Wafaa Bilal: Speech in a Democracy

“Virtual Jihadi”

Wafaa Bilal is currently an artist-in-residence at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the city of Troy, New York. Shortly after his arrival on March 5, his exhibition in the gallery of the Arts department was closed to the public by order of the university’s president. Today there is no certainty that the exhibition will be reopened. What I want to show is that every aspect of Wafaa Bilal’s visit to RPI points back to one fundamental issue: the value of free speech in a democracy.

Bilal was born in Iraq in 1966. He resisted the authoritarian government of Saddam Hussein, suffered persecution and then escaped the country, emigrating to the US in the early 1990s to realize a lifelong dream. He completed an MFA at the Chicago Art Institute in 2003 – and then, due to circumstances far beyond his own choosing, he became one of the most controversial artists in America.

He works with photography, video and computer games, using the Internet to reach beyond the gallery to a wider public. At the heart of his recent pieces is a single principle: he performs the existence of an Iraqi civilian. He shows us, tells us and tries to make us feel what life might be like right now, for those he left behind in his home country. By staging himself in interactive situations, he asks each of us to chose what we have to say to the Iraqi people.

Let’s remember that Iraqis are not necessarily our enemies. US armed forces originally came to liberate them from a dictator. This apparently simple premise has given rise to a terribly complex dilemma. An occupying power, claiming to restore democracy to a foreign nation, is faced with deadly attacks on its forces and with the parallel development of civil wars linked inextricably to its presence. A civilian population, which had no voice and no chance to intervene in any of the events leading up to this violence, is faced with explosives, assassinations, cross-fire, penury, immeasurable suffering and death. By the most cautious and thoroughly documented account available, the liberation of Iraq has been accompanied by 81,632 civilian deaths by violence since March 20, 2003 (cf. www.iraqbodycount.org). Each of those who have died, including Bilal’s own brother, is a unique human being, just like each of the 3,974 Americans who have died in the war. The question that arises today is whether the citizens of the United States – who, through our elected representatives, did collectively decide to engage in violence – can still speak in public about the consequences of that decision.

What does it mean to speak in public? It’s no longer so easy as standing on a soapbox. We live in an intensely mediated society. Every day, politicians, journalists, newscasters, movies, recruiting officers, brochures, posters, blogs and games “speak” about the war. They raise feelings of the widest variety: fear, revulsion, hatred, pride, a sense of strength or courage, sadness, horror, anxiety. Amid all these emotions, one overriding concern is constantly at issue: our relation, as a listening and viewing public, to the image of American servicemen and women faced with a strange, seemingly unknowable enemy. That one issue conditions every political decision made about the war. Yet those whom we came to liberate – not our enemies, but the Iraqi people – are strangely absent from this discussion. As if in reality, we wished to know nothing about them.

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. Via Bilal’s image, you become the virtual jihadi, playing the game as an individual on a giant screen which forms the public exhibit.

There is vital meaning in this complex 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. He is trying to inform you both intellectually and affectively. With the image of his own body, connected to the game-playing moves of yourself (or your neighbor), Bilal seeks to tell everyone he can about the consequences of war and hatred, and about the kinds of symbolic speech that are circulating in the world beyond our borders.

Wafaa still has one project going at RPI: and you can participate, at www.dogoriraqi.com. He wants your vote to decide which one — a dog named “Buddy,” or an Iraqi, himself — will be waterboarded at an “undisclosed location” in upstate New York. An act which has gained a whole new timeliness, since President Bush just vetoed the Congressional bill that would have prohibited it.

Are Iraqis our enemies? Did we already vote for torture? Is free speech the essence of a democracy? Would you pull the trigger? To ask these dangerous questions through symbolic speech, without physical harm to anyone, is a possibility that art can give us. To make use of that possibility, and thereby to keep democracy vividly alive, is to fulfill one’s civic responsibility. This kind of challenging and open debate is what we could expect in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of a great university. Yet precisely that has been denied, with the closing of the exhibition “Virtual Jihadi” at Rensselaer Polytechnic. Exercise your right of expression. Write to President Shirley Jackson in favor of re-opening the show (email: president@rpi.edu). Free speech is now severely threatened. But what we need today, at a minimum, is to ask many more public questions about the reasons for remaining involved in this war.

Brian Holmes

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Wafaa Bilal interviewed on the RPI censorship

“People, this is art. It’s supposed to educate.”

 

The exhibition, “Virtual Jihadi,” has been restaged at the Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy, New York. See the Sanctuary’s website for extensive information.

 

THEIR WAR, OUR WORLD

BUILDING THE STUDENT RESISTANCE
Campus Antiwar Network’s East Coast Conference

April 4-6th, Hunter College, New York City

students prepare for a demo in Syracuse

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Come one, come all! As we enter our 6th year in the occupation of Iraq, our leaders refuse to present an exit strategy or even a truthful representation of what’s happening on the ground. Though we keep being told violence is down, US air strikes are up, and in 2007 sectarian killings “ethnically cleansed” Baghdad, turning it from 65% Sunni to 75% Shia. A poll conducted by the British Ministry of Defense found that 82% of Iraqis are “strongly opposed” to the occupation, and “less than 1% of the population believes coalition forces are responsible for any improvement in security.” Resistance to the war has emerged on three fronts: Iraqi civilians defending their country against foreign invasion and continued devastation, enlisted US troops refusing to participate in an illegal and bloodthirsty war, and American civilians (particularly the student movement, who feel that effect of the war daily– as military recruiters continue to haunt our campuses and tuition is raised as the cost of the war depletes funds for education). As of yet, the US government has refused to recognize these forces of resistance as legitimate, but with continued and heightened pressure in the form of independent, grassroots activism, we can hope to create the change we wish to see.

Join us, the Campus Antiwar Network’s Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions, for our spring regional conference on the US War on Terror and our student movement. Students from campuses across the East Coast will be convening to share their organizing experiences. Together, through workshops and plenaries, we’ll try to address some of the issues facing the antiwar movement today, educating ourselves as well as combining efforts to create long and short-term strategies to end the war.

Housing can be provided as necessarywww.campusantiwar. netFor more information, email campusantiwarnyc@ gmail.com

Antioch Confidential

Did Someone Say Autocracy?

Antioch Confidential is a video and text on the gross mismanagement of Antioch College by an Ad Hoc Committee, whose secret decisions have imperiled the College’s existence. What the film expresses in a shocking anecdote — a SWAT team in the stacks for a Homeland Security exercise conducted against the will of the librarians — the text corroborates with a point-by-point analysis: the sobering story of what can happen to an institution when democratic checks and balances are ignored. As the introduction remarks: “Two modes of higher education management have been and continue to be in conflict at Antioch College, an institution historically based on shared governance and currently micromanaged by Antioch University. One presumes a private space of command, control and communications and the other supports a public realm of courage, responsibility, and shame (“Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity”).

Watch the film, read the documents, form your own opinion.

PRESS RELEASE

Tuesday February 26, 2008

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE FROM THE ANTIOCH PAPERS
http://theantiochpapers.org

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ANTIOCH CONFIDENTIAL – NOW ONLINE

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The video and companion article “Antioch Confidential”
examine the closed control and destabilization of
Antioch College by Antioch University. “Antioch
Confidential” documents the damage to educational
processes when “control” is mistaken for “leadership,”
and “command” is confused with “vision.” The events
taking place at Antioch College are a case study of
recent trends in higher education today. The article
and video are available for free use by librarians,
teachers, educational workers and citizens concerned
with the seizure of shared resources for private
interests.

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THE ANTIOCH PAPERS
http://theantiochpapers.org/
theantiochpapers@gmail.com

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Communications will be treated as confidential.
Webmaster: Timothy Noble – 443-653-2262

Speculations on EMPAC

The Experimental Media & Performing Arts Center in Troy, New York

It’s a new, world-class, 142 million-dollar architectural extravaganza for music and the electronic arts — and nobody seems sure where it came from or what it’s doing there. Opening next October.

Any visitor to Troy has to wonder about the huge, glass-skinned, vaguely green-colored building rising up the steep slope that divides the declining post-industrial city along the Hudson river from the prosperous Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute on the top of the hill. Is it a vast community center where the inhabitants of the city will be able to meet the students in a friendly egalitarian atmosphere? Is it a library, a hospital, a sports-and-leisure facility — or maybe a particle accelerator, a jet-propulsion lab, an astronomy complex unlocking the secrets of the stars above?

Well, no, it’s not any of that, but instead the Experimental Media & Performing Arts Center, or EMPAC. When the main stage is done you’ll be able to hear a pin drop from the back balcony of the 1,200-seat concert hall; you’ll attend a top-flight theater production with computer-controlled special effects, watch film projections on the world’s largest screen, participate in vanguard sound and media experiments in two black boxes outfitted with every imaginable kind of electronic equipment, then finally relax with a glass of wine on the terrace cafe and enjoy a view over the quaint little provincial city. Johannes Goebel, formerly of the prestigious ZKM art and media center in Karlsruhe, Germany, has overseen the design and construction process with the aim of contributing a beautifully designed and acoustically perfect building to the world music, media and performing arts community. This man knows exactly what he’s doing. But the question why such a facility has been planned at RPI in Troy, and what it will ultimately be used for, remains an enigma of the first degree.

News From the Outside World

Benjamin Geer on Autonomous Universities

Benjamin Geer (photographed with a friend in Cairo) is a computer hacker and Indymedia enthusiast who decided the only way to really take part in a progressive world politics was to learn other languages — really “other” ones, like Arabic. He is also part of the edu-factory dialogue. Here is one of his most incisive contributions on the notion of autonomy.

On 10/02/2008, an edu-factory participant wrote:
> On knowledge production – well it has a certain range of meanings in
> the current world – tied up with certain notions of value etc…

If you want to talk about academic work as a social phenomenon, and
about how it could become more autonomous, I think you absolutely need
a sociology of knowledge production, one that deliberately breaks with
everyday understandings of academia. Otherwise you’ll fall into the
trap of taking those understandings for granted, and reproducing the
very problems you want to solve. You and I, who are part of academia,
need a reflexive critical understanding of what we are doing (and
could or should be doing) when we produce papers, talks, or messages
on this mailing list. Moreover, we need a shared language for talking
about what we’re doing.

Collapse and renewal of the knowledge society

Is the university in ruins, as Bill Readings said ten years ago? Or is it in chains, as Giroux says today? These are two basic books for understanding the contemporary university. They explore the history, philosophy, economics and politics of what used to be called “higher education” — before the process of becoming a knowledgeable member of society turned into yet another vector of the flexibilization, corporatization and militarization that is currently plaguing the United States.

One thing is certain: if there is to be any fundamental transformation of the so-called “knowledge societies” and of the people who inhabit them, it will have to come at least in part from the laboratories, libraries, studios and public debates of the institutions of knowledge production. Never in the past did these institutions play such a central role in shaping society, through streams of innovation that are almost immediately turned into technologies, organizational forms, landscapes of belief and behavior. And never before did universities have such a great responsibility to innovate for the better, in a world that is now faced with major crises.

Models of the Contemporary University

DISCONNECTING THE DOTS

OF THE RESEARCH TRIANGLE

Entry to IBM plant, RTP North Carolina

Corporatisation, Flexibilisation
and Militarisation in the Creative Industries

 

We’ve heard a lot in recent years from urbanists and economic planners about the ‘creative city’, the ‘creative class’ and the ‘creative industries’. To compare facts with fictions, I decided to take a little tour of one of the urban areas that have been specially designed to put the creativity into industry.

The Research Triangle is an unusually wealthy, unusually brainy metropolitan region of North Carolina, centred around the university towns of Chapel Hill, Durham and Raleigh, and home to about one-and-a-half million people. It owes its name and fame to the establishment in the late 1950s of a state-funded science park, the Research Triangle Park, which is a woodsy retreat for the R&D labs of giant transnational corporations. ‘Where the minds of the world meet’ is the RTP motto.

Research Tools

Extradisciplinary Investigations

Towards a New Critique of Institutions

Gov’t Office in Baku (Ursula Biemann, Black Sea Files)

The artistic frame has expanded beyond the border of the painting, beyond the perimeter of the gallery or museum. Now it encompasses the entire society, where each artistic intervention is a catalyst of awareness and a pointer toward possible change. But how does that society work, of what does it consist? To fulfill the promise of a socially transformative art, we need the research tools of extradisciplinary investigations.

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What is the logic, the need or the desire that pushes more and more artists to work outside the limits of their own discipline, defined by the notions of free reflexivity and pure aesthetics, incarnated by the gallery-magazine-museum circuit, and haunted by the memory of the normative genres, painting and sculpture?

Pop art, conceptual art, body art, performance and video each marked a rupture of the disciplinary frame, already in the 1960-70s. But one could argue that these dramatized outbursts merely imported themes, media or expressive techniques back into what Yves Klein had termed the “specialized” ambiance of the gallery or the museum, qualified by the primacy of the aesthetic and managed by the functionaries of art. Exactly such arguments were launched by Robert Smithson in his text on cultural confinement in 1972, then restated by Brian O’Doherty in his theses on the ideology of the white cube.1 They still have a lot of validity. Yet now we are confronted with a new series of outbursts, under such names as net.art, bio art, visual geography, space art and database art – to which one could add an archi-art, or art of architecture, which curiously enough has never been baptized as such, as well as a machine art that reaches all the way back to 1920s constructivism, or even a “finance art” whose birth was announced in the Casa Encendida of Madrid just last summer.