Surveillance, from the comfort of your living room.

Wafaa Bilal

Domestic Tension

2007

http://wafaabilal.com/works/

"Iraqi born Wafaa has become known for provocative interactive video installations. Many of Bilal's projects over the past few years have addressed the dichotomy of the virtual vs. the real.

He attempts to keep in mind the relationship of the viewer to the artwork, one of his main objectives being to transform the normally passive experience of viewing art into an active participation."

"...his latest effort, Domestic Tension, viewers can log onto the internet to contact or "shoot" Bilal with paintball guns. Bilal's objective is to raise awareness of virtual war and privacy, or lack thereof, in the digital age."

http://wafaabilal.com/works/

 I won't say much, as I'm not feeling well today, but this work was incredibly interesting. It addresses so many things-as does so much of Bilal's work- but what relates back to my interests and issues within my work, is the use of the Internet. It's almost like a video game, where you log on and shoot at people, only this time it's real.
It's like any kind of confrontation on the internet, these days. You can call someone something horrid, you can be anyone you wouldn't normally be in real life, and not have to worry about the consequences as such; there is no face value.

Earlier today I was also lead to this website - www.blueservo.com, where you can log on and watch surveillance cameras along the Texas/Mexico boarder. It reminded me of a site where you can listen to live police radio feeds, paired with atmospheric music. Listen here.
I always liked listening to the Minneapolis feed.

These three things may seem only slightly relative, but to me it's much more. I haven't figured everything out yet, but listening to the feeds from the police radios and watching the surveillance videos are two things one would think were illegal right? With the birth of the internet, we can all spy on one another, listen in to eachother cities, I just heard that some dude drove his car into a house in New York. It's an experience, it makes us seem so much closer, a lot less different. Maybe this post is just me thinking out loud, but Bilal's work started something today that I'm rather excited about. All this talk about Social Media and the net, about Science Fiction narratives etc etc... perhaps this is an avenue worth taking. Too many ideas in one basket! Blah!