[-empyre-] mediation & videogames / the screen as a place of activity in the battlefield

[Gabriel Menotti]

Dear all:

Since we are approaching the end of this first week, we should start
pondering about the thickness of the screen from the other
perspective: as referring not to the technical space that produces the
image, but to the real space contained within it. In what measure the
process of mediation is an abstraction of the world, as much as an
abstraction of technologies?

Of course, it is precisely in the balance between both aspects that
the thickness of the screen shows its highest political implications.
It seems to me that Jonathon Kirk illustrates this very well in his
video 'I've Got a Guy Running',[1] using graphic filters to create
(further) distance from surveillance images (originally intended to
get things closer - literally under scope).

A recent article in salon.com also brings about the suble cultural
dimension involved in  adopting screens as places of activity /in the
world/. In an (expected?) reversal of the old "videogames makes people
violent" polemics, the military forces are using the apparently
non-violent interface of hi-tech weaponry as an appeal to convince
people to enlist. "Join the armed forces, the ads suggest, and you
don't have to experience the blood-and-guts consequences of combat.
Instead, you get to hang out stateside, entertaining yourself with a
glorified PlayStation." [1]

Baudrillard aside, what is exactly being abstracted (i.e. supressed)
in all these situations?

Best!
Menotti

[1] http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/08/29/military_marketing/
[2] http://www.ux1.eiu.edu/~jjkirk/running_excerpt2.mov