Monday, December 19, 2011

Waafa Bilal Lecture

Wafaa Bilal is an Iraqi artist, and an Arts Professor in New York. I was somewhat familiar with his work before, having heard about his exhibition where he locked himself in an apartment in which people could shoot paintballs at him over the internet. He spoke about his different works over the years. He is an interactive and video artist. He is known for his controversial work Domestic Tension, or “Shoot an Iraqi,” which was the interactive installation that I had recognized his name from. The piece consisted of a paintball gun that could be controlled by people who logged into the internet. Bilal lived in the gallery in Chicago for a 30 day period and people could shoot at him with the gun 24 hours a day. The point of the work was for Bilal to experience what a regular Iraqi does in time of war, which is just about every day now. Bilal also spoke about another controversial work called Virtual Jihadi. In it, Bilal took a computer game called Quest for Saddam and altered it. The game was called The Night of Bush Capturing: A Virtual Jihadi. In the game Bilal made himself a suicide bomber and is recruited on a mission to find former President Bush. The work was pointed at bringing attention to the Iraq war and racist and stereotypes in video games.
Bilal spoke about his latest piece called 3rdi.me and it was very interesting. He has took a camera and surgically implanted it into the back of his head. The camera is set up to take a picture every minute and upload it online. He did this work for a year beginning on December 15, 2010. He captured photos of what was behind him. In this work he tried to express the issue of privacy. The photos were uploaded online and his location was shown on the website by GPS. This was interesting because he turned himself into somewhat of a cyborg voluntarily. It shows how we are connected to technology, and in the future we are going to be connected with technology physically whether we like it or not.

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