Two years ago, now defunct Live-Shot.com - a Texas-based hunting company - began offering paying visitors the opportunity to shoot (and kill) real deer online. Live-Shot eventually closed its doors, but not before diversifying the business model - the original company’s legacy now remains in the form of Live-Paintball.com: pay some money and shoot live people with a paintball gun controlled via the Internet.
The opportunity to experience this form of remote violence, either via direct interaction or just observing others, is enticing. We have an opportunity not only to gratify and indulge through control and affect, but to examine and explore ourselves. The problem, aside from the shooting and killing of actual animals, is that Live-Shot commoditised the experience, removing the opportunity for a certain kind of introspection - a cultural analysis free from the notion of something so utterly distasteful as killing and maiming.
Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal, now based in Chicago, certainly won’t be free from criticism either, despite creating an installation that explores the concepts of control and interaction, via remote shooting, in a completely different context. Bilal has set himself up as the centre of an installation in which he lives in a single room under the gaze of a user-controlled webcam and paintball rifle. The work, entitled Domestic Tension, has Bilal living 24-hours-a-day for a month in one space, constantly connected to his audience, who can observe, chat or just shoot at him through the installation’s website.
Some 40,000 rounds were fired in the first two-and-a-half weeks of the work, and the project has already drawn the attention of a group of hackers who managed to fire the gun 20,000 times in 24 hours. Unsurprisingly, almost everything in Bilal’s living quarters is now covered in the yellow paint of the gun.
The level of audience interaction means that the online participants are as much the subject of the work as the reactions of the artist. His fate relies on these observers, be they understanding, unsympathetic or simply idiotic. In addition to the ever-present threat of the paintballs, Bilal only eats food donated by strangers, which has produced an audience reaction at the opposing end of the scale: people have donated food, items, and have even taken turns at firing the gun away from him so as to deprive those who wish to target the artist himself.
Bilal probably did not predict his own reactions to the varied forms of audience participation, and is clearly shaken and touched by his experiences. He shares his thoughts on a daily Youtube video blog, which will continue until the end of the installation on June 4. Although you may have your own idea of how you’ll approach interaction with Bilal, the interesting part occurs when you’re at the controls - faced with this man and this gun. Visit now as there are only a few days left to find out how you’ll behave on Domestic Tension.
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