Wafaa Bilal's "Domestic Tension"

    I originally meant to post about this piece when we discussed "dead-in-iraq," but that didn't happen...which I guess worked out since I've since noticed it has some elements similar to panopticism. But honestly, it'd be great to discuss what transpired across the duration of the piece in relation to gaming and the age of the internet. (Like, are there consequences to virtualizing reality, such as virtualizing war violence? Are there consequences to the anonymity granted by the internet?)

    Domestic Tension (2007) was a performance piece by Iraqi-American artist Wafaa Bilal, where Bilal lived in a room in a Chicago art gallery for 30 days, and broadcast it via webcam over the internet. The webcam, which livestreamed 24/7, was equipped with a paintball gun that could be remotely operated (in the manner of a FPS) by visitors to the project's website. The idea for the piece partially stemmed from the death of his 21 year-old brother, who was a civilian casualty in a US airstrike in 2004. According to Bilal, the performance piece aimed to "raise awareness about the life of the Iraqi people and the home confinement they face [on a daily basis] due to [...]war" and bring attention to the remote, technological aspects of modern war. It was imperative that he reach a larger, more diverse audience than the gallery-goers, so he turned to the internet and the medium of video games.

     By the 20th day of his confinement, Bilal (whose only protective equipment was a pair of goggles) had been shot at nearly 40,000 times. Hackers ran a script that made the paintball gun fire automatically, turning it into basically a machine gun.

     In regards to panopticism, the setup of Bilal's piece and that of the panoptic model are quite similar - though obviously their respective intents are different. There is the prisoner confined to his cell, unable to physically interact with others, and who is under constant surveillance by a power that is, as Foucault states, "visible and unverifiable." Only in Bilal's work, the "tall central tower" of the Panopticon was a webcam and a paintball gun, and the "anonymous and temporary observers" who operate the panoptic machine were the some 62,000 anonymous internet users from 130 different countries who took aim at Bilal with their mouse.

An article on the piece
Artist's Website