[-empyre-] re: pedagogy and curating (forward from anne-marie schleiner)

[Christina McPhee <christinamcphee@yahoo.com>]

Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2003 15:52:26 +0100
To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
From: opensorcery <opensorcery@opensorcery.net>
Subject: pedagogy and curating + Valient
Strike/Velvet-Strike
Cc: mccoy@earthlink.net, brody, retroyou-retroyou.org
Bcc:
X-Attachments:

hello empyre list,

christina asked me if i had some input to your
discission thread on pedagogy and curating.  i am not
currently teaching(or curating actually) but catching
a spur from christina's last emial:

As the hours pass agonizingly slowly towards the
nightmare of tomorrow it is
difficult to summon speech; one is almost rendered
silent by the enormity of
the hypermedia circus that has brought all of our
fears of digital terror
into reality.

i coincidentally  today found some strange relations
between my and collaborators anti-war game art project
/semi curatorial venture, "Velvet-Strike"  a series of
inteventions and counter-military graffiti inside the
popular counter-strike game
(http://www.opensorcery.net/velvet-strike/ )
+
and the name for bush's new concurrent to the irak war
offensive in afganistan called Valient Strike. Both
make the same initals VS. (Sorry i dont live in
america right now but i do appreciate the logic of
conspiracy theory)  Since our project did get press
coverage (just today i had to defend my position to
some french counter-strike players writing for a paper
who are against war but pro-counterstrike) maybe there
is some bizarre relation, if not conciously then
otherwise, in the hollywood style production of war. 
Such romantic names: Desert Storm, Valient Strike...

"The new operation in Afghanistan, called Valiant
Strike, appears to indicate that the Bush
administration wants to pursue the war against terror
at the same time that it prosecutes a war against
Iraq."  The New York Times today

I watched on tv today the german news about us
military toys being tried out in this war. Especially
interesting were small unmanned bomber airplanes
controlled through remote computer screens. So toylike
and gamelike. War really looks fun.

Yet I keep stressing not making oversimple equations
like violent computer games produce violent behavior.
(the colombine syndrome).  Not to get too pathelogical
a la baudrillard, war and computer games maybe are
infected with the same sorts of syndromes,
baudriallards screens and total interfaces, virillian
speed, and physical dysembodiment and movement
sickness.  And their histories share various
junctures--(as do other technologies developed for 
military purporses --flight simulation to VR, ARpanet
to Internet,etc). America's Amy Online(free us
military game using the unreal shooter game engine) 
is the ultimate unholy wedding of the two, flowing
back the other direction from games to military.

Off to my second live street protest this week
although feeling pretty hopeless about it.  (Luckily
for some reason people think i have a french accent
not american in german.)

xo.
anne-marie  schleiner
http://www.opensorcery.net


ps. more hyperreality relating to Velvet-Strike
project:


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2003 15:27:08 -0500
From: Jennifer and Kevin McCoy <mccoy@earthlink.net>
To: list@rhizome.org
Subject: RHIZOME_RAW: Video Game as Political
Propaganda

The Islamic terrorist group Hezbollah has realeased a
video game called Special Force. It has it's own web
site<www.specialforce.net> and is based on the
open-source genesis3D game
engine<http://sourceforge.net/projects/genesis3d/>.
The game appears to be explicitly designed in line
with Hezbollah's stated objective of the destruction
of Israel.  Has there every been a video game released
that is tied into a specific political goal?




=====
<http://www.naxsmash.net>

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