More research for context.
A JOURNEY INTO THE VIRTUAL WORLD #8
So, I finally decided on a title for the project, and some advancements in the direction the presentation will take, but as the work continued in the background, I went on with the research to bolster the cultural context of the project. If you missed it, here is the previous post.
As further research into the representation of war and conflict in modern culture, I looked to the work of Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. Working in collaboration, their joint projects usually steer from making photographic images themselves, often opting to use archive or appropriated imagery to put forth their agendas and observations, and often utilising collage or cut up techniques. Their altered and updated version of Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer (originally published in 1955), War Primer 2 (published in 2011) is a typically innovative and thought-provoking piece, and this trait as become a staple of their collaborative oeuvre. Within War Primer 2, the pair focused their efforts on revealing the truth and reality of the War on Terror and the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East post 9/11. This is what drew me to their work as I too was looking to unpick the reality of war, albeit in the virtual and in a more general sense.
I was also drawn to their work for their choice of presentation. For their reinterpretation of Bertolt Brecht’s work, they displayed multiple copies of the War Primer 2 book in acrylic vitrines, each open on pertinent pages to represent the project in its most effective light. This was something I aspired to doing in my own upcoming exhibitions, but I would end up having to wait for a subsequent project in order to utilise this method properly.
Moving on from Broomberg and Chanarin, I found the work of Thomas Hirschhorn, and his project titled Touching Reality. This is a video piece of a hand interacting with a touchscreen device that is displaying harrowing imagery.
A quote from Institute of Modern Art sums the project up by saying:
Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn’s video Touching Reality conflates seeing and touching. We watch fingertips scroll through photographs on a touchscreen. The photos are of corpses and carnage; scenes of war, violence, and dismemberment; bodies burnt and shredded. We see heads blown apart; bits of muscle, viscera, and brain matter. We do not find such images in newspapers, but they are accessible on the Internet. The shots are generic (they could be from anywhere), yet specific (we see individuals uniquely mangled). The fingers caress the screen, stopping to zoom in for more detail, then move on. But we don’t know their motivation. Are the fingers concerned, prurient, both, or neither? Certainly, they show us more than we might care to see.
This implicitly with the work by the viewer that Hirschhorn has instilled within his project is quite powerful, and is something that intrigued me greatly, and I was eager to introduce to my own work, were it on display in a larger gallery setting. By forcing the viewers to interact with the work, it makes them complicit, and it makes them contemplate what it is they are seeing, and potentially see a deeper meaning within it. This was something I would keep in mind for the future, but after looking at Touching Reality, I went on to further my research, which eventually lead me to the writings of philosopher Jean Baudrillard who wrote Simulacra and Simulation in 1981. Within the book, in which he examines the relationships between reality, symbols, and society, he talks of Simulacra which are copies that depict things that either had no original to begin with, or that no longer have an original. He states that simulation is the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time. These ideas on representation stood out to me as pertinent to my project.
Within the book, simulacra and simulation can be broken down into four stages:
The first stage is the true image or copy in which we believe reflects reality.
The second stage is the perversion of that copy, they only hint to reality.
The third stage is a masking of the lacking reality where the image pretends to represent something original. Images are a suggestion of something to which they have no relation.
The fourth stage is where pure simulation is reached. The image has no relation to reality.
Within my work there are several clear stages.
War, the machines of war, and the locations.
Computer-generated models based on the real-life machines and locations.
A digitally captured image of the computer-generated models.
An analogue process creates a negative film of the digitally captured image.
This process could be continued for at least several more steps, as part of the development of the work I created dark room prints from the negatives and from there they were scanned and digitally reproduced in order to be included in my development document. This is merely one example of detachment from reality, and this concept is what the primary focus of this work is really about, and how that detachment is spreading. War occurs, then imagery, and subsequently video games. This perversion of reality is what desensitises us to the true reality and horror of war.
Baudrillard, J. and Glaser, S.F. (1981) Simulacra and simulation. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
Brisbane, I. of M.A. (no date) Thomas Hirschhorn, Institute of Modern Art. Available at: https://www.ima.org.au/exhibitions/thomas-hirschhorn-touching-reality/ (Accessed: 11 January 2024).
War primer 2 [paperback] Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin (no date) MACK. Available at: https://mackbooks.co.uk/products/war-primer-2-paperback-br-adam-broomberg-oliver-chanarin (Accessed: 11 January 2024).
That’s it for another instalment of this series. Quite heavy on the research in this one, but next time we’ll see how the project came together for my peer review. After that we’ll see what steps I took to make the work ready for exhibition.
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