Wafaa Bilal, “Domestic Tension,” 2007**Trigger warning: death, gun violence, war**During the War in
Wafaa Bilal, “Domestic Tension,” 2007**Trigger warning: death, gun violence, war**During the War in Iraq, Wafaa Bilal lost his father and brother to drone strikes. Appalled by the ease with which one can kill a person from another country, Bilal decided to set up a month-long social experiment, with his own body on the line. (An unrelated, anonymous group of artists addressed the same issue with an enormous portrait - read about it here.)Bilal, then a professor of art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, asked for help from other faculty to set up a remote-controlled paintball gun that anyone could control at any time from a website. Users could aim and fire a paintball at any time, day or night. Bilal lived in a room with this gun for a full month. Paintball guns are designed to be shot from 200 feet away - this one was mounted just 20 feet from Bilal at all times. A test shot just before the opening of the performance pierced a sheet of cardboard. During this month, he was shot 60,000 times from people in 128 different countries. At one point, hackers modified the website to allow the gun to fire like a machine gun. Unsurprisingly, the comment section was vitriolic and full of hate speech. Like Abramovic’s “Rhythm 0,” this piece spoke to how easy it is to dehumanize and harm a person. For Abramovic, this was because she did not react; for Bilal, this was most likely because because he is a minority and an immigrant from a country most Americans do not understand and because he was nowhere near the shooters. It reminds me of one of Stanley Milgram’s experiments on obedience. People were usually willing to obey authority figures when they were asked to hurt someone in another room, but were far less willing when they were in the room with the person they thought they were hurting. By the end of the piece, the pain, the loud firing of the modified gun, and the ticking of the gun’s movement caused traumatic symptoms in Bilal. It is always amazing to me how easy it is to get people to hurt one another and how few of those people would view themselves negatively for having done so. -- source link
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