First Person Shooter: Baden Pailthorpe

If the first Gulf War was known as the ‘Nintendo war’ for its introduction of the god-like cruise missile camera to mass media, then the apotheosis of this vision was captured during the second Gulf War in the Wikileaks video Collateral Murder. The July 12, 2007 attack by two Apache helicopters in the Baghdad neighbourhood of Al-Amin al-Thaniyah, that killed amongst others two Reuters correspondents along with a father of two who stopped to assist the wounded, has become one of the defining media moments in the War on Terror.

The events proceed with a clinical inhumanity. The pilots spot a group of men (‘fucking prick…. have individuals with weapons… request permission to engage…). They manoeuvre into position  (‘just fuckin’, once you get on ‘em just open ‘em up….light ‘em all up… keep shoot’n keep shoot’n’). They fire. There is a brief delay before the bullets register their targets and the men evaporate. The Apaches circle around a heap of bodies. More chat (‘look at those dead bastards. Nice. Good shooting. Thank you.’).[i] All of this is filmed through the lens of the chopper’s 30mm cannon and viewed third-hand on YouTube.

Collateral Murder exemplifies the displaced subjectivity characteristic of the modern battlefield, which has produced not only the surreality of young American pilots flying drone incursions into Pakistan from bases in Nevada, but an accompanying string of robotic acronyms that sever combat from its human capital: UAV, RPA, TALON, SWORDS, MARCBOT.

But as Collateral Murder has demonstrated, the transmission of combat imagery via media channels such as YouTube and Twitter has the potential to shape social responses to war. To this media stream must be added what has rapidly become a performative space in which the politics of war are prosecuted: the virtual world of video games. Consider the popular first person shooter Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, released in the same year as Collateral Murder was recorded. In the mission ‘Death from above’, the player assumes control of the gun camera of an AC-130 Spectre gunship. The vision and crew chatter are eerily familiar (‘we have armed personnel… request permission to engage… OK you got ‘em… light ‘em up… good kill, good kill… I see lots o’ little pieces down there’). The player succeeds by eliminating targets while avoiding civilian casualties, which is to say by positively enacting the doctrines of the US military.

Much work has been done by game theorists on how video games rehearse their subjects for warfare, either actively through the promotion of military cultures or passively, by socialising the game-playing population to endorse the conditions under which wars are fought.[ii] Indeed games such as the wildly successful America’s Army and Full Spectrum Warrior were developed by the US Military for their ability to influence social perceptions – the former as an overt recruitment exercise, the latter as a squad-based tactics trainer. Both have equivalent versions used by the military as combat simulators. In this sense it has been argued that such games are tools of biopower, with the aim to ‘distribute and normalise the institutional logic of the military among civil society’.[iii] They form a component of what has been coined (with Orwellian dread) ‘MIME NET’ – the military industrial media entertainment network.[iv]

Contemporary Australian war artists have begun to interrogate this parlous relationship between bio and military power, between the virtual subjectivity of a video game and its real world equivalent. Take for instance Shaun Gladwell’s photographic series BPOV MEAO (Behind Point of View, Middle East Area of Operations) 2009/10. These are portraits of individuals but, shot from behind, they are effaced. To the media-saturated consumer of Nintendo war, two positions avail themselves. In the third person the soldiers might be exemplars to be imaginatively inhabited. However from the perspective of the first person shooter they are targets in a position of immense vulnerability. Christopher Langton’s 2007 work Hide and Seek makes this more literal. In this painting of combat in Iraq, an image taken from the internet is superimposed on one from a video game, blurring the lines between virtual play and battlefield reality.

These works reflect on the performative logic and visual syntax of video games, but for new media artist Baden Pailthorpe it is the system itself that forms both the structure and target of his practice. As Pailthorpe argues, it is the performativity of video games that gives them their particular power: ‘you don’t just watch the ideology as you would in a film, you actively generate it. The video game is one of the most closed environments you could imagine… everything is restricted. You might be given the illusion of free will but it’s amongst a set of choices already pre-determined. You have to enact certain gestures and perform in a certain way that matches an American soldier’.[v]

In his recent series Cadence (2013) and Formation (2011-13) Pailthorpe hacks and modifies military simulators – in this case the game ARMA 2 – to use them as a form of performative software, in so doing exposing the rituals that structure military society. In Cadence I a US soldier dances on a desert landscape appropriated from the 2005 Sam Mendes film Jarhead. There is a relationship here with traditional cinematic techniques. Pailthorpe used a game script to film the digital avatars dancing. He then put a green screen in the simulator to isolate the figure, approximating a filming technique in a virtual environment. The soldier emerges onto the resulting scene almost joyously, tearing aside the fabric of the space he inhabits. A replicating series of almost 500 layers of bodies creates a dazzling illusion of speed and movement. The lingering traces of the figure’s gestures form an immense, kinetic Rorschach blot that has affinities with military camouflage. However, here the patterns work to recast the pre-determined subjectivity of military simulators by allowing a space for subliminal and individual psychological responses.

The dance reveals a lyrical beauty in the processes of war, which is part of the artist’s intention. As Pailthorpe explains, ‘the original idea was to make poetic works out of violent machines and violent systems and in that gesture it’s kind of subversive. But it is humorous to some extent and there is an absurdity to war’. The script used to create the dancing exists as an ‘easter egg’ coded into the simulator, but these dances have a real world equivalent in one of the more interesting cultural memes to have arisen from the War on Terror – ‘combat dancing’, the phenomenon of soldiers filming themselves in choreographed dance routines in combat zones.[vi]

But the gestural rehearsal in Pailthorpe’s work has implications beyond the downtime horseplay of infantry. It refers in a direct way to the intense physical training of soldiers in which the choreography of individual movements and squad manoeuvres – rehearsed thousands of times in combat training as well as in military simulators – are essential to combat capability. Here, performative equivalents between players of war games, real world soldiers and Pailthorpe’s avatars emerge: muscle memory becomes an embodied ideology, an expression of the military’s political mission encoded in the physical expression of the men and their digital avatars.

The replication in the Cadence series emerged by chance from within the game engine. During production for his Formation works Pailthorpe found that issuing the simple command to ‘walk’ caused a glitch in which the digital soldiers began to unexpectedly replicate. In doing so he discovered that the internal politics of the simulator – to train its players to enact a particular doctrine – could be resisted.

It is through this phenomenon that Pailthorpe develops his critique of military biopower. In Cadence III (2013) Taliban and US soldiers dance in unison side-by-side on a virtual airfield, their images multiplying and transforming. What begins as an image of two individuals quickly becomes a representation of a body politic. The cloning that occurs in Cadence III mimics the process of cultural image-making itself and the transmission of digital images in mass media. It is an approximation of viral activity that speaks the biopolitical language so often used to describe the War on Terror: terrorists group in cells, cells replicate, they spread and infect a national polity; they must be eradicated.[vii] Yet the replication of the Taliban soldier here is in tandem with the actions of the US soldier and here equivalences between the two military structures emerge: the synchrony speaks to the fear that fighting the War on Terror has spawned more terrorist threats than it has silenced.

We can extrapolate from this to view the military body as a whole as an assemblage of individual units, each with a range of roles to be performed in tandem. ‘What is war but a giant choreography’, the artist remarks, ‘war is logistics’. It is the format of this revelation that is particularly significant. Pailthorpe’s appropriation of video games touches upon the danger inherent in an uncritical socialisation of warfare. Indeed, it is precisely at the point at which the social reception of war becomes banal that violent action is legitimated, for ‘what’s the point of training for the game’, as one young Australian infantryman recounted to the artist, ‘if you never get to play?’.

Publication: ARTAND Australia, Vol 51 No 3 February 2014