From the This Is Your Brain on Paranoia Department: a brewing controversy over an Iraqi Artist Censored at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute after complaints from College Republicans. The artist, Wafaa Bilal, created a work called Virtual Jihadi, which was essentially just a tweak of another game called Quest for Sadaam.

In the original version, freedom fighters liberate Iraq by assassinating Hussein, in Bilal’s version, terrorists attack the United States and our dear leader. In terms of game mechanics, the difference is simple, solely based on team and designation, but in Troy, New York, at least, Bilal’s tweak is pushing all kinds of buttons among campus conservatives.

Not only has the President’s office ordered the exhibit closed, RPI hired a private security company to “guard” the Arts Building the next day. Virtual Jihadi then moved to a local venue, the Sanctuary for Independent Media, only to have the city of Troy slap a suspicious $14,000 building code violation on them twenty-four hours later. Welcome to Troy, Where Defending Democracy is More Important than Maintaining It.

It’ll be neat on t-shirts.

Shortly after I hit publish, I found this on Waafa Bilal’s website:

Wafaa Bilal is now a US citizen. He uses his rights as a citizen to speak to us symbolically, with photographs, videos, websites, interactive games. He insists that symbolic speech has its consequences. One of his recent pieces was entitled “Domestic Tension: Shoot an Iraqi” (2007). He designed an interactive website allowing anyone, anywhere, 24 hours a day, to aim a paintball gun inside a gallery and fire it at him. With this work he addressed the American public. The participants chose their responses. They could speak with bullets, by firing paintballs at a supposed enemy; or they could respond in any other way, with words, with letters, with emotions, with recognition and respect, with solidarity for another human being. Some of them found that if they “spoke” just right, by a click just in time, they could divert the paintball which another participant was firing directly at the artist.

Bilal came to the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a video game: “The Night of Bush Capturing: A Virtual Jihadi.” Here, the situation is complex, like the war itself. Bilal’s piece is based on the video game “Quest for Saddam,” where American gamers were invited to attack and kill stereotyped Iraqi enemies during a mission to capture the dictator. This commercial game was hacked by individuals claiming to be part of Al Qaeda. They transformed it into a game where Islamist warriors seek to kill the American president. Then they offered it to people in Iraq, just as the original game had been offered to young Americans. Bilal hacked the hack, and placed his own image in the game. He let himself be symbolically absorbed within it, the way any teenager would be absorbed during the time of play. And he then made this situation public, as the central element of his exhibition at RPI.

There is vital meaning in this act of symbolic speech. The artist is trying to inform you, not only about the ways that a video game pictures Iraqis for the American public, but also about the ways that Al Qaeda speaks through games to Iraqi youth. With the image of his own body, Wafaa Bilal is trying to tell everyone about the consequences of war and hatred, and the kinds of symbolic speech that are circulating in the world beyond our borders.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 8:32 pm and is filed under Art, Commentary, Culture, Life, Manichaean paranoia, Media, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.