Con­science, Mem­ory and Protest: Ves­tiges of the For­ever War

Symposium:


Session Title:
  • If You See Something Say Something: Art, War, Surveillance and the Sustainability of Urgency in the Post 9/11 Era

Presentation Title:
  • Con­science, Mem­ory and Protest: Ves­tiges of the For­ever War

Presenter(s):


Venue(s):


Abstract:

  • Panel:  If You See Something Say Something: Art, War, Surveillance and the Sustainability of Urgency in the Post 9/11 Era

    In March of 2006, to roughly co­in­cide with the 3rd an­niver­sary of the start of the Iraq con­flict, I first en­tered the on­line US Army re­cruit­ing game, Amer­ica’s Army, in order to man­u­ally type the name, age, ser­vice branch and date of death of each ser­vice per­son who has died to date in Iraq. dead-in-iraq is es­sen­tially a fleet­ing, per­for­ma­tive memo­r­ial to those mil­i­tary per­son­nel who have been killed in this on­go­ing con­flict. My ac­tions are at the same time an in­ter­ven­tion­ist ges­ture to protest against the war in Iraq. This work marked the overt politi­ciza­tion of my cre­ative prac­tice. I went on to cre­ate an on­line data­base of memo­r­ial con­cepts and pro­jects en­ti­tled iraqimemorial.?org. This on­go­ing pro­ject in­vites artists, ar­chi­tects and other cre­ative in­di­vid­u­als to up­load memo­r­ial con­cepts ded­i­cated to the many un­told thou­sands of civil­ian ca­su­al­ties from the Iraq in­va­sion. Through these works and oth­ers, I seek to de­velop and im­ple­ment strate­gies for uti­liz­ing the In­ter­net as the lo­ca­tion for in­ter­ven­tion­ist acts of con­sience, mem­ory and protest. I will dis­cuss the pro­gres­sion of these works and on­go­ing ef­forts to con­tinue to en­gage is­sues sur­round­ing pol­i­tics, war and ter­ror, in­clud­ing my par­tic­i­pa­tion in the fake New York Times End of the War edi­tion, my ef­forts to place Hosni Mubarak up for sale on eBay and on­go­ing works to reify the us and them of rep­re­sen­ta­tions of war through con­tem­po­rary first per­son shooter video games.

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