparent in each digital artwork, users can manipulate each gaming space, often redirecting control from the artist to the participant.
Biography of Joseph Delappe
Born in San Francisco, California in 1963, Delappe grew-up in a rich atmosphere of political and social activism. The Hippie Movement, coupled with Anti-War protests concerning the Vietnam, disturbed the status quo in the San Francisco/Berkley area. After graduating from high school, he contemplated joining the military. However, a discussion with a veteran-recruiter changed his perspective:
I actually contacted a recruiter who had come to our school. I had a recruiter in
my living room and the next step was to take this test in the Presidio, in San
Francisco. There they classify where they would have you go. This guy actually
talked me out of it. The recruiter — he was a Vietnam Vet — probably just saw
something in me; he said ‘You know, you really need to be sure there’s something
very specific you want to get out of this because it’s not always for everybody.
You may want to think about not doing this. It changed my life. This one person
saying it maybe was not the right thing. And it wasn’t the right thing.238
Instead of enlisting, Delappe enrolled in San Jose State University. This proved vital to his early influences, specifically his exposure to the booming 1980s tech scene in
California and the radical punk movement flourishing in the underground music clubs.
The tech/punk combination influenced his early creative process, namely through the
238 Joseph Delappe, “Joseph Delappe,” interview by Stephen Duncombe and Steve Lambert, The Center for Artistic Activism, January, 28 2012, http://artisticactivism.org/2012/01/joseph-delappe/. 163 anti-establishment lyrics of punk and the interactive, collaborative practices in the digital arts milieu. He recalls the following about his punk roots:
I was, at the time, immersed in the hardcore punk rock scene in San Francisco: the
Dead Kennedys, Flipper, DOA, Black Flag, etc. – these groups influenced my
political stance in a rather radical way and at the same time they inspired me with
their DIY sensibility.239
While at SJSU, Delappe enrolled in courses that challenged the relationship between technology and the visual arts. One of the more progressive programs offered by the university was the Computers in Art, Design, Research, and Education or CADRE.240
The CADRE program, formed in 1984, still serves as a source for utilizing the “tech- heavy” resources in Silicon Valley. Their current mission statement emphasizes the following:
[CADRE] is dedicated to research and experimentation in a multitude of areas. It
has branched out from the Art Department to become a truly interdisciplinary
program that has included courses from Engineering, Computer Science, Theatre
239 Scott Beauchamp, “A Critique of Conscience in Joseph DeLappe’s Video Games,” Pacific Standard, May 4, 2016, https://psmag.com/a-critique-of-conscience-in-joseph-delappes-video-games- 7b21fad381dc#.yquxcrw5v. In a 2016 interview with Delappe, the artist cites a famous quote by Dead Kennedy’s lead singer, Jello Biafra, that perfectly encapsulates many of his digital intervention pieces: “Don’t fight the media. Become the media.” As evident in works like dead-in-iraq and Twitter Torture/MGandhi in Jail, Delappe chooses not to “fight” against the power of the media, instead choosing to use digital and online space as a didactic tool for educating users about war and the plight of civilians caught in spaces of violence.
240 Beauchamp, “A Critique of Conscience in Joseph DeLappe’s Video Games,” https://psmag.com. 164
Arts, and Library Science. Topics of study include surveillance, digital media
aesthetics, artificial life, robotics, mobile computing, and databases as art.241
During his undergraduate career, the curriculum focused on pushing the limits and definitions of art through technological interventions. In Computerized Confessional, one of his earliest pieces to his radical past with digital media, Delappe examined the relationship between machine and human. In the piece, participants engaged an AppleIIe computer by kneeling in front of the screen and confessing their sins.242 This encounter between human and technology remains a constant in Delappe’s work, representing human dependence on digital media.
During his MFA residency at SJSU, Delappe was exposed to the performances of
Linda Montano and Laurie Anderson. He recalls the following about his contact with feminist performance art from the 1970s and 1980s:
It has been primarily women performance artists whom I find most interesting -
excluded from the galleries and museums they took to the streets and to life to
make their creative statements. I first engaged in performing in game spaces upon
the realization that these online environments could be considered a new type of
public space. I definitely consider my work to have a direct lineage to street
theater/interventions, etc.243
241 “History,” CADRE Media Lab, http://cadre.sjsu.edu/?page_id=59.
242 Beauchamp, “A Critique of Conscience in Joseph DeLappe’s Video Games,” https://psmag.com.
243 Joseph Delappe, Interview: Joseph Delappe, Pioneer of Online Game Performance Art, interview by Matteo Bittanti, Game Scenes: Art in the Age of Videogames, March 20, 2010, http://artisticactivism.org/2012/01/joseph-delappe/. 165
The direct link to intervention-based art serves as the main thematic drive for many of
Delappe’s work. Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, many of his performances and installations challenge online presence through virtual occupation. The works selected for this chapter utilize the performance-based intervention methods influenced by Montano and Anderson and furthered by the rise of gaming and gaming-based art in the early
2000s.
(In) Direct Witnessing: Experiencing War through the Screen
The direct act of witnessing violence from the Persian Gulf War influenced Bilal and Abidin’s artworks. However, Delappe’s position subsists not through a direct act of witnessing violence, but through indirect witnessing, or a form of secondary exposure to war or traumatic acts. This type of experience relates to virtual trauma, in that the exposure to a traumatic event exists through a screenic or ancillary filter.
Originally, scholarship about indirect witnessing focused on images produced via photographs. For example, Susan Sontag emphasized the traumatic effects of viewing photographs from concentration camps:
Before I saw those photographs (I was twelve) and after, though it was several
years before I understood fully what they were about…when I looked at those
photographs, something broke. Some limit had been reached, and not only that of
horror; I felt irrevocably grieved, wounded…244
244 Susan Sontag, quoted in E. Ann Kaplan, Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (New Jersey: Rutgers University, 2005), 91. 166
There are several parallel terms used to explain what Sontag experienced after viewing the images from the camps. Marianne Hirsch cites Sontag’s experience as a type of visually mediated trauma. With image-induced or visually mediated trauma, the act of witnessing a traumatic act via the television, film, or photograph produces an intense reaction from the viewer, much like Sontag experienced when gazing upon the images of concentration camp victims.245 This may be referred to as a form of indirect witnessing, a term commonly used after 9/11 to refer to the act of witnessing traumatic or violent events through the television or Internet. From this position, the act of indirect witnessing results in a virtualized, traumatic experience.
In Uses of Photography: About Looking, John Berger discusses the effects produced by witnessing a traumatic act through an image or screen. He references Donald
McCullin’s Vietnam War photographs. McCullin’s Vietnam photos from the 1968 Tet
Offensive captured some of the most traumatic events from the war, including Shell
Shocked Soldier and Vietnamese Father and Daughter Wounded (Figures 61, 62). With regards to these images, Berger stated:
The camera which isolates a moment of agony isolates no more violently than the
experience of that moment isolates itself. The word trigger, applied to rifle and
camera, reflects a correspondence which does not stop at the purely mechanical.
The image seized by the camera is doubly violent and both violences reinforce the
245 Sontag, Trauma Culture, 91. 167
same contrast. The contrast between the photographed moment and all others.
isolates itself.246
These photos may be experienced as “arresting” to the viewer, a reaction lived vicariously through another’s suffering.
Figure 61: Donald McCullin, Shell Shocked Soldier, 1968
246 John Berger, Uses of Photography: About Looking (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 39. 168
Figure 62: Donald McCullin, Vietnamese Father and Daughter Wounded, 1968
Whereas Sontag and Berger’s experiences with war originated from exposure to photographs (more specifically, analog photographs), most witnesses to 9/11 and the
2003 invasion of Iraq experienced war via the Internet. Although print media and television networks broadcasted the events, the images, stories, and videos from 169 newscasters, amateur photographers, and bloggers circulated online, continuously expanding the digital archive.
One major component associated with witnessing traumatic events online centers on the role of belatedness. The idea began with Freud’s Nachträglichkeit or the belatedness of an event. Published as part of his research on hysteria, Freud examined how certain patients experienced hysterical episodes predicated by previous traumatic events. In his observations he noted that the original, traumatic event did not cause hysterical or psychological episodes, but rather the after-effects of experiencing the event. It may be determined that “events that are reminiscent of an original stressful experience might ‘activate and unmask latent psychopathology,’” resulting from the triggers associated with the memory of the event.247
Cathy Caruth’s position on traumatic experience focuses on the relationship between latency and trauma. For Caruth, the experience of the traumatic event does not occur at the moment of exposure, but processes later. It is through the repetitive act of remembering and forgetting the event that traumatic reactions surface. For many, this process results in symptoms characteristic of PTSD or other depressive disorders associated with traumatic exposure. However, Caruth also notes the constructive byproduct associated with “working through” traumatic events.248 Though the realization of the traumatic event isolates many witnesses, it presents an opportunity to connect with
247 Gregory Bisteon, Stijn Vanheule, and Stef Craps, “Nachträglichkeit: A Freudian perspective on delayed traumatic reactions,” Theory and Psychology 24, no. 5 (2014): 675.
248 Cathy Caruth, “Introduction,” in Trauma: Explorations of Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 10. 170 others based on shared experience. As an example, she uses literature as a means of opening a dialogue about suffering:
Literature…enables us to bear witness to events that cannot be completely known
and opens our ears to experiences that might have otherwise remained unspoken
and unheard.249
For many primary witnesses to traumatic events, literary and artistic practices enabled individuals to contextualize their experiences. Patrice Keats comments on the relationship between primary/direct witnesses and indirect/vicarious witnesses:
Vicarious witnessing begins with abstract representations of an event. The
evidence is witnessed firsthand, but the event itself is pieced together from
images, stories, and physical artifacts and then represented through the
imagination. The vicarious witness can make the statement, “I have imagined
what another has experienced; hence, I believe I know something about the
event.”250
When applied to Delappe’s work, his experience with atrocity comes from the experiences and testimony of direct witnesses, albeit directly accessed from newscasters, journalists, refugees, or veterans. However, this does not diminish the effects of his work, nor does it limit the intended message behind his performances. Present in the three artworks discussed in this chapter, the power of indirect witnessing provides a platform
249 Elissa Marder, “Trauma and Literary Studies: Some “Enabling Questions,” Reading On 1, no.1 (2006): 2-3.
250 Patrice Keats, “Vicarious Witnessing in European Concentration Camps: Imagining the Trauma of Another,” Traumatology, 11, no.3 (September 2005): 174-175. 171 for understanding how individuals living in the “comfort zone” react to traumatic events from the “conflict zone.”
Occupying Online Space: dead-in-iraq
Though he never actually fought in the Iraq War or lived in the region during the
American military campaigns, Delappe’s exposure to violence via the screenic platform influenced many of his artworks. In an early piece from 2002, Delappe occupied the online MMORPG game site Quake III: Arena. Titled Quake/Friends, Delappe and a group of students created avatars based on the popular television series Friends. They used the online message box to recite, verbatim, lines from one of the episodes (Figures
63, 64).251 Other users continuously shot and killed the avatars, causing each student to
“respawn” and continue reading the lines from the episode. After three hours, the performance concluded.252 Building off his experience with the MMORPG platform, one of his more important contributions to intervention art and digital performance began in
2006 with the creation of dead-in-iraq.
251 Joseph Delappe, “Quake/Friends.1,” Joseph Delappe, http://www.delappe.net/game-art/quakefriends/.
252 Warner Bros. threatened legal action for copyright infringement, due to their ownership of the Friends series. 172
Figure 63: Delappe and his collaborates perform Quake III and Friends, 2002-2003
Figure 64: Still image from Quake III and Friends, 2002-2003
173
Unlike the collaborative effort in Quake/Friends, dead-in-Iraq involved a single avatar created by Delappe. The location of the digital performance took place over the course of five years within the online MMORPG space of America’s Army. The location proved pivotal to Delappe’s performance. Produced under the direction of Col. Casey
Wardynski, America’s Army dates to 1999. Influenced by his son’s interest in videogames and gaming culture, Wardynski sought to develop a recruiting device that appealed to America’s youth. After several years of development and design, the game became active on July 4, 2002 and cost the US Army $7.5 million to produce.253 Using commentary and testimony from actual soldiers and veterans, the game was advertised as an authentic experience within the online gaming environment. Currently, over nine million online accounts are registered with 42.6 million downloads from 60 counties since the game’s creation (Figures 65, 66, 67).254
253 Stahl, Militainment, Inc., 106.
254 “Playing America’s Army,” PBS Frontline, last modified 2010, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/waging-war/a-new-generation/playing-americas- army.html 174
Figure 65: Mainpage of the original America’s Army
Figure 66: Game footage from America’s Army 175
Figure 67: Information page about actual American soldiers and combat veterans, America’s Army
Users “play” numerous scenarios within the gaming space. For example, a user may choose to lead a raid attack in Iraq or negotiate a domestic hostage exchange in the
US. In each case, users must work with other participants to problem solve the scenario and work together to successfully complete each task. To complement each scenario, users face a high-tech environment that mimics desert villages and urban city scenes. The sophisticated design of the game supersedes many top game developing firms like
Activision, Infinity Ward, and Ubisoft.255 Seamless graphics add to the “realism” of the
255 Ubisoft is best known for developing Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, while Infinity Ward is responsible for the Call of Duty series. 176 gaming environment, challenging users to traverse complex terrain and urban structures.
If a player fails a mission or accidently shoots a fellow team member, consequences include imprisonment in the digital Ft. Leavenworth prison, arrest as a POW, or death of the user’s avatar.
One of the major issues of the game centers on youth engagement. Although marketed as T, or available for children ages 13 and up, many critics view the game as inappropriate for young adolescents. Wardynski insists that the game “is definitely not” a recruiting device, but instead a “communication tool designed to show players that the army is a high tech, exciting organization with lots to do.”256 James Paul Gee provides commentary on the function of America’s Army and the methods of recruiting youth using the video game:
I don’t think they wanted it to be just a recruiting device, but to brand the Army.
They wanted to say…a modern army is high-tech, collaborative. You have to be
on a team, got to be team a player, and have to use pretty sophisticated
technology. Games are very good to let the world know what your world looks
like. If I want you to know- how does the world look to me? One way to do that is
to put you in it. And the Army did it.257
For Gee and many other critics of the game, America’s Army lacks a certain level of
“transparency.” Many users are unaware that the US Army tracks successful progress within the game, actively engaging participants that succeed within the MMORPG
256 Stahl, Militainment, Inc., 109.
257 “Playing America’s Army,” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/. 177 environment. This could be viewed as a type of youth recruiting device, using the video game platform to encourage children to “play” war games sanctioned by the US government.
For Delappe, a disturbing component of America’s Army centered on the disjuncture between the actual warzone in Iraq and the digital gaming space. Users continually play the game without an understanding of the consequences of actual warfare. As a means of disrupting the space occupied by players, Delappe created an account under the name dead-in-iraq with the intention of dismissing acts of violence in exchange for memorializing real American troops killed since the invasion of Iraq in
2003. The layout of the game permitted Delappe the opportunity to chat with other users via a text box located in the upper left corner of the screen. On the lower portion, a health tab and ammunition gauge tracked the number of bullets left in the weapons cache. As
Delappe traversed the terrain, he purposely dropped his digital weapon and began typing the names of American soldiers killed in the Iraq war, including their date of death and branch of military service (Figure 68). The names of the deceased were copied from the online death count website, www.icasulaties.org. The website tracks the number of US deaths from both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. 258
258 Elisabeth Bumiller, “Defense Chief Lifts Ban on Pictures of Coffins,” The New York Times (New York), February 26, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/washington/27coffins.html?_r=0. Since World War II, the censorship of violent images served as a means of protecting civilians and the families of victims from witnessing the aftermath of war. By the start of the Persian Gulf War, the George H.W. Bush Administration issued a ban on photographs depicting coffins of fallen soldiers by the US media. The argument for the ban sought to “protect the privacy and dignity of families of the dead.” For many critics, including former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the ban sanitized the gruesome effects produced by war. By hiding the corpses from the public, it eliminated the need to bear witness to death, protecting individuals from the casualties of an unpopular war. 178
Figure 68: Still from dead –in-iraq
One major component of the piece centers on how other users engaged Delappe.
Similar to Bilal’s interactions in Domestic Tension, Delappe faced sympathetic responses, juxtaposed with negative comments. Some users even forced him off the site by killing his avatar or complaining to the site administrator. A typical screen transcript reads as follows:
[US Army] –hk-burritoman#1 messaged: i think they are dates of deaths of
soldiers
[US Army] dead-in-iraq messaged: CEDRIC LAMONT LENNON 32 ARMY
JUN 24 2003
[US Army] BgRobSmith messaged: are those real people?? 179
[US Army] dead-in-iraq messaged: JOHN ELI BROWN 21 ARMY APR 14 2003
[OpFor] bin-lad-e-nG.W.B messaged: I am srry
[US Army] dead-in-iraq messaged: JOSEPH ACEVEDO 46 NAVY APR 13 2003
[OpFor] bin-lad-e-nG.W.B messaged: I am srry
KICK NOTIFICATION: dead-in-iraq has been kicked by an Administrator
[US Army] dead-in-iraq messaged: JIMMY J ARROYAVE 30 MARINE APR 15
2004
[Admin] [BM]LoftyDog ADMIN MESSAGE: cause i dont need to sit through a list of over 1000 deaths
[Enemy] stepdown messaged: RIP, THIS IS A GAME
[US Army] dead-in-iraq messaged: HESLEY BOX JR 24 ARMY MAY 6 2004
[US Army] dead-in-iraq messaged: JEFFREY G GREEN 20 MARINE MAY 5
2004
[US Army] dead-in-iraq: ERICK J HODGES 21 MARINE NOV 10 2004
[US Army] –os-zelptic messaged: dead stfu you dumb **** {FUBAR}rtftd was shot by {-Boomer-}
[US Army] turkeybird messaged: who cares
[US Army] Pvt_Styx messaged: he drops his gun at the beginning of every round
[US Army] dead-in-iraq messaged: GEORGE T ALEXANDER JR 34 ARMY
OCT 22 2005
[US Army] Pvt_Styx messaged: jeeez shut up already we get it people died
[US Army} ={UMD}=HairyJohnson messaged: hmmm so whats your point? 180
XSTALKERX89 was shot by {UMD}=MORE_BEER.259
Like Domestic Tension, the online user base varied. As evident in the transcript, some users inquired about his presence, while others verbally assaulted him by cursing, condemning his actions, or shooting his avatar. Even the administrator of the gaming simulation forcibly removed Delappe several times from active game play.
His work may be defined as a type of socially engaged art, focused on engaging the public through participatory actions. Delappe’s audience for dead-in-iraq remained largely online, unhindered by the space of the gallery or museum. His work included the anonymous masses that flock to online MMORPGs to play fantasy roles or engage in violent acts of play. For Delappe, his presence in America’s Army engaged users via online space, yet also served to memorialize those unable to provide commentary or testimony about the atrocities of war.
Memorializing the Real in Virtual Space
Part of the performance of dead-in-iraq includes social intervention within online space. However, the piece also serves as a memorial to the nearly 4,500 American soldiers killed in the Iraq War (2003-2012). Common in several post-Vietnam memorials like Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial, the Oklahoma City National Memorial, and several of the 9/11 Memorials, the names of the victims appear on the surfaces of granite tablets or slabs. Through his avatar dead-in-iraq, Delappe typed the names of each fallen soldier as a memorial to the deceased. Many of the users from America’s
259 Joseph Delappe, “dead-in-iraq: performance/memorial/protest,” TDR: The Drama Review 52, 1 (Spring 2008): 3. 181
Army reacted by complaining to administrators that Delappe made the game too real and took away the joy of escapism within the online gaming environment. However, since the game serves to recruit users to join the armed forces, should they be aware of the real casualties of war? Delappe responded with the following criticism:
One of the things that has intrigued people about this work is that it is in this
online context. It is essentially military territory online. It’s a kind of base if you
will. People who have…complained to me about this, like ‘this is not the place to
protest go do this on the federal building steps.’ And I’ll respond to them…and I
said look I’m taking this to the source. There’s a reason why in the ‘60s blacks
went to lunch counters. They created meaning by actually going into that context.
It’s the same thing I’m doing here. I mean I could go to the federal building and
stand there and read a list of these names but who’s going to pay attention to that?
This got your attention.260
By finding a location where young users convene, Delappe used the site to memorialize, but to also expose users to the harmful possibilities of joining the US military during an active war time. Since Delappe performed the piece during an actual war, he remained constantly connected to the piece as each soldier died. As the war continued for years after he started in 2006, his piece turned into a durational performance, driven by the
260 Returning Fire: Interventions in Video Games, directed by Roger Stahl (2011; Roger Stahl, Andrew Kilroy, Pinehurst Pictures & Sound, 2012), DVD. 182 deaths of real soldiers. By continuously performing the piece in America’s Army, he served as a constant reminder to users about violent after-effects of warfare.261
Occupying Second Life: Twitter Torture/MGandhi in Jail
Similar to the occupation of space in dead-in-iraq, Delappe continued his experimentation with online presence through another digital intervention performance.
Twitter Torture/MGandhi in Jail began in 2009 as a continuation of a 2008 digital performance entitled The Salt Satyagraha Online: Gandhi's March to Dandi in Second
Life. This section merges Delappe’s online experience within Second Life with my personal exploration into the same MMORPG space. I will provide personal insight into how users engage online interaction within Second Life and how actual and virtual entities coalesce. Delappe’s presence served as a means of protest, once again harnessing passive occupation of online space as witnessed in dead-in-iraq. Using his experience as an indirect witness to the war in Iraq, Twitter Torture/MGandhi in Jail serves to inform users about acts of torture committed under the Bush Administration in the mid-2000s.
261 Joseph Delappe, “Virtual Commemoration: The Iraqi Memorial Project,” last modified 2011, http://www.iraqimemorial.org/: To complement his performance of dead-in-iraq, Delappe created an online memorial to the fallen Iraqi civilians killed since the invasion in 2003. Available at http://iraqimemorial.org/, Delappe started the site as a means of starting a dialogue about civilian casualties and to honor the innocent lives lost to war. Delappe states: “In contrast to the 9/11 memorial proposals, which required specification of location, materials, access, lighting, and cost, the Iraqi Memorial projects range from small, private gestures to concepts on a global scale, spanning the entire range of modern media: architecture, painting, performance, video, photography, body art, found objects, and so on. They are haunting in that, once seen, they promise to be always about to arrive, about to take physical form as built monuments in the conventional manner. We cannot help thinking of them as possible, or desirable, even as the format is specified as virtual.” Whereas fallen soldiers receive honorary funerals, obituary publications, and local/national press, numerous Iraqi victims never receive any proper burial rites or public commemoration. The Iraqi Memorial provides an online forum for users to gather and remember the thousands killed in the war, providing testimony, memorial proposals, and donation services to NGO and non-profit relief organizations. 183
Creating Presence in Second Life
What is Second Life? Why choose Second Life as a site for protest? In 2003, San
Francisco-based Linden Labs released the MMORPG gaming site Second Life. The architect of the game, Philip Rosedale, created the site as a means of inviting participants to explore new frontiers of virtual space, using avatars as a means of communicating and interacting with users from all over the world.262 Rosedale did not see Second Life as a game per se; instead, he uses the term “new country” to describe the online space. His argument against the “game” term centers on the notion that users in Second Life do not play for an overall objective. Instead, Second Life serves as a space “to connect everyone to an online world that improves the human condition.”263 Rosedale indicated a desire to connect persons from around the world through virtually-constructed space. Elevating the function of the text-based frame of the chat room or message board, Rosedale created a community where three-dimensional bodies could interact, catering to both real and fantasy interactions. Through the creation of the avatar, people could choose to perform as a hyperreal version of their “actual body” or create an alter-ego. Avatars took the form of fantasy characters, superheroes, and celebrities, permitting users an opportunity to perform outside their actual bodies.264 The presence of users served to integrate the space as a means of socialization and interaction. At present, users freely traverse the online
262 Eric Morgan, “Virtual Worlds: Integrating Second Life into the History Classroom,” The History Teacher 48, no. 4 (August 2013): 548.
263 Tateru Nino, “Philip Linden talks mission statement,” Massively, last modified 2013, http://massively.joystiq .com/2007/11/22/philip-linden-talks-mission-statement/.
264 Nino, “Philip Linden talks mission statement,” Massively, last modified 2013, http://massively.joystiq .com/2007/11/22/philip-linden-talks-mission-statement/. 184 spaces, visit cafes, dance clubs, recite poetry, hold public forums, or engage in meditation.
Throughout the discussion of Twitter Torture/MGandhi in Jail, I will integrate my personal experiences within Second Life with Delappe’s protest performance piece. Both
Delappe and I engaged ritual space as a means of understanding how virtual platforms can facilitate a response from participants. From my exploration of the space, I gathered information about social interaction, using an avatar as a conduit for understanding how individuals interact through a virtual body. Delappe used a similar method in his performance of Twitter Torture by facilitating a dialogue with individuals via the avataric body.
Within Second Life, two distinct bodies interact: an actual, biological body recognized as the user, and the digital avatar.265 Unlike the biological components that comprise the actual body of the user, the avatar exists as an amalgamation of computer codes interacting in a space created through a system of algorithmic formulas.266 These algorithms create the avataric foundation for Second Life. Both the actual and avataric
265Tom Boellstroff, Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 7. Terminology used to describe the actual world and the virtual or digital world remains a contested issue. The terms “real life” body and cyber body serve as forms of tension when attempting to delineate the two distinct groups. For the sake of avoiding confusion, Tom Boellstroff and other virtual theorists settle on terminology that clearly delineates the actual, “real life” user from the digital.
266 Drew Harry, “Algorithmic Architecture in Virtual Spaces” (master’s Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2008), 59-60.
185 bodies coalesce within the site, performing a variety of interactions with millions of other users from around the world.267
The body of the avatar remains completely dependent on the guidance of the actual user, yet remains suspended as an abstract entity within virtual space. My personal experience with Second Life served to chronicle a virtual ethnographic study of actual interactions within the digital space. Following a trajectory of interactions from the initial stages of exposure to Second Life, I chronicled the asymmetrical disjuncture between the actual body of the user and the virtually-constructed avatar. Both bodies engage pseudo-ritual space, whether through physical interaction or coded performance, that are located in several online communities within the site. I visited Muslim-based sites that served as the focus of cyber ritual performance (Figures 69, 70).
Figure 69: Screen shot my avatar, JennaBellarc, exploring Second Life
267 Tom Boellstroff, Coming of Age in Second Life, 20. 186
Figure 70: Engaging in a ritual session using JennaBellarc, Second Life
In Twitter Torture, Delappe also uses ritual space as a site for his intervention performance. Unlike other social worlds within Second Life, religious-based spaces employ specific ritual practices, prayers sessions, and discussion groups in order to educate users about the faith, and provide an opportunity for users to engage with a global audience (figure 71). Stephen Jacobs suggests:
It is possible to set apart, in the Durkheimian sense, special places within
cyberspace in which cyber-ritual-architectural events can be facilitated that bring
together (disembodied) people and (virtual) building in a hermeneutical
conversation/game.268
268 Stephen Jacobs, “Virtually Sacred: The Performance of Asynchronous Cyber-Rituals in Online Spaces,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12, no. 3 (2007): http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue3/jacobs.html. 187
Taking Jacob’s position into consideration, does the virtual ritual space in Second Life exist with the same level of agency as the actual? Jacobs suggests that performing ritual within Second Life provides an informal, more accessible platform for performing religious-based rituals. In accordance with Jacobs, individuals can perform religious rituals at times deemed “convenient” to the user.269
Figure 71: Other avatars gather for a community meeting, Second Life
There are differences between online and offline sacred spaces and rituals. When users perform in digital space, asynchronous online rituals can be more flexible. For example, one does not have to follow an ordered ritual sequence at a particular time.270 In other words, whereas an actual prayer site may close at certain times, the Second Life
269 Jacobs, “Virtually Sacred: http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue3/jacobs.html.
270 Ibid., http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue3/jacobs.html. 188 space allows user access at all times of the day to coincide with the various time zones and accessibility of participants. Delappe cited this as a major issue in his performance of
Twitter Torture, specifically the inconsistent occupation of the actual user. For him, his avatar remained present during the entire duration of the performance, whereas the actual body of Delappe intervened at times deemed convenient to his schedule.
No stranger to Second Life, Delappe previously performed several other durational performances within the space, including The Salt Satyagraha Online:
Gandhi's March to Dandi in Second Life. In The Salt Satyagraha Online, Delappe re- enacted Gandhi’s 1930 protest march from the Salt Satyagraha, a 240-mile endeavor.
Using his avatar, MGandhi Chakrabarti, Delappe and members of the Eyebeam Art and
Technology Lab rigged a Nordic Trek treadmill to a computer (Figure 72). As Delappe walked on the treadmill, his avatar moved within the space of Second Life. The entire performance of the Salt Satyagraha reenactment took 26 days to complete. After the completion of the performance, Delappe decided to conclude the march with another durational performance based on Gandhi’s actual imprisonment by the British Authority after the Salt Satyagraha march. This resulted in the creation of Twitter Torture, using the same avatar.
189
Figure 72: Footage of Delappe performing The Salt Satyagraha Online: Gandhi's March to Dandi in Second Life, 2008
The premise for Twitter Torture focused on the nine-month imprisonment imparted on Gandhi after Salt Satyagraha. Delappe commenced the performance to coincide with the actual date of Gandhi’s arrest on May 5, 1930.271 A month before the start of the performance, the Obama administration permitted the release of former classified documents under the George W. Bush presidency regarding CIA and military-
271 Joseph Delappe, “Twitter Torture/MGhandi in Jail,” Joseph Delappe, http://www.delappe.net/project/twitter-torturegandhi-in-prison/. Delappe stated that he was greatly influenced by Tehching Hseih’s One Year Performance 1980-1981 In the piece, Hseih lived for one year in solitary confinement. 190 sanctioned torture of suspected terrorists at places like Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.
The documents detailed the legal loopholes used by the administration to commit acts of violence as a means of information extraction. The following details the types of
“enhanced interrogation techniques” used by the CIA at prisons sites sanctioned by the
US Office of Legal Counsel:
…placing detainees on liquid diets, interrogating detainees in the nude, ‘walling’
(slamming detainees against a wall), facial and abdominal slaps, cramped
confinement, the use of stress positions, dousing detainees with cold water from a
hose, and sleep deprivation (for periods up to 180 hours) …’waterboarding’”
which involves laying a detainee on a board with his feet above his head, placing
a cloth over his face, and pouring cold water over it. This makes it difficult to
breath and induces “a sensation of drowning” and ‘fear and panic.’272
The documents later became known as the Torture Memos, the legal framework detailing permissible acts of torture. Delappe decided to incorporate the Torture Memos into the daily performance of his avatar. Each day, he would type sections of the memos into the
Second Life text box and also through a supplemental Twitter box linked to his Facebook account. Delappe remained engaged with other users through these social media accounts, even if he was not physically present at his home computer.
On May 5th, 2009, Delappe entered Second Life with his avatar, placing the digital figure in a jail cell. His avatar was guided into a seated Lotus position, legs crossed with
272 Allen Wiener, “The Torture Memos and Accountability,” American Society of International Law 13, no. 6 (May 2009): 1. 191 his hands resting upwards on his knees. Dressed only in a white khadi scarf and waist wrap, MGandhi Chakrabarti remained seated in Second Life 24 hours a day, seven days a week.273 Delappe spent several hours a day engaged with the avatar, using his time within
Second Life to perform his text-based performance. Users slowly began to enter the space, guiding their avatars directly outside the jail cell to watch the performance. Users even asked questions about the performance by messaging Delappe via his avatar
(Figures 73,74, 75).
Figure 73: Delappe’s avatar, MGhandi, imprisoned within Second Life, 2009-2010
273 Delappe, “Twitter Torture/MGhandi in Jail,” http://www.delappe.net/project/twitter-torturegandhi-in- prison/. 192
Figure 74: Screen shot displaying the textbox in Second Life, 2009-2010
Figure 75: Screen shot to Delappe’s Twitter feed as a transcribes lines from the Torture Memos, 2009-2010
193
Delappe began the performance by reading memos dated from 2002, prior to the invasion of Iraq. The memos date to August 1, 2002 and consist of hundreds of pages of documents. Many of the pages included commentary on types of state-sanctioned interrogation methods. Delappe typed each line into the textbox, sometimes up to 6-8 hours at a time. The following excerpt comes from the Memorandum for John A. Rizzo,
Senior Deputy General Counsel for the CIA, and was typed as part of the Twitter Torture performance:
The ‘waterboard,’ which is the most intense of the CIA interrogation techniques,
is subject to additional limits. It may be used on a High Value Detainee only if the
CIA has ‘credible intelligence that a terrorist attack is imminent’; ‘substantial and
credible indicators that the subject has actionable intelligence that can prevent,
disrupt or delay this attack’; and ‘[o]ther interrogation methods have failed to
elicit the information [or] CIA has clear indications that other… methods are
unlikely to elicit this information within the perceived time limit for preventing
the attack.’274
The memorandum continues:
The program, moreover, is designed to minimize the risk of injury or any
suffering that is unintended or does not advance the purpose of the program. For
example, in dietary manipulation, the minimum caloric intake is set at or above
274 “Memorandum for John A. Rizzo, Senior Deputy General Counsel for the CIA (George Washington University, 2005), 5. 194
levels used in commercial weight-loss programs, thereby avoiding the possibility
of significant weight loss.
In nudity and water dousing, interrogators set the ambient air temperature high
enough to guard against hypothermia.
The walling technique employs a false wall and a C-collar (or similar device) to
help avoid whiplash. See Techniques at 8.
With respect to sleep deprivation, constant monitoring protects against the
possibility that detainees might injure themselves by hanging from the wrist,
suffer from acute edema, or even experience non-transient hallucinations. See
Techniques at 11-13.
With the waterboard, interrogators use potable saline rather than plain water so
that detainees will not suffer from hyponatremia and to minimize the risk of
pneumonia. See id. at 13-14 (Figure 76).275
The memorandums are available via numerous websites, including the ACLU, Find Law, and the George Washington University archives, de-classified albeit slightly redacted.
The question begs: why did Delappe re-type material already available for public access online?
275 “Memorandum for John A. Rizzo,” 29. 195
Figure 76: Example of waterboarding. The head of the interrogatee is tilted with a washcloth or rag placed over the face. Water is poured over the rag to induce a feeling of suffocation or drowning.
With regards to the location of his performance, he utilized several social media platforms designed to communicate information via digital networks. Delappe did not experience torture like Bilal, nor directly witnesses the atrocities committed at Abu
Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay (Figure 77). However, he did have the means to address the effects of state-sponsored torture using social media as a didactic tool. Through his intervention in Second Life, he connected his performance to Twitter and Facebook, two of the largest social media platforms in the world, boasting over a billion users combined.
By tagging his performances and sharing his daily interactions, he compiled a growing list of followers. With regards to the power of social media, Delappe states the following: 196
I’ve been reading various texts into computer games for several years now as
interventionist performances – migrating this type of work into the social media
world seems like a logical step. The work exploits the interconnected nature of
contemporary media to create what I intend as a droll, verbatim recitation – a type
of temporary re-publishing if you will – of these memos which catapulted into the
public consciousness…276
Thus, the re-publishing of the material provided documents to a larger group of individuals that may not have understood or been exposed to the Torture Memo scandal in the early 2000s. His piece served as a lesson not only on the function of performance in digital space, but also on the power of the online platform as site for sharing materials en masse.
276 Joseph Delappe, “Playing Politics: Machinima as live performance and document,” in Understanding Machinima: Essays on filmmaking in virtual worlds, ed. Jenna Ng (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 160. 197
Figure 77: Photograph of Ali Shallal al-Qaisi, a prisoner from the Abu Ghraib Prison, c. 2004
Collaboration Online: Killbox
Whereas dead-in-iraq and Twitter Torture used pre-constructed MMORPG environments, Delappe’s latest collaborative project, Killbox, was created as an autonomous gaming unit. Like Bilal’s game, Virtual Jihadi, and Abidin’s webpage in
Abidin Travels, Delappe’s participatory interaction remains a major objective of the piece. Once again, the premise for his online performance stems from a desire to educate the public about the power of military technology and state-sponsored violence. 198
His interest in military technology originates from his residential proximity to several Air Force UAV bases.277 Located on the southern portion of Nevada, Nellis Test and Training Range and Creech Air Force Base comprise several reconnaissance and surveillance UAV units. In his 2013-piece Project 929: Mapping the Solar, Delappe rode a bicycle around Nellis, dragging a piece of chalk for 460 miles (Figure 78). The durational intervention piece took nearly 10 days to complete and highlighted the amount of space needed to create a solar farm large enough to power the entire continental United
States.278 Since the Persian Gulf War, the space has served as a testing ground for weaponized UAV aircrafts.
277 Delappe currently teaches at the University of Nevada, Reno.
278Joseph Delappe, “On the Making of Killbox…,” Killbox, March 29, 2016, http://www.killbox.info/killbox/, 199
Figure 78: Delappe performs part of Project 929: Mapping the Solar, 2013
Inspired by UAV devices, Delappe created several other works in a series detailing the power of government surveillance and technology. The series includes:
Cowardly Drones (2013), an intervention piece where Delappe added the word
“Cowardly” to the body of GA MQ1-Predator and MQ9 Reaper Drones and uploaded the doctored images as searchable. jpgs in Google and Bing. Created in 2014, Me and My 200
Predator consists of a downloadable, wearable art piece (Figure 79). Available at http://www.instructables.com/id/Personal-Drone-System-Me-and-My- Predator/, users can create an exact 1/72 scale replica of a Predator Drone, fastened to a carbon-fiber rod measuring roughly three feet in length (Figure 80). The rod attaches to a metal c-clamp head strap made of aluminum that rests on the posterior of the head. Once secured in place, the drone hovers above the participant’s head. Delappe states that “the Personal
Drone System is designed for insecurity and comfort - to simulate using analog technologies and what it might be like to live under droned skies....”279 Drone Strike
Visualization (2014-2015) mapped the UAV-initiated bombing sites in Pakistan, highlighting the number of deaths caused from the aerial attacks.280
Figure 79: Image still from Cowardly Drone, 2013
279 Joseph Delappe, “Me and My Predator,” Joseph Delappe, http://www.delappe.net/sculptureinstallation/me-and-my-predator/
280 Joseph Delappe, “Drone Strike” Visualization,” Joseph Delappe, http://www.delappe.net/installation/drone-strike-installation-prototype/ 201
Figure 80: Delappe wears his drone from Me and My Predator - Personal Drone System, 2014
Building off the other pieces in the series, Delappe teamed up with several artists and gaming engineers to create an interactive device focused on the after-effects of UAV technology. The premise for this digital gaming intervention centers on Delappe’s fascination with UAVs used in modern warfare since the Persian Gulf War. Collaborators include: Malath Abbas, co-founder of Quartic Llama, Tom deMajo, the head game designer and sound engineer for Killbox, and Albert Elwin, a programmer and founder of
Space Budgie (Figure 81).281
281 Jo-Ann Green, “Turbulence.org Commission: ‘Killbox’ by Joseph Delappe, et al.,” Networked Performance, http://archive.turbulence.org/blog/2015/09/22/turbulenceorg-commission-kill-box-by-joseph- delappe-et-al/. 202
The title for the game derives from a military term of the same name. The
Department of Defense defines a killbox as “a three-dimensional area reference that enables timely, effective coordination and controls and facilitates rapid attacks.”282 To simply state, the killbox space serves as a free-range kill zone where armed forces are free to shoot and/or bomb anything deemed as a target or threat. Since the beginning of the Iraq War, the function of the killbox focuses on finding specific combatants and eliminating the threat. With the onset of urban warfare, killbox use requires efficient data analysis, cartographic expertise, and technological prowess. Outlined by Scott
Beauchamp in “The Moral Cost to Kill,” listed below is an example of how modern killboxes are used:
First, killboxes have materialized in places the local population might not expect.
And second, killboxes have been used in conjunction with disposition matrices, or
‘kill lists.’ The DOD uses these to target people whose ‘pattern of life’ fit the
parameters of an algorithm, rather than specific individuals. For example: Say
someone who owns a cellphone has been calling numbers that trigger a response
from a computer at the Pentagon. Analysts will triangulate the cellphone’s
whereabouts, and military leaders might initiate a ‘killbox’ at that location,
authorizing soldiers to kill everyone within the ‘box.’ Mission accomplished.283
282 Scott Beauchamp, “The Moral Cost of the Kill Box,” February 26, 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/02/the-cost-of-the-kill-box/470751/.
283 Beauchamp, “The Moral Cost of the Kill Box,” http://www.theatlantic.com/ 203
For example, if a suspected ISIS combatant in Iraq makes a reference to a terrorist attack using a cellphone or computer, US surveillance teams can pinpoint the location of the suspected individual and decide to survey the region for possible threats or neutralize the target.
Figure 81: Mainpage from Delappe’s game, Killbox
This type of digital, militarized intervention fascinated and troubled Delappe and his team of collaborators. In the past, warfare required the actual visualization of hostile enemies by ground units, supplemented by aerial surveillance devices (Figure 82). Since the inception of the Iraq War and the weaponization of UAVs, the need for ground troops decreased, relying mainly on digital aerial surveillance devices. Coupled with the abstraction of modern urban warfare, killboxes adapted. Beauchamp continues his critique of the UAV-killbox marriage by stating:
The military began using killboxes in the so-called war on terror as a technique to
exert force in ‘ungoverned spaces,’ territories that are not controlled by a state and 204
are populated by people who might not share American cultural values… The
innocent people living in Afghanistan or Yemen, however, are apparently judged
by a different standard. And this is the moral cost of the killbox: When used
widely and indiscriminately, the tactic devalues human life.284
This facet of military UAV warfare deserves attention, specifically in the aftermath of several bombings on civilian hospitals run by Doctors without Borders (DWB) in Syria.
In fact, several reports claim that DWB-sponsored facilities have been hit over 100 times in the past several years in Iraq and Syria alone, killing civilians, doctors, and staff.285
Delappe’s game serves to educate the public about the loss of innocent life with regards to UAVs and how operators risk civilian casualties in combat zones.
Figure 82: UAV launches a missile, date unknown
284 Ibid., http://www.theatlantic.com/
285 Rudaw, “‘Syria is a kill box’ say medical NGO,” Rudaw, February 18, 2016, http://rudaw.net/english/middleeast/syria/180220161.
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Playing Killbox
The design of Killbox appears like a stripped-down version of America’s Army, reducing the landscape to rudimentary, geometric shapes and basic terrain indicators.
Instead of high contrast shadows and detailed color graphics, buildings appear as square blocks and simple colored dots replace the realistic bodies found in America’s Army.
Although the game’s designers have the necessary credentials to create a highly- sophisticated game, their decision to create a rudimentary design serves as a strategic plan. The reasoning is due to “the setting of cultural signifiers that may trigger a player’s prejudices, and to show how artificial the world may feel when viewed through a circling camera.”286 Without the distraction of realistic set designs, the user can focus on the process of playing, rather than the graphics.
Unlike dead-in-iraq or Twitter Torture, the premise of Killbox requires users to download the game from http://turbulence.org/commissions/Killbox/ and play one of two roles available to users. To fully understand the premise and objective behind the game, I downloaded a version of Killbox from the website and documented my experience. The following details my movement through the space:
As a first-time user, I follow the link to turbulence.org, an online digital arts project. The link to Killbox leads me to a separate site that provides the basic premise for the piece, supplemented by two links to download the game (one for PC, the other MAC). Once the game is downloaded, the Killbox logo appears on a black screen, followed by two icons.
286 Edwin Evans-Thirlwell, “In this Game You Play a Drone Pilot, Then a Drone Target,” Motherboard, October 8, 2015, http://motherboard.vice.com/read/in-this-game-you-play-a-drone-pilot-then-a-drone- target. 206
On the left side of the screen, a green icon appears and the right, a red icon (Figure 83).
When I guide the mouse over the icons, the green dot turns into a humanoid figure wearing a headset with the text “PLAYER 1” above the head. When the mouse hovers over the red dot, the icon rapidly changes from a child icon to a woman to a man. Above the flickering figures, a text box reads “PLAYER 2.” I first venture into the PLAYER 1 scenario (Figure 84).
Figure 83: Screen shot from Killbox 2016
Figure 84: Player 1 option, Killbox, 2016 207
First, the I type a username and password to start. Users must then press “L” to
continue. The text line moves up. The name “CREECH AIRBASE 4320” appears,
followed by a series of GPS coordinates. More numbers appear, seemingly
arbitrarily in their sequence. The next action indicates that the drone is located
over Waziristan, Pakistan. The region remains pivotal to the game. NOTE: From
2013-2015, the North Waziristan region in Pakistan suffered numerous civilian
casualties by UAVs. It is home to remote tribal groups and terrorist cells. This
creates confusion when operators try to decipher between terrorist targets and
civilians. I continue through the space:287
Next, the screen indicates a system check for a MQ-1 Predator. Predator drones
are a weaponized UAV capable of long range missions involving
intelligence/reconnaissance and threat elimination.288 More numbers and
coordinates appear. Slowly, the left 2/3 of the screen opens into a digital
landscape. Rudimentary, white buildings, green grass, a beige walkway, and rows
of green triangles appear in the scene. The lower right section displays the
elevation and GPS coordinates while the left and upper portion displays distance
measurements, the height above target, range, and bearings. These are actual
instruments used by UAVs and military aircrafts. The silence is interrupted by
287 Steve Coll, “The Unblinking Stare: The drone war in Pakistan,” The New Yorker, November 24, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/24/unblinking-stare.
288 “MQ-1B Predator,” U.S. Air Force, September 23, 2015, http://www.af.mil/AboutUs/FactSheets/Display/tabid/224/Article/104469/mq-1b-predator.aspx.
208
voices speaking over a radio. The voice over the radio is unclear, providing little
to no information. I hear alphanumerical sequences. A command option tasks the
player with testing camera keys to move the UAV camera left (A key), right (D
key), up (W key), down (S key), zoom-in (I key), and zoom-out (O key) (Figure 85).
Once the keys are pressed, the text box reads “All Systems Operational.” Next, I
confirm the target by pressing the T key. The ground target is then locked. After
several seconds, I press the M key in order to launch the missile.289 Upon closer
inspection, small dots move around the space, some in clusters, others alone. A
red square appears around one of the dots (Figure 86). Once the missile makes
contact, two black spheres appear on the target site as the buildings crumble and
the surviving dots cluster away from the target zone. The user can then shoot
another missile at the target. The screen fades to black (Figure 87).
289 SSgt. Greg Wetzel (Air Force In-flight Refueler), interview by Jenna Altomonte, August 1, 2016. 209
Figure 85: Command key test, Killbox, 2016
Figure 86: Moments before impact from a missile, Killbox, 2016
210
Figure 87: Scene after missile impact, Killbox, 2016
A small red dot appears on the black screen. I am now in the role of Player 2.
The occasional bird chirp breaks the silence of the gaming space. One of the
buildings display the location, Waziristan, Pakistan, coupled with the command
keys: MOVE: W/A/S/D LOOK: MOUSE JUMP: SPACE (Figure 88). As I traverse
the terrain, the dots disappear when the player 2 sphere runs over them.
Gelatinous, multi-colored forms move through the space (Figure 89). A loud
explosion followed by a black scene interrupts my movement. The scene turns to a
grey overlay and then fades to black. The screen remains black for several
seconds (Figures 90, 91). An information box appears (Figure 92).
211
Figure 88: Player 2 point-of-view, Killbox, 2016
Figure 89: Player 2 dot-avatar, Killbox, 2016 212
Figure 90: Aerial UAV hit, moment of impact, Killbox, 2016
Figure 91: Screen after impact as Player 2, Killbox
213
The text box states the following:
In 2004 the first Unmanned Aerial Vehicle missile strike in an unofficial war zone
was carried out in North Pakistan, killing four people including two children.
Since then over three thousand people have been killed by UAV-or Drone-
strikes piloted from screens in cubicles thousands of miles away. Press any
key to continue.
Figure 92: Information screen, Killbox, 2016
The game serves as a didactic tool for educating gamers about the accessibility of violent technology used in modern warfare. One issue with telepresent technology centers on the sanitized nature of UAV use in warfare. Building off cruise missile technology from the 1970s, the UAV was created to reduce both military and civilian casualties.
Operators guiding UAVs could use the devices to reduce collateral damage, decrease 214 ground troop presence, and provide long-range support to remote regions. However, the main concern from UAV critics centers on the idea that “drones make killing too easy” and may blur geopolitical borders by major military powers.290
Tom deMajo, one of the collaborators on the project, comments on the issues with
UAV warfare:
[Drones] bend legal boundaries, definitely territorial boundaries, but also
psychological boundaries as well. How do you reconcile yourself with killing on a
screen, when you’re used to doing it for fun?291
In Killbox, the choice to use colored dots, rather than realistic bodies or avatars, serves a strategic purpose. For many UAV pilots and sensor operators, ground targets resemble small dots, making it very difficult to distinguish threats versus civilians. In the game, the user bombs these targets without consideration for what they may or may not represent. The same issue remains present for many UAV pilots when confronted with targets in regions where visibility may be low or targets undefined.
Killbox is not just a “video game” or form of entertainment, but a tool used to educate users about the power of violence produced by telepresent technology. The problem with the statement “killing made easy” derives from out-of-date research involving UAV crew and operator data. Cases of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
290 Jacqueline L. Hazelton, “Drones: What Are They Good For?” Parameters 42/43, no. 4/1 (Winter-Spring 2013): 31.
291Evans-Thirlwell, “In this Game You Play a Drone Pilot, Then a Drone Target,” http://motherboard.vice.com/.
215 for UAV pilots and sensor operators has increased exponentially, suggesting that “killing too easy” may be correct in terms of technological intervention, but not with regards to the humans operating the devices. In 2014, 1,064 UAV pilots and operators were included in a United States Air Force study that focused on the relationship between
PTSD and indirect exposure to combat scenarios. 292 Many UAV pilots and operators suffered from extreme exhaustion from working in isolation for 12+ hours per day, up to six days a week. Others experienced depressive disorders after witnessing the deaths of civilians, combatants, and fellow soldiers via the screen within their operator units.
Delappe and his collaborators understood the negative effects many UAV operators experienced as indirect witnesses to traumatic events. Thus, Killbox provides users the opportunity to experience, albeit on a minimal scale, the issues many operators face when having to strike targets on the ground. This issue appears in dead-in-iraq, in
Bilal’s Virtual Jihadi, and Abidin’s webpage in Abidin Travels. These works are not just video games and forms of entertainment, but tools used to educate users about the power of violence produced within digital space.
Conclusion
Using video games and MMORPGs as performance platforms, Delappe enables for a greater, more diverse network of direct and indirect participants in his oeuvre. His work reconfigures interventionist practices by using digital space as a site for protest and political resistance. Throughout this chapter, several works by the artist enabled
292 Wayne Chappelle, Tanya Goodman, Laura Reardon, William Thompson, “An Analysis of Post- Traumatic Stress Symptoms in United States Air Force Drone Operators,” Journal of Anxiety Disorders 28 (2014): 481. 216 participants and viewers to actively engage within his performances. In dead-in-iraq, users could watch Delappe occupy one of the largest MMORPG gaming spaces, using the space as a site for memorialization. Twitter Torture/MGandhi in Jail also used the
MMORPG platform to engage the masses of online users in Second Life. Similar to dead- in-iraq, the performance required Delappe to occupy online space via an avatar, using the
Second Life environment as a site for educating the public about the role of torture sanctioned by the Bush Administration.
The final piece discussed in the chapter, Killbox, removed Delappe from primary play, using the participant as the main source for performance intervention. Using the game to inform audiences about the repercussions of UAV technology, the game still requires active participation from users and continues to operate as a downloadable game for anyone to pursue online. As the use of UAV and remote technology remains constant throughout active and inactive warzones and killbox sites, Delappe will continue to build and create interactive performance works that challenge the after-effects of telepresent technology.
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CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION
Sometimes objection to or rejection of political art is not because it presents a different point of view, but because it makes the invisible-visible visible again. It confronts us with our own image; it is terrifying because an image is seen whose existence one always tries to deny. One must admit we are all ideological beings, programmed by our own culture. This should be a simple fact – no matter how much we try to distance ourselves from an ideology, we still operate within our societal code. And these codes often lead to double standards and prejudices of which we may not even be aware. – Wafaa Bilal293
The digital-based artworks by Wafaa Bilal, Adel Abidin, and Joseph Delappe serve as tools for understanding the relationship between violence, trauma, and technology. Using primary and secondary connections to the Persian Gulf and Iraq Wars, each artist uses personal and collective traumas to reveal the dangers of technological advancements in modern warfare since the early 1990s. This conclusion provides two points of departure regarding the status of each artist and how their works continue to influence participants, viewers, and spectators online. I revisit artworks by each artist and consider current projects that investigate new practices involving telepresent technology and remote warfare. The conclusion also addresses current trends in online gaming and digital performance with regards to global terrorism and virtual spectatorship.
Each chapter throughout this dissertation closely examined the artworks and performances by Bilal, Abidin, and Delappe. With regards to Bilal’s work, his exposure to the direct violence of the Persian Gulf War and the subsequent trauma experienced from the “conflict zone” of Iraq influenced his artistic approaches. Evident in Domestic
Tension, Virtual Jihadi, and 3rdi, each artwork used the digital format as a means of
293 Bilal, “Invisible Mirror: Aggression and the Thumb Generation Response,” 97. 218 exposing the problems associated with modern technology used during war. In Domestic
Tension, the piece exposed the immediacy and accessibility of violent platforms within online space. The durational performance unearthed Bilal’s PTSD, originating from exposure to the Persian Gulf War and his time spent in refugee camps in Kuwait and
Saudi Arabia.
In Virtual Jihadi, Bilal examined the use of video games as a reaction to digital and telepresent violence. Using an avatar, Bilal performed as a terrorist, using a hacked
Al-Qaeda version of Quest for Bush by the Global Islamic Media Front. Like Domestic
Tension, the game sought to expose users to accessibility of violence platforms online. In
3rdi, Bilal merged both his body and computer hardware devices to create a performance based on sousveillance in the post-9/11, post-invasion era. The piece was examined through four dimensions: the digital, the corporeal, the public, and the private. Each dimension provided a different approach to interpreting 3rdi.
In Chapter Three, the digital-based artworks by Abidin were examined through the lenses of satire and humor. Cold Interrogation, Jihad, and Abidin Travels: Welcome to Baghdad each used humor to illustrate the negative byproducts of the Iraq War, including travel limitations and racial profiling. In Cold Interrogation, Abidin used an actual refrigerator with a video installed inside the freezer box. As viewers looked through the peephole, a male interrogator asked a plethora of questions about Islam, terrorism, and the war in Iraq. Abidin’s performance of Jihad used terrorist tropes common in ISIS or Al-Qaeda execution videos. Instead of condemning the West, he sang rendition of Woody Guthrie’s 1944 song This Land is Your Land. The performance 219 sought to alleviate negative stereotypes associated with Arab culture, like the keffiyeh and thobe. The final piece, Abidin Travels: Welcome to Baghdad, used gallows humor to expose the viewer-participants to travel limitations imposed on Iraq since 2003. Instead of highlighting the glamourous avenues and of Baghdad, Abidin used violent, post- invasion images and footage of the city. As a counter to Abidin Travels, Hometown
Baghdad sought to expose viewers to the daily life of Iraqi students living in the city during the war. Unlike Abidin Travels, Hometown Baghdad presented both the positive and negative aspects of the living in Iraq during the post-invasion era.
In Chapter Four, Delappe used his position as an indirect witness to 9/11 and the
Iraq War to address issues associated with modern military technology. Three pieces inspired by the Iraq War were discussed: dead-in-iraq, Twitter Torture/MGandhi in Jail, and Killbox. In dead-in-iraq, Delappe occupied the MMORPG gaming site, America’s
Army, via a digital avatar. His occupation of the site sought to memorialize American soldiers killed in the Iraq War. He used the gaming textbox to type the names of deceased soldiers killed in action. The piece served as an anti-war intervention performance, lasting nearly five years.
In Twitter Torture/MGandhi in Jail, Delappe occupied another MMORPG platform, Second Life. Using commentary from my personal exploration into Second Life,
I examined the relationship between user and avatar. Within the piece, Delappe’s avatar occupied a Second Life jail cell for nine months. Delappe used the Second Life textbox to type portions of the Bush-era Torture Memos. The piece exposed viewers and online participants to state-sponsored torture/interrogation practices sanctioned by the US 220 government in the 2000s. The last piece by Delappe, Killbox, currently remains available for user access at http://turbulence.org/commissions/Killbox/. The game seeks to explore
UAVs technology used during combat missions. After playing the game, I included commentary about maneuvering the game space and using multiple player options.
Delappe and his collaborators hope to use the game to educate users about the ease and accessibility of UAV software.
New Methods of Subverting Terrorism and Violence
In Bilal, Abidin, and Delappe’s art, violent exposure and traumatic experience manifest in various forms, often influenced or experienced directly by the artist or through footage recorded via the screen. The use of rudimentary technology in gaming platforms like Virtual Jihadi or through crude camera editing in Jihad serve to expose the cheap, technological limitations used by terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda. However, with the recent advent of ISIS, the means of production and the use of digital media has increased exponentially over the past several years. Using social media to garner attention, sites like Twitter and Facebook now serve as recruiting platforms for ISIS and their affiliates.294 David Talbot provides the following with regards to social media and terrorism:
Think back to when terrorists made their first beheading video, in 2004.
According to the CIA, this grainy and gruesome piece of media likely shows Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi (the leader of al-Qaeda’s branch in Iraq, which later morphed
into ISIS’s predecessor) slaughtering Nick Berg, a radio entrepreneur from
294 James P. Farwell, “The Media Strategy of ISIS,” Survival 56, no.6 (December 2014–January 2015): 51. 221
Pennsylvania. It was a laborious task to upload this file onto a jihadist Web
forum. There was no YouTube or Twitter to allow instant sharing of videos or
links to them. Facebook was still a dorm-room plaything…Today, however,
affordable devices, fast networks, and abundant social-media accounts directly
feed a spectacularly large potential audience of young people.295
Although social media sites attempt to police and eliminate terrorist recruiting, the ability for users to create anonymous or fake accounts corrupts the media platform. These platforms also provide easy access since the software is available and only requires the creation of a user account.
Coupled with social media presence, ISIS also began increasing production value of recruitment videos. JM Berger, a counterterrorism expert on ISIS, analyzed the increase and accessibility of mobile devices with higher quality audiovisual recordings and editing software. Currently, terrorists organizations intent on creating violent videos can create fast, sophisticated videos on a grand scale. Like the Global Islamic Media
Front’s appropriation of Quest for Saddam, ISIS uses similar methods by hacking pre- made video games. However, ISIS has gone even farther, creating state-of-the-art gaming platforms that mimic popular games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto.296 As the
US used America’s Army as a form of militainment, the new venture into high-tech gaming by ISIS may be viewed as a type of terrorist militainment (Figure 93). The
295 David Talbot, “Fighting ISIS Online,” MIT Technology Review 118, no. 6: 75.
296 Jay Casplan Kang, “ISIS’s Call of Duty,” The New Yorker (New York), September 18, 2014.
222 terrorist militainment complex seeks to use gaming software not only to recruit members, but also to promote dangerous religious rhetoric. Organizations like the Global Islamic
Media Front, operated by Al-Qaeda, and the propaganda section of ISIS recently began using social media and video games to lure younger generations into their extremist organizations. A new generation of interventionists and social performers are using these trends within Al-Qaeda and ISIS to subvert the terrorist organizations and educate potential recruits about the dangers of joining hate-based groups.
Figure 93: Screen shot of as ISIS sponsored video game. These games are used as recruiting tools, much like the US version of America’s Army
To combat this trend used by ISIS and other terrorist organizations, Abidin recently created a piece, Yesterday (2015). The installation uses lyrics from The Beatles 223
1965 hit of the same name.297 However, instead of using digital media, Abidin hand- painted the lyrics to the gallery wall. The lyrics mimic the format of a news ticker. By capturing a still image of the news ticker, the text remains stationary on the gallery wall.
Rather than presenting a series of fast-moving phrases, the viewer is confronted with a single headline (Figure 94). The text, translated from Arabic, reads as follows:
Breaking News- Baghdad - Now comes the time for the evening prayer in the city
of Baghdad and its suburbs.
Celebrations around the Arab world, from the Gulf to the Ocean in the memory of
Yesterday.
Tens of people were killed and injured in an explosive bomb in Baghdad.
[Yesterday lyrics] Yesterday, All my troubles seemed so far away. Now it looks
as though they're here to stay. Oh, I believe in yesterday. Suddenly I'm not half
the man I used to be. There's a shadow hanging over me. Oh, yesterday came
suddenly.
Why she had to go, I don't know, she wouldn't say. I said something wrong, now I
long for yesterday.
Yesterday love was such an easy game to play. Now I need a place to hide away.
Oh, I believe in yesterday.298
297 Adel Abidin, “Yesterday,” Adel Abidin, http://www.adelabidin.com/works/yesterday. 298 Adel Abidin, “Yesterday,” http://www.adelabidin.com/works/yesterday. 224
Abidin presents the lyrics as a “metaphor” regarding the current state of affairs in the
Middle East since the advent of ISIS. The lyrics describe a time before the “troubles” and the lingering effects produced by terrorist attacks.
Figure 94: Gallery photo of Abidin’s Yesterday, 2015
Other artists also seek to alleviate the online presence of ISIS by creating intervention art works that temporarily disrupt or subvert the organization’s recruiting methods. German-based artist/activist group PixelHELPER merges both digital technology and clandestine street interventions to promote anti-oppression and anti- terrorist practices. Using projection hardware, the group seeks to “literally shine a light 225 on humanitarian problems worldwide to help those in need.”299 The group seeks to expose state sponsored-funding of terrorist organizations. In a recent piece, the group projected the ISIS flag and the statement “Daesh Bank” on the façade of the Saudi
Arabian embassy in Berlin, Germany (Figure 95). Since the projections only last a short period, the group immediately uploads images of their work to Facebook and other social media platforms. In a recent statement regarding their work, the organization stated the following:
With the arrival of so many refugees to Europe in general and Germany in
particular, we felt it was the perfect time to remind the media and the public that
these refugees are fleeing ISIS, and that countries such as Saudi Arabia are
funding these terrorists.300
Their work remains controversial, in that many of their claims are strictly based on conspiracy theories investigated by hacktivist groups. However, much of their work stems from Wikileaks documents and former ISIS fighters that seek to educate the public about the terrorist organization.
299 “‘Anti-ISIS campaign’: Light artists of ‘Daesh bank’ protest to fight terror backers & propaganda,” RT Question More, May 17, 2016, https://www.rt.com/news/343247-pixelhelper-protest-isis-saudi-turkey/.
300 “‘Anti-ISIS campaign,’” RT Question More, https://www.rt.com/news/343247-pixelhelper-protest-isis- saudi-turkey/. 226
Figure 95: PixelHELPER projection on the Saudi Arabian Embassy
Though the war in Iraq may appear to have diminished according to formal declarations made by the US, the inherent violence perpetuated by terrorist organizations and state-sponsored military operations still plagues the region. Bilal and Abidin were able to leave the conflict zone; however, they are still influenced by the violence and traumatic after-effects of the wars in Iraq. Coupled with the work of Delappe, the artists presented throughout this dissertation work to improve the conversation about technology and trauma in the age of modern warfare. As groups like ISIS continue to dismantle 227 social order, both in actual and virtual space, groups like PixelHELPER seek to expose networks of supporters that condemn terrorism and violence. Returning to Bilal’s statement mentioned at the beginning of Chapter Two, each of these works has served as a type of “invisible mirror,” requiring each participant to reflect upon personal prejudices and preconceived biases. As war and technology changes, so to shall the manner in which trauma is realized, recognized, and represented.
228
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APPENDIX A: EXCERPT FROM THE DSM-V DIAGNOSTIC CRITERIA FOR
POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER
American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders,
5th ed., Washington, DC, 2013.
A. Exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence in one (or more) of the following ways:
1. Directly experiencing the traumatic event(s).
2. Witnessing, in person, the event(s) as it occurred to others.
3. Learning that the traumatic event(s) occurred to a close family member or close friend. In cases of actual or threatened death of family member or friend, the event(s) must have been violent or accidental.
4. Experiencing repeated or extreme exposure to aversive details of the traumatic event(s)
(e.g., first responders collecting human remains; police officers repeatedly exposed to details of child abuse).
Note: Criterion A4 does not apply to exposure through electronic media, television, movies, or pictures, unless this exposure is work related.
B. Presence of one (or more) of the following intrusion symptoms associated with the traumatic event(s), beginning after the traumatic event(s) occurred: 248
1. Recurrent, involuntary, and intrusive distressing memories of the traumatic event(s).
2. Recurrent distressing dreams in which the content and/or affect of the dream are related to the traumatic event(s).
3. Dissociative reactions (e.g., flashbacks) in which the individual feels or acts as if the traumatic event(s) were recurring. (Such reactions may occur on a continuum, with the most extreme expression being a complete loss of awareness of present surroundings.)
4. Intense or prolonged psychological distress at exposure to internal or external cues that symbolize or resemble an aspect of the traumatic event(s).
5. Marked psychological reactions to internal or external cues that symbolize or resemble an aspect of the traumatic event(s).
C. Persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the traumatic event(s), beginning after the traumatic event(s) occurred, as evidenced by one or both of the following:
1. Avoidance of or efforts to avoid distressing memories, thoughts, or feelings about or closely associated with the traumatic event(s).
2. Avoidance of or efforts to avoid external reminders (people, places, conversations, activities, objects, situations) that arouse distressing memories, thoughts, or feelings about or closely associated with the traumatic event(s). 249
D. Negative altercations in cognitions and mood associated with the traumatic event(s), beginning or worsening after the traumatic event(s) occurred, as evidenced by two (or more) of the following:
1. Inability to remember an important aspect of the traumatic event(s) (typically due to dissociative amnesia and not to other factors such as head injury, alcohol, or drugs).
2. Persistent and exaggerated negative beliefs or expectations about oneself, others, or the world (e.g., “I am bad,” “No one can be trusted,” “The world is completely dangerous,”
“My whole nervous system is permanently ruined”).
3. Persistent, distorted cognitions about the cause or consequences of the traumatic event(s) that lead the individual to blame himself/herself or others.
4. Persistent negative emotion state (e.g., fear, horror, anger, guilt, or shame).
5. Markedly diminished interest or participation in significant activities.
6. Feelings of detachment or estrangement from others.
7. Persistent inability to experience positive emotions (e.g., inability to experience happiness, satisfaction, or loving feelings).
E. Marked alterations in arousal and reactivity associated with the traumatic event(s), beginning or worsening after the traumatic event(s) occurred, as evidence by two (or more) of the following: 250
1. Irritable behavior and angry outbursts (with little or no provocation) typically expressed as verbal or physical aggression toward people or objects.
2. Reckless or self-destructive behavior.
3. Hypervigilance.
4. Exaggerated startle response.
5. Problems with concentration.
6. Sleep disturbance (e.g., difficulty falling or staying asleep or restless sleep).
F. Duration of the disturbance (Criteria B, C, D, and E) is more than 1 month.
G. The disturbance causes clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.
H. The disturbance is not attributable to the physiological effects of a substance (e.g., medication, alcohol) or another medical condition.
251
APPENDIX B: LYRICS TO “THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND” BY WOODY GUTHRIE
Woody Guthrie, “This Land is Your Land,” Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc. & TRO-
Ludlow Music, Inc., 1956 (renewed), 1958 (renewed), 1970 and 1972.
This land is your land This land is my land
From California to the New York island;
From the red wood forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and Me.
As I was walking that ribbon of highway,
I saw above me that endless skyway:
I saw below me that golden valley:
This land was made for you and me.
I've roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts;
And all around me a voice was sounding:
This land was made for you and me.
When the sun came shining, and I was strolling,
And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling,
As the fog was lifting a voice was chanting:
This land was made for you and me. 252
As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said "No Trespassing."
But on the other side it didn't say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.
In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?
Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.
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