Though old news by now, an instillation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute of Wafaa Bilal’s “The Night of Buch Capturing: A Virtual Jihadi” was cancelled due to public outcry. The piece was an Al-Quieda created hack of a video game published by the U.S. military in which the player assumed the role of a soldier in Baghdad who is on a mission to assassinate Saddam Hussein. The Al-Quieda version reverses the sides, with the objective of assassinating President Bush. Bilal’s version is a re-skinning of the Al-Quieda version, but the objective remains the same. Participants at the installation were allowed to play the game through to its conclusion on a large projection screen, until the entire show was unexpectedly shut down.
It is regrettable that the work resulted in censorship rather than dialogue. Bilal’s piece is obviously controversial, something he should have considered more carefully before presenting it, but, in my opinion, it serves as a jarring reminder of the near-universal availability of digital technology and reminds the american public that the technology so often taken for granted can be used for equally potent propaganda in the hands of anyone computer-savvy enough to tap its potential, even Al-Queida. it reminds of us of how severely we have underestimated our enemy in this aimless ‘war on terror’.
Bilal is an Iraqi artist whose work examines the consequences of war in the middle east and its people, as well as revealing the nature of torture and cruelty in the modern world. His work was first brought to my attention last summer through an interview on NPR, in which Bilal described another emotionally charged piece. Performed in June of 2007, Bilal’s concept was to lock himself in a room for a month while inviting web-surfers to shoot at him with a remotely controlled paintball gun, which could be aimed through controls on this website, essentially inviting the whole world to shoot him anonymously with yellow paint. Though the site now only shows a still image of a blank wall, you can still easily imagine Bilal’s terror as he would sit and patiently wait for the gun to spring to life, manned by some faceless sadist thousands of miles away or more.
More information on these and other works by Wafaa Bilal can be found at www.crudeoils.us or at www.wafaabilal.com.
0 Responses to “censorship alert. controversy ensues.”