the typhoon continues and so do you exhibition reader

8/7/2019 The Typhoon Continues and So Do You exhibition reader

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The Typhoon Continues and So Do You is borrowed from Kenneth Kochs 2003poem, To World War Two. Koch references the drive to continue life asusual during wartime, describing this phenomenon from the perspective of asoldier in a foxhole:

I could write poetry

Fall in loveAnd have a daughterAnd think about these thingsFrom a great distanceIf I survived.

When organizing this exhibition, we focused on the natural desire totranscend material reality (whether experienced through a newscast or onthe frontlines) in selecting the four artifacts of war. The artifacts we chosecarry great social and historical weight, and are expressions of conflicts thatlack resolution, closure, or certainty. These objects exist today in contextsslightly removed from their origins; they act in a different way and alludeto various shifts that demonstrate how societies understand and processconflict.

The Typhoon Continues and So Do YouThe responses we received from the par ticipating artists evoke pop culturesravenous appetite, which can manipulate and consume almost anything.As is the case with the recruitment video game Americas Army or theNorth Korean Hell March video posted on YouTube, eccentric evidencesof modernity collide to perpetuate a kitschy militaristic culture. Alternately,many of the artworks that respond to the Slobodan Miloevic trial andbalaclava facemask explore both sides of the conflicts and their historicalcontexts, although rarely from an impartial standpoint. In all cases, a newcontextualization of these ar tifacts shift how a collective consciousness

absorbs the trauma of conflict and attempts to move beyondor at leastwithit.

The artists responses have an improvisational quality that questionsthe residues, implications, and shadows of objects or images that wereintentionally made to establish and enforce a political perspective. Whilepeople are killed, property is damaged, and humanity is degraded, there isstill an impulse to continue through the typhoon.

- Elizabeth Larison, Douglas Paulson, Ginger Shulick, Chen Tamir,and Christina Vassallo

April 2011

Introduction

Vahap Avsar, Hector Canonge, Joseph DeLappe, Patrick Dintino, Nick Fevelo,Yevgeniy Fiks, Gregory Green, Harvey Loves Harvey, Pablo Helguera &Colectivo Mishima, Yael Kanarek, Kristian Kozul, Julia Kul, Elizabeth Larison,Brian Leo, Paolo Pedercini, Public Studio, Ryan Roa, Christopher Robbins,Sayeh Sarfaraz, Aida Sehovic, and Matthew Sleeth.

With reader contributions by Rodney Dickson, Pauline Julier, Biko Koenig,Nick Kolakowski, Carin Kuoni, Morgan Meis, Catherine McMahon, Gregory B.Moynahan, Oliver Ressler, A.E. Souzis, Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor.

Reader edited by Elizabeth Larison, designed by Douglas Paulson

Sunday, May 1, 3:30pm: Knowledge Creation and Propagation: JustifyingChoices in War and Reparation. Short film by Nadia Awad and presentationby Maxwell Neely-Cohen.Preparations for Existing in and Surviving through Zones of Conflict. Shortfilm by Alana Kakoyiannis and short film by Oliver Ressler.

Exhibition information:Opening: Friday, April 1, from 6 pm onExhibition dates: Saturday, April 2 through Sunday, May 8Hours: open weekends, 12 6 pm or by appointmentLocation: Flux Factory, 39-31 29th Street, Long Island City, Queens

Special thanks to Brendan Coyle, Amanda Curtis, and Marion Arnaud.

Flux Factory is a non-profit arts organization whose mission is to supportand promote emerging artists through exhibitions, commissions, residencies,and collaborative opportunities. Focused on generating collaborative workprocesses, Flux Factory is a public and community space with an openoffice, exhibition space, printmaking studio, woodshop, and craft-room for

its collaborative Flux Artists-in-Residence (FAIR) program and the public. Inaddition to exhibitions of new commissions and events, it produces uniqueprojects around the city and the world.

www.fluxfactory.org

Featuring

Oliver Ressler, Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies, 2007

Scheduled presentations, screenings and performances:Saturday, April 9th, 6pm: Objects of War and Their Reappropriations.Performance by Pablo Helguera & Colectivo Mishima and presentation by

Anya E.V. Liftig.

Thursday, April 14th, 8pm: Geographical and Social Landscapes of Conflict,Both Real and Perceived. Short film by Owen Mundy and documentary byJayce Salloum. To occur in conjunction with Flux Thursday, Flux Factorysmonthly potluck dinner and arts salon.


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MILOSEVICWe speak in metaphors, because metaphors are a way we attempt tounderstand. Heres one: the transcript for The Hagues 5-year trial againstSlobodan Miloevic for crimes against humanity during the 1991-1995Yugoslav War is 49,615 pages long. Stacked up vertically, the entiretranscript measures a whopping 49.26 feet, or roughly the height of a5-story building. In my mind, that building is decrepit, abandoned, unfit forhuman habitation. You enter at your own risk, scuttling past the holes in thefloor, the rats, the decaying beams. You head up the creaking stairs in thedarkness, pausing at each floor (or every 10,000 pages of the transcript),which, like a reverse Dantes Inferno, leads to more horrors the higher yougo. Open the doors on each landing to revisit the crimes Miloevic has beencharged with: the ethnic cleansing of the Albanians in Kosovo in 1990; thebombing of historic Dubrovnik, Croatia in 1991; the massacre of nearly9,000 Bosnians in Srebrenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1995. By thetop floor you are p anting, numb, and theres an ominous tingling shootingup your left arm. But its too late: as you step off the stairs, they collapsebeneath you, like the trial abruptly did when Miloevics heart stopped onMarch 22, 2006.

But you may prefer this metaphor: the transcript as a screenplay for a50,000-hour epic drama. The characters leap off the pages: the sternbut impartial Judge Robinson, the serious but sultry p rosecutor Carla DelPonte, her prim, upright British associate Geoffrey Nice, and, of course,Miloevic, saddled with the Kafkaesque moniker The Accused, arguingvoraciously against the legality of the trial, the veracity of the witnessesstatements, seeking every opportunity to attack and deny. He is a fighter,the most dangerous kind. Perhaps you want to add a personal detail for adramatic touch: a man, sitting in the back of the courtroom day after day,who has lost his family in the conflicts. In the Hollywood version, the manis still ruggedly handsome, still hopeful. In the European art house version,he is missing teeth and visibly scarred. The films endings vary, based onthe production, on the final day in court when Judge Robinson announcesMiloevic has died. In the Hollywood film, we see the man smiling tohimself -- somehow he is responsible for Miloevics death, cosmic justiceand retribution reinforced. In the European art house film, the cameraslowly pans over the mans sunken, lost face. Aghast at the futility of it all,he stumbles out of the courtroom, shoulders hunched, into the blindingsunlight.

But perhaps these metaphors can only go so far in making peace with war.For every attempt the transcript makes to restore our sense of morality andhumanity, the blankness opens up behind. Ultimately, the horror of Kurtzsheart of darkness is what 50,000 pages of words documenting one of themost brutal wars in recent history can only hint at.

The forty-six thousand page transcript of Prosecutor v. Slobodan Miloevic indexes thetimes and places in which people, historic monuments, and villages were destroyed.Understanding the transcript as an object of war provides a frame in which toconsider this vast database of information as an unintentional memorial to the war,to genocide and to their complex refraction through the trial itself. Even if ultimatejustice seemed impossible long before Miloevics death brought a sudden end tothe trial in 2006 and thus appeared to make this enterprise technically of limitedvalue for hundreds of individuals the trial transcript was the only means to learnthe circumstances in which a sister, a son, a father or mo ther was murdered. Thetranscript can thus be considered from the onset a memorial that contrasts thecomplexity of war and the quest for justice with the individual fates of those withinit. Within the transcript, however, as a sort of living memorial, we also find anillumination of the new challenges of the 1948 United Nations Genocide Conventionilluminated in the interplay of political, legal, and technical representation.

As the political philosopher Hanna Pitkin observed, representation is one of thoseterms that appears simple until it is approached and recognized in its multiplicityof meanings. As a general definition, she suggested simply presenting somethingagain. The various meanings of aesthetic or epistemological representation, legalrepresentation by a lawyer, the political action of a representative, or the originalface-to-face representation of vassal to lord can all b e understood as distinct butoften overlapping forms of representation. For Pitkin, working in the tradition ofWittgenstein, the advantage of this broad approach is to emphasize that each form ofrepresentation is an action of translation or transposition, and none a simple copyof reality. Each form of representation indexes events with different rules of evidenceand engagement, even as the often-opaque manner in which these meanings occur andoverlap is itself deeply political.

In this context, the transcripts are not simply a direct representation ormemorialization of acts of war. A fateful conjuncture of representations is at playin a figure such as Miloevic (who at different points fits nearly every form of thedefinition), in the trials themselves, and in attempts to ascertain events on theground. This is of course clear in the transpositions that occur even in the transcriptsmaterial form, which is the written representation of a spoken testimony (itself oftentranslated between several languages), and often even further archived and accessedthrough several forms of digital representation. The military war as such is severalsteps removed from these triangulations.

The particular character of the trial was the new claim to charge the former leaderof a nation with genocide by representing this act through its multiple specificinstances. This problem was made considerably more complex by the multiple motivesand contexts of the atrocities. Even as an epistemological problem of representing awhole by its parts, then, the case is not simple. Under the 1948 Genocide Convention,the prosecution had to demonstrate that there was a targeted murder of membersof a racial, national or ethnic group as such, and that this murder was intendedto destroy in whole or in part this group apart from military objectives of controlof territory. Ultimately, the ICTY found that in international law only the massacre atSrebrenica in July 1995 fit this criteria, since the more than 8,000 murdered victimsand more than 20,000 ethnically cleansed refugees were so clearly targeted.

Linking Miloevic to such atrocities (as opposed to other Serbian leaders tried bythe ICTY) hinged on his role as a political representative of the Republic of Serbia.Since Serbian forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina were not directly under the control ofthe national forces Miloevic institutionally represented, the ICTY used the termjoint criminal enterprise to explain his role outside the boundaries of Serbia in theterritory of Bosnia- Herzegovina. Miloevics argument was that he was the legitimaterepresentative of a Serbian nation that was in his view under attack by NATO generallyand, as he clarified in his introductory remarks, long-standing German nationalinterests specifically. He claimed to only have acted as a national leader within nationalboundaries: I have been indicted, he argued, because I defended my people legallyand with legitimate means on the basis of the right to self-defense that every nationhas.

In this regard, Miloevic claimed that the trial itself was illegitimate. I consider thistribunal, he contended, a false tribunal and the indictment a false indictmentso I have no need to appoint counsel to (an) illegal organ. As a trained lawyer,however, he in fact legally represented himself. Miloevics unusual role as his ownlegal representative or counsel was in this context also a means to call the trial itselfinto question, not only legally, but extra-legally through his personal engagement. Inhis often-hectoring treatment of those he was cross-examining, he appeared to stepoutside his role as merely a legal representative, into a theatrical role as a national andsymbolic representative of Serbian grievances.

Despite the challenges of this tangled web of representations within the vertiginoustedium of the trial, it can ultimately be seen as advancing the treaty on genocide. AsHegel declared, the law is alive: progressive instantiations of the law mark one ofthe few means for organizing and shaping human conduct. When the Polish-Jewishjurist Raphael Lemkin coined the term genocide, he intended to create an awarenessof a crime that, as he quoted Winston Churchill in declaring, was without a name" the planned destruction of entire nations of peoples. Just as almost all murders in amodern country are somehow remembered in police reports, insurance registers,newspapers, and local gossip, so even the apparently forgotten victims of genocidecould hope for some commemoration within the register of this new form of crime,even if only as representative numbers. In this regard, the Miloevic transcripts have asan ethical and aesthetic representation a visceral importance in their very comp lexityand ambiguity. The documents suggest a sense of what should be, how humans shouldconduct themselves, and the efforts that should be made to mete out just punishment,even if this punishment only finds realization in a vanishingly small percentage ofcases. For those who sought out their loved ones in the registers of the Miloevic trial,there is some small comfort that even if they will not have justice, there is such a thingas justice and its potential for future generations.

Bringing war criminals to justice. Bringing justice to victims.(http://www.icty.org/) Before the conclusion of the trial for crimes againsthumanity of former president of Serbia and Yugoslavia Slobodan Miloevic,

the accused died in his cell in The Hague in 2006. It was five years after hisarrest, and four after the beginnings of the proceedings of his case, part ofthe United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

What remains from the most prominent trial of the most violent war inEurope after World War II apart from insurmountable trauma and suffering are the video files and 50,000 pages of transcripts of approximatelyfour hundred days of the Miloevic trial on the website of the InternationalCriminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia.

In recent years, there have been famous incidents of public accountability,where different parties opened archives in response to calls for transparency.The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commissions proceedingsare entirely online http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/. The Guantnamo BayCombatant Status Review Tribunals are at http://www.defense.gov/news/combatant_tribunalsarchive.html. The 500-page Tower Commission Report,ordered in response to the Iran Contra Scandal and holding Reaganaccountable for a lax managerial style and aloofness from policy detailscan be bought on Amazon. And significant details of the 2010 DeepwaterHorizon Oil Spill, as analyzed in the independent commissions SummaryReport for Fate and Effects of Remnant Oil in the Beach Environment canbe found here: http://www.restorethegulf.gov/release/2011/02/11/federal-science-report-analyzes-environmental-risks-and-benefits-additional-clean.

The vastness of such archives is both exhilarating and forbidding. To visitwww.icty.org, and to hear and see the victims, the accused, and judgesof a war two decades back is jarring. How do we digest such an immenseamount of data? How do we bring the archives to the present? WikiLeaks(Keeping You Informed! All Released Leaks Archive! Afghan or Iraq WarDocuments! Secret UFO Information! Classified US Army Videos! at www.wikileaks.org) has opted to make approximately 20,000 of 500,000 cablesavailable, to great effect. In 2009, a group of artists mined the GuantnamoTribunals and produced a multipart video installation that implicates everygallery visitor: 9 Scripts from a Nation at War by Andrea Geyer, SharonHayes, Ashley Hunt, Katya Sander, and David Thorne consists in part ofreenacted tribunal scenes (http://www.9scripts.info/).

The aborted trial of Miloevic did not yield a pronouncement of guilt, and

therefore not justice in a conventional sense. However, perhaps just as im-portant as final closure in itself an illusion are the proceedings of tryingto get there. Arent we witnesses to such developments now, one month afterthe uprising in Egypt has begun, when information swamps the Web, andWisconsin attempts to emulate Cairo?

This Tragic Text Is ASupreme Absurdity

A.E. Souzis

- A.E. Souzis is a writer and media artist living in New York City. Through her writ-ings, multimedia installations and site-specific tours, she creates narratives thatexplore the real-life networks of power that exist in politics, underground andalternative histories and public spaces.

Piercing the White Noiseof Transparency

Carin Kuoni

- Carin Kuoni is an independent curator and director of the Vera List Center for Artand Politics at The New School.

- Gregory B. Moynahan is Assistant Professor of History and Co-Director of the Science,Technology and Society Program at Bard College.

Representative Miloevic The TrialTranscripts from the International Criminal

Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia

Gregory B. Moynahan


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HELL MARCHIn the mid to late 1990s, somewhere between onemillion and four million North Koreans died of star-vation. There was famine in a closed, totalitariansociety. Generally, putting those two things togetherequals mass suffering. And that is exactly whathappened. It is a terrible and terrifying story. I saythis to acknowledge the obvioussomething hor-ribly wrong is going on in North Korea, and it hasbeen going on for a long time.

And yet, there is something fascinating about thisclosed society. In a global and interconnected age,the North Koreans are living in an alternate reality.Not just an alternate reality, a radically alternatereality. The whole society is like a finely tunedinstrument for singing praises to the SupremeLeader. What it means to be a human being isvastly different in North Korea than it is everywhereelse on the planet. That is downright interesting.Troubling, unsettling, and interesting. The very factthat North Korea exists makes a person wonderwhat is possible. Can it be the case that somepeople thrive in North Korean society? These are

dangerous questions to ask. We are supposedto believe in human freedom as somethingfundamental, inalienable. The North Koreans do,

SCENE 9 GAS STATION EXT. DAY THE CASH IER

Birds flock in the cloudy sky.

A car horn honks outside a gas station in the middle ofnowhere. From inside the stations convenience store,THE CASHIER (ECCENTRIST) looks up through thewindow. A driver stands next to his car, with his armresting on the open door. A man sits inside the car,tapping on his smartphone. It begins to rain.

THE CASHIER exits the convenience store to approachthe vehicle.

SCENE 10 STATION INT. DAY THE CASHIER

Inside the empty store, the music of Hell March plays.The computer browser is opened to a page on YouTube.com, showing video of a military march in Nor th Korea.

JPRESCOTTI: This video is soooo fucking coool!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

TEXASWHATITDO: NORTHKOREA IS BEST KOREA

THE CASHIER comes back inside the convenience storeand settles himself at the counter. His fingers type onthe old keyboard. On YouTube.com text responses ag-gregate rapidly.

ECCENTRIST: This is absolutely terrifying.

DANSEB1337: Its star wars attack of the clones, nooffense..

LAZOMANIAC: what a waste of women

XSTONYMAHONYX: why do these fucking communistmonsters got russian weapons?!

THE CASHIER looks out the window. It's raining heavilynow. Car headlights pass by on the road outside.

SCENE 11 METRO INT. NIGHT THE OLD MAN

On an iPhone screen, THE OLD MAN (ZU NBANDEE)types a response on YouTube.com.

ZUNDANBEE: To @xStonyMahonyx maybe because rus-sia and china sold them???????????

The blue light of the iPhone illuminates THE OLD MAN'sface. He is on a metro train. Some passengers are sleep-ing. A beautiful woman naps, her head on his shoulder.He writes on YouTube.com.ZUNDANBEE: It doesn't matter that north Korea has3times the amount of troops as us. They force peopleto join their army, we don't. They have no navy while wehave 11 air craft carriers. we could comp letely block-ade that country and win without even invading them.

99% of their country is starving. People think they havenuclear weapons and could nuke us, The fact is theydon't even have a missile that could hit us. any planes,boats, tanks that they have would just be demolished inthe first week of the war.

MRSLONOED: to @Zunbandee win like in Vietnam?

ZUNDANBEE: to @MrSLonoed: different type of ar my.we lost mainly due to guerrilla tactics used by the Viet-cong.THE OLD MAN reads one comment after another. Hesighs loudly. The woman barely moves.

USAMERICANPATRIOTCA: ... good idea I prefer a ham-burger rather than talking with an imbecile. I guess youdo have the army since it is obliged hahahhaahha. youmake me laugh with your bullshit. go in the breakawayCaucasus waiting for you, shred

LAZOIZATION: to @USAmericanPatriotCA hope 1 dayusa gonna feel war on their territory. then u will knohow it feels to run into bunkers to save ur head whilebombs r fallin from the sky.and i have to say,i was reallydisappointed with the americans in 1999 instead ofsending nato ground troops,u bombed Serbia for 3months and sent albanians as cannon fodder..at least ucould train them better cause they fought like shit. butive seen how brave usa soldiers r in iraq.killin civiliansand tapeing it.good job usa!

USAMERICANPATRIOTCA: to @lazoization sorry but I'mtired I have not read your story but I'm sure it's bullshitgood for you bye ;)

SCENE 12 BAR INT. DAY THE WOMAN AND THEYOUNG MAN

THE WOMAN (THEULTRABODY) sits at a bar, which isfilled with summer light. The street outside is crowded.Close up to her blue eyes wide open. Hell Marchblares in her earphones, coming from her smartphone.Colored fingernails begin to tap the screen.

THEULTRABODY: this video is awesome, but unfortu-nately it is racist. why do they have no black soldiers? isall of north korea racist??

Nearby, THE YOUNG MAN (NUCLEARLION73) isstanding at a counter that loo ks outside the barswindow. His eyes are carefully fixed o n somethingoutside: the sea and the accompanying horizon. Thereis a fake palm tree on the beach. All of a sudden, thewindow reflection of a passing metro is seen. It rumblesby, fast and noisily on the tracks which lay on the otherside of the street.

SCENE 13 THE OFFICE INT. DAY THE MAN INSUIT

we believe, yearn to breathe free. But we shouldalso have the strength to ask ourselves, what if theydon't? What if human beings can accept almostany reality, attune themselves to almost any setof conditions? What if we have no real basis uponwhich to claim that the people of, say, Belgium arehappier than the people of North Korea? What ifNorth Korean society does, in its own ways, servehuman needs?

I'm joking, of c ourse. I must be joking. We shouldn'ttake these questions seriously. It would be a m ock-ery of everything we hold sacred, of our deepestconvictions. On the other hand, how deep is the con-viction? How real is a truth if you cannot bear, evenfor a moment, to imagine it to be otherwise? Isn'tthat where truth bleeds over into desire?

It is, anyway, in the rigor of ritual and public displaythat the North Korean state achieves its highestlevel of synchronized beauty. The military displaysin North Korea are the most beautiful of all, themilitary being the place of extreme discipline. I callthis beauty because, like all displays of organizedand synchronized human activity, it is deeplypleasing to behold, whatever our revulsion at itscause and purpose. I am, thus, no t at all surprisedthat people outside of North Korea are fascinatedwith its military displays and have created all sortsof mash-ups on YouTube and in other places.

"Hell March" takes an industrial music track from avideo game (Command and Conquer: Red Alert) anduses it as the theme music for a military march inPyongyang. The hardness of the music, the driving

riff of the electric guitar, would seem to emphasizethe brutality and inhumanity of the North Koreanmilitarism we are observing. It does. But there isa catch. The North Korean army has developed anincredible marching style. There is a little kick inthe march, a hop that happens just as the otherleg comes down from being extended straight outin front. North Korean soldiers don't j ust march,they bounce. You could almost call it jaunty. Here,politics and ethics hit a brick wall. It doesntmatter what I think about North Korean society,how I judge it. Aesthetically, I am mesmerized.The hop-march is amazing, powerful, satisfyingand strange. The women soldiers with their yellowtights make a particular impression as they march,machine guns held close to their hearts. It evokesthe troubling fascination most of us have forSchutzstaffel uniforms. Watching this video, wefeel the attraction of these kinds of displays. Themusic, which might at first have served as criticalcommentary on the military display, actually servesto heighten the power of the march. The fact thatthe music comes from a video game about combatand war furthers this point. Here in N orth Koreasomething human is being satisfied, some humanneed for the pageantry of war is being taken to itshighest aesthetic expression. Shake your head allyou like, you can't look away.

Hop-MarchMorgan Meis

- Morgan Meis is the critic-at-large at The Smart Set and aneditor of 3 Quarks Daily. He has a PhD in philosophy and isthe founder of Flux Factory.

THE MAN IN SUIT (NEVERHOODYN) sits in front of acomputer, the same page is open on YouTube.com.

ARSHAVIN2007: Big respect to North Korea and Kim-Young-Il from Russia ! The last place in the world whereMac Donalds, Hollywood and Coca cola will never get topoison the people. North Korea stand!

THE MAN IN SUIT is looking out his window, down tothe park below. One little girl in a red anorak standsout against the green background. She acts p aranoid,looking over her shoulder repeatedly, as if somebody isfollowing her.

THE MAN IN SUIT's eyes wander back to the office. Bigwhite desks are full of activity.

NEVERHOODYN: to @arshavin2007, You would not beable to watch this video and comment on it if it was notfor "Americanization" you dumb piece of trash.

GWINDAK: to @neverhoodyn--And one huge finger foryou americans, british and bla bla bla. FUCK YOU. A vivacomunismus, a viva komumunizm from Polska!

FROGBLASTTHEVENTCORE: INTERNET FIGHT

THE MAN IN SUIT smiles.

ARTISTICENTREPRENEUR: Firstly FANTASTIC JOB!Camera angles were perfect and all clips timed well tothe cinematically-rich visuals! Hats go off to the preci-sion of the DPRK Military for such a flawless and syn-chronous effort! Secondly - WHO IS THAT SMOKINGHOT NORTH KOREAN GIRL, WHO GIGGLES AT 1:51INTO THE CLIP? I want to show her MY Juche ;)

SCENE 14 PARK EXT. DAY THE YOUNG GUY

In the park, THE YOUNG GUY (NUCLEARCLION73) sitson a bench. The wind displaces some white pollen in theair. It looks like snow. H e writes on his laptop.

NUCLEARLION73: I just turned 18 a couple weeks ago.I'm more than likely about to b e drafted. i have no wordsto describe the shear amounts of anger I have.

- Born in 1981, Pauline Julier has presented her films mostlyin European collective exhibitions and film festivals, andreceived the 2010 Swiss Art Award in Art-Basel for her lastfilm installation: Noah (http://mubi.com/films/37007).She is interested in several complementary mediums of thecinema, and works with PHP, a crossover group associatedwith 104 in Paris (www.104.fr).

Daily Dialogue (an excerpt)

Pauline Julier


4/7

Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor.Soldiers Resting, 2011


5/7

A Wee FuckinHood Job

I was born in Northern Ireland in 1956, and asa teenager experienced the worst time of violentpolitical strife in that country. It was a time knownas The Troubles, when civil disorder brought thatsociety close to collapse.

During this time, the balaclava was a well-knownand much used object of war. It was, in fact, somuch associated with violence that it was rarelyworn as a regular item of clothing. Anyone seenwearing one would be liable to instill fear inothers, and run the risk of being arrested by thepolice or the British Army, or else shot by one ofthe numerous paramilitary gangs. The balaclavahad multiple uses; for example, assassins wouldwear one to conceal their identity. It could alsobe turned around backwards or slightly modifiedin order to render a victim unable to see theassassins or where they were taken to be killed.The balaclava was almost compulsory headwearfor rioters, as it concealed their identity frompolice cameras, and from the enemy who m ightremember a face and target that person at a laterdate.

Hood was the name commonly used for thebalaclava in Northern Ireland in those days, andit is likely that many of those who wore them didnot know its correct name. The hood was a thingto be feared and a hood job was the phrase usedfor a hit or an assassination. We got a fuckin weejob on tonight; bring some hoods, would signifythe aim of the evening was to kill someone. Sincethe hood was almost exclusively used in violent

- Rodney Dickson was born in 1956 in Northern Ireland,Having drawn and painted since a child, he reacts to hisearly experiences by considering the futility and hypocrisy ofwar through art.

(Italicized words are from the Remarks of theGeneral Command of the EZLN in the openingceremony of the First Intercontinental MeetingFor Humanity and Against Neoliberalism, July 27,1996.)

This is what we are.The Zapatista National Liberation Army.The voice that arms itself to be heard.The face that hides itself to be seen.The name that hides itself to be named.The red star that calls out to humanity and the worldto be heard, to be seen, to be n amed.The tomorrow that is harvested in the past.Behind our black mask.Behind our armed voice.Behind our unnamable name.Behind what you see of us.Behind us, we are you.Behind us, we are the same simple and ordinary men

and women that are repeated in all races, paintedin all colors, speak in all languages and live in allplaces.The same forgotten men and women.The same excluded.The same untolerated.The same persecuted.The same as you.Behind us, we are you.

Esto somos nosotros.El Ejrcito Zapatista de Liberacin Nacional.La voz que se arma para hacerse or.El rostro que se esconde para mostrarse.El nombre que se calla para ser nombrado.La roja estrella que llama al hombre y al mundo para

Detrs de NosotrosEstamos Ustedes :Behind Us, We Are You

- Born naked, blond and unable to cook for himself, Bikoeventually grew up to be a brown-haired PhD student. Helives off your surplus labor but makes a mean tempehburrito.

Biko Koenig

Rodney Dickson

que escuchen, para que vean, para que nombren.El maana que se cosecha en el ayer.Detrs de nuestro rostro negro.Detrs de nuestra voz armada.Detrs de nuestro innombrable nombre.Detrs de los nosotros que ustedes ven.Detrs estamos ustedes.

Detrs estamos los mismos hombres y mujeres sim-ples y ordinarios que se repiten en todas las razas, sepintan de todos los colores, se hablan en todas laslenguas y se viven en todos los lugares.

Los mismos hombres y mujeres olvidados.Los mismos excluidos.Los mismos intolerados.Los mismos perseguidos.Somos los mismos ustedes.Detrs de nosotros estamos ustedes

Behind us, We are You: the Zapatista maskhides and reveals the essence of Zapatismo.Known as pasamontaas (literally mountainpaths), these masks, at first take, act to co nceal.In flouting a corrupt Mexico, the Zapatistas takepains to hide their identity from a state thatwould crush their rebellion, with the hope that itinspires others to do the same. But behind thisstraightforward understanding lies somethingdeeper and far more complex.

Behind us, We are You: in wearing the mask, theInsurgent hides his or her personal identity whilesimultaneously taking on a larger role. Insurgentshide themselves to be seen, while striving for theday when masks are no longer necessary. Theyarm themselves to be heard, while yearning forthe day when their weapons are no longer needed;they are an armed force that fights to make armsobsolete.

Behind us, We are You: embodying the univer-sal, the Zapatistas see in their own oppression theviolence against all indigenous people, but alsothe subjugation of women, the fictional bordersof migrancy and immigration, the exploitation of

workers, and the social violence against GLBTQcommunities. They know that while they onlyspeak for themselves as indigenous people in themountainous jungles of Chiapas, they have deepconnections to oppressed people throughout theworld.

Behind us, We are You: it is a grammatical odd-ity that rings of that other Zapatista slogan: ParaTodos, Todo. Para Nosotros, Nada. For Everyone,Everything. For Us, Nothing. This is the productof the moral outrage of oppression, the violenceof the capitalist machine, the hegemony of theState. We are Us, and yet, We are You.

Brothers and Sisters of the entire world:Welcome to the mountains of Southeastern Mexico.Welcome to this corner of the world where we are allthe same because we are different.Welcome to the search for life and the struggleagainst death.Welcome to this First Intercontinental Meeting For Hu-manity and Against Neoliberalism.Democracy!Freedom!Justice!

Hermanos y hermanas de todo el mundo:Bienvenidos a las montaas del sureste Mexicano.Bienvenidos a este rincn del mundo donde todos

somos inguales porque somos diferentes.Bienvenidos a la bsqueda de la vida y la lucha contrala muerte.Bienvenidos a este primper encuentro i ntercontinen-tal por la humanidad y contra el neoliberalismo.Democracia!Libertad!Justicia!

activity, it was problematic to purchase one, sothey were often homemade in a variety of ways.One of the most comical ways to make a hoodwas to rip some holes in a big brown paper bagfrom the liquor store.

The hood or balaclava was a symbol for TheTroubles in those days, and was often depictedin both Loyalist and Republican propagandapaintings, such as the famous murals that werespread throughout the country. Artists have alsoused it in their commentary on The Troubles, as

seen in the work of well-known Northern Irishartist Jack Packenham.

The Troubles are more or less over and the soci-ety is going though the aftermath of 25 years ofconflict. Deep divisions still exist and the scars willtake a long time to heal. Certainly this generationwill have to pass on before genuine reconciliationhas a chance. The hood will long be rememberedand feared, and I wonder how long it will be beforea balaclava could be worn as a regular item ofclothing in Northern Ireland.

BALACLAVA


6/7

AMERICASARMY

The other night I made it across fifty yards of enemyterritory before a burst of automatic-weapons fire cutme in half.Hit reset.

Three minutes later, a sniper crouching atop a buildingshot me in the head.

Hit reset.

A grenade riddled my torso with shrapnel.

Hit reset.

I stood on that moonlit road, again, with four workinglimbs and a full clip of ammo, again, ready to kill or bekilled, again.

Over the past twenty years, first-person shooter(FPS) games have evolved to a state of near-realism.Americas ArmyThe Official U.S. Army Gameis nodifferent. According to the games website, its creatorscrawled through obstacle courses, fired weapons,

observed paratrooper instruction, and participated in avariety of training exercises in order to develop a feelfor soldiering. The end result imposes a games heroicnarrative onto the ambiguities of modern warfare.Exhaustion and boredom and uncertainty and fear haveno place in that narrative. Neither does permanence:When you die in Americas Army, the world resets.When you choose to quit, the "war" disappears into ahard drive.In real war, there are no resets. The dead stay dead. Afew button-taps will not reverse time, stitch skin andbones, remove shrapnel from brain tissue, exorciseghosts, make hearts beat again.

Back in college, I played first-person shooters with afriend who later joined the Army. When I picked up agame controller the other night, for the first time inyears, my fingers assumed their old twitchy grace: Idodged through the crumbling ruins of a virtual city,firing clips left and right, feeling all the adrenalineand none of the pain. I thought back to a few monthsago, sitting across from my old friend in a Harlemrestaurant. He had survived his tours of duty with fewscars, but the look in his eyes said all the things agame can never convey.

In 1913 an instructional text titled Little Wars, was published in London, and written bythe futurist, H. G. Wells. Wells had invented something he called "modern little warfare,"or a game for "Boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that moreintelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books."1 Gender essentialism aside, whatis striking is the appeal to "intelligence" made in relation to the subject of game playing.In general, games have long occupied a contested ground between the idea that theyhelp the players develop certain skills and hone the mind's ability to think strategically,and the thought that they are (at best) a waste of time or silly amusement and (at worst)responsible for the propagation of perverse values. So the question remains, Can gamesteach us anything? And if so, what type of intelligence is gained by playing them?

As the condition of enmity is a primary characteristic of most games, they often havetheir most successful real world corollary in warfare. Historically, there has been a long-standing relationship between games and the military whereby the former is seen as a wayto both train and plan for conflict. Nineteenth century Prussian Kriegspiel is perhaps oneof the earliest examples of mo dern wargaming played both for sport as well as for thedevelopment of military strategy. In a large part, using a game as a substitute for actualwarfare is an abstraction that parallels the desire to scientifically control and predict allaspects of combat. In the twentieth century, the convergence of the computer and conflictsimulation (no longer called games as their cost and complexity rise) has developed intandem with the attempt to fully automate the battlefield through advanced weaponry,vehicles, and robotics. Intelligence in this respect is now considered to be a quality thatresides within games, simulations, and machines, as well as humans.

It almost goes without saying that notions of warfare from the American perspectivechanged dramatically in post-nuclear context of the Cold War and in the ongoing age ofAmerican economic imperialism. Beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, conflict simulation,operations research, and systems analysis became a way to rationalize both the co stand ethical implications of military involvement in a global theatre of operations. Thismanagerial way of thinking was epitomized at this time by figures such as defensesecretary Robert McNamara, who was responsible for overseeing the conflict in Vietnamand its neighbors.

Yet, as long as wargaming has been in use, it has also had many detractors both frominside and outside the military. Unlike a game of strategy such as chess, wargamingimplies the desire to closely mimic the terrain conditions, munitions capabilities, andman-power possessed by both sides in order to ascertain potential advantages anddisadvantages held by each adversary. The component of reality is labor intensive toproduce, a high-level military simulation takes many months to prepare and weeks toplay; as time is stretched out, a half an hour of combat can take days to simulate. In1968 one author critical of gaming, Andrew Wilson, recounts an anecdote in his text, TheBomb and the Computer, in which a high ranking general constantly kept interrupting theplanning of the very real conflict in Vietnam in order to call and check on his players in asimulation so that he could see how well he was doing in next year's (imagined) conflict inBolivia. At a deeper level, many questioned what was gained through gaming when, in theclosed circuit of the game and the mind of the player, there are no true external surprises.Rather, what is produced is a rational maze that may bear little resemblance to reality.

Furthermore, the closed logical systems represented in games are reflected in otherrealms of warfare. For example, how should we think about the drones in Pakistan beingoperated remotely via video councils in Langley, Virginia? Or the disembodied voicesrecorded in the now infamous video footage released on Wikileaks? Here, Iraqi civilians andjournalists are massacred by American soldiers from the alienated distance and relativesafety of a helicopter and remote command base. Wargaming is not a new phenomena,but through technology, speculative games, and actual tactics, it is converging in a newera of command and control. The America's Ar my video game, initially developed in 2002as a part of a larger recruitment strategy to entertain and inform potential recruits, hascost taxpayers approximately $32.8 million dollars and is now being hailed as a successbecause it has also been utilized to train enlisted soldiers.

When Little Wars, was reprinted in the US in 1970, the science-fiction author IsaacAsimov offered a short foreword to the text. He c laimed that playing war games wouldallow the emotions that find an outlet in conf lict, to be displaced from the realm ofviolence to the realm of the mind. In other words, wargaming would, by his estimation,work to prevent wars. He writes that, In the absence of reality, there is the driving desireto find a substitute."2 Yet, it seems important to ask, How have games c ome to shape oureveryday sense of reality?

No ResetsNick Kolakowski

Playing WarCatherine McMahon

- Catherine McMahon is a graduate student at MIT studying the history, theory, and criticism of art andarchitecture. Her research focuses on the history of computers as they have been used in the field of design,as well as urban simulation, conflict simulation, and computer mapping.

1 Wells, H. G. Little Wars. London and New York: Arms and Armour Press and The MacMillan Company, 1970.

2 Asimov, Isaac. Foreword in Little Wars. London and New York: Arms and Armour Press and The MacMillanCompany, 1970.

- Nick Kolakowski is a journalist and editor based in NYC. Hiswritings have appeared in The Washington Post, Lost Magazine, andeWeek.com, amongst other venues. He also shot a short film in2010 for the Rubin Museum's "Talk About Nothing" lecture series.


7/7

In 2009 I curated One After Anotherat the ironicallynamed and now defunct National Gallery of Saskatch-ewan in Canora, a small town nestled in the CanadianPrairies. I wanted to link the daily lives of the few peoplein Canora with the banality of war and oppression, andto consider the consumption of photographs of war inNorth American culture. I invited nine artists to contem-plate war and oppression by using one photograph asa shared source of inspiration. The artists were DeanBaldwin, Mirelle Borra, Kerry Downey, Kristan Horton,

Douglas Paulson, Jory Rabinovitz, Gabriella Vainsencher,and Amy Westpfahl.

Image 0451 was chosen from thousands of photographsthat were just as inadequate in describing the conditionsof war, and just as banal as living under war actually is.It is a fairly ordinary picture of normal things peopledo to each other in times of war and oppression. Theimage was taken a few months prior to the show by anIsraeli photojournalist named Albert Sadikov. It showsPalestinian prisoners being led to an Israeli militarybase near the Gaza Strip, against the backdrop of theSeparation Barrier still being built. In image 0451, theprisoners are handcuffed with zip-ties and blindfoldedwith flannel strips used to clean riflescommonmaterials that I, too, used when I was a soldier in theIsraeli Army.

Image 0451 is typical not just of the Israeli occupation,

but of war and military oppression around the world.It is not much different from the goings-on in Iraq andAfghanistan, in Libya, in North Korea, and in so manyother places. With wars still raging and the world stillturning, I wanted to expand the scope of how conflictwas considered or consumed, and thus was born thecollaboration of The Typhoon Continues and So Do You.

- Chen Tamir

Im not sure how to begin talking about war. What doI know about war outside of whats been sung to meby my teenage idols D. Boon and Jello Biafra? This

exhibition was the perfect way for me to explore mycomplete ignorance of the topic. While the teenageme came to learn about war through punk rockrecords, teenagers all over the world today are able toimmediately gain access to a wealth of informationthrough Twitter and Facebook, if they aren't alreadycaught in the throes of conflict as an everyday event.

Just over a year ago, the Department of Defense issuedits policy on social networking media in the military.This was the first time Americas military allowed theuse of social networking sites by its soldiers. Today,Facebook is actively used in the militarys recruitmenttactics, as the government is now able to put a real faceon real time American heroes. Since issuing its policyon social networking media, the U.S. Army itself hasnearly 630,000 followers on Facebook, not to mentionone of the most technologically advanced pages Iveever seen.

There are now hundreds of Facebook and Twitter pagesdedicated to the armed services, including a Facebookpage specifically for the Americas Army recruitmentgame which itself has over 39,000 fans. This game hasproven to be an efficient strategy in disseminating thearmys tactical agenda, as demonstrated by severalpieces in this show. The militarys use of Facebookcant all be bad though. Those with the misfortune ofbeing called for active duty are able to have a vir tual linkbetween themselves and the rest of the world. At leastsoldiers families and closest friends can now measuretheir loved ones activities by the number of times theyuse Facebook each day, just like the rest of us.

- Ginger Shulick

* title taken from 1985 song by Dead Kennedys

Special thanks to Albert Sadikov and to Ami Steinitz of the Frames of Reality photography forum.

About the Curators:

- Elizabeth Larison is an interdisciplinary artist and a FluxFactory collaborator.

- Douglas Paulson is an artist whose work is focused oncreating the space within which culture happens. Hes alongtime member of both Flux Factory and Parfyme, as wellas other enduring and impromptu collaborations.

- Ginger Shulick is the Managing Director of Flux Factory, andholds an M.A. in Socio-Cultural Anthropology from ColumbiaUniversity, and a B.A. in Art History from DePaul University.

- Chen Tamir is Flux Factorys Executive Director and Pro-gram Manager at Artis. She holds an M.A. from the Centerfor Curatorial Studies, Bard College, and recently organizedexhibitions at the Israeli Center for Digital Art, Art in General,

the Museums of Bat Yam, White Box, TPW, and the Universityof Toronto.

- Christina Vassallo is the Adjunct Curator at Flux Factory andalso organizes projects independently through her curatorialplatform Random Number.

#starsandstripesofcorruption*

You will not be able to stay home, brother.You will not be able to plug in, turn on & cop out.

You will already be @home, brother.You will already be plugged in, turned on & copped out.

You will control an image of you and Willie Maehacking that shopping cart down the block on the dead runand trying to load that stolen image into a mini SD.

You will push a button in #DC and destroy a house in #pakistanYou will skip out @beer and commercial breaksbe home in time for dinner & catch the instant replayRT & catch the instant replayRT @msnbc & catch the instant replay

RT @maddow & catch the instant replayRT @cnnbrk & catch the instant replayRT @GlobalSoulTruck & catch the instant replayRT @libya & catch the instant replayRT @libya & catch the instant replay #EgyRT @libya & catch the instant replay #jihad

There will be no highlights @the 11 o'clock newsThe theme song will be written by private generals, El Generale,Mohamed Ali Ben Jemaa, your ringtone, those studios in LA,and your sister lipsynching into the mirror while holding her phonenot @Francis Scott Key, nor sung by @Glen Campbell, @TomJones, @Johnny Cash, @Englebert Humperdink, or the Rare whtvr.

Green Parties, The Beverly Hillbillies, & @hooters are no longer so damned relevant,and we're who's plugged in logged in and not who's plugged out.Our #conflict has new fonts new fronts and no faces becauseour #conflict puts you @in the driver's seat.

This #conflict will not be televised, will not be televised,will not be televised, will not be televised.This #conflict is no re-run brothers;This #conflict is recorded and updated LIVE.

- Douglas Paulson

you @in the driver's seat (@GilScottheron)

I understand war only through other peoples storiesas a drama that unfolds without my direct involvement.

September 11th wasnt real to me until I watched iton the news. That morning in Brooklyn I saw sheets ofpaper rain from a tremendous brown cloud that floatedacross the East River, but it was the round-the-clockrepetition of Flight 77 crashing through the SouthTower that had the biggest impact on me. Days later itwas the heroic photos of rescue workers emerging fromrubble that shaped my interpretation of the attack.

This fascination with mediated warwar at adistancebegan with my grandparents stories of livingin air raid shelters for weeks at a time. Undergroundmazes protected them during some of the harshestspit-fire battles of the second World War, and theirdescriptions of the cramped quarters have becomefamily legend. Most notably, the experience resulted inmy grandfathers dislike of minestrone soup (the airraid shelter special) and the first award of a collectiveSt. Georges Cross to an entire country.

In 2004 I visited the shelter that my grandparentsshared with hundreds of others in Mgarr, a tiny isolatedvillage in the northwest of mainland Malta. The protec-tive structure was dug into layers of soft limestone rockby hand during the feverish anticipation of self-preser-vation. Today it is maintained by the owner of Il-Barri,the restaurant that sits above the shelter and is knownfor its rabbit stew. Curious diners receive an admissionticket that lists statistics of the Second Siege of Maltain April 1942, the most desperate period of bombard-ment and starvation in the British colonys history. Theticket states that Malta had been on alert for twelvedays, ten hours, and twenty minutes, and that over60,000 tons of bombs were dropped in that monthalone.

Part of my tour included a film that opened with apredictable scene of a Luftwaffe plane gliding over the

Mediterranean Seaa standard beginning to manyWWII documentaries. The English accented voiceoverexplained that free Europe owes a debt to the Mal-tese people, who prepared against attacks they wouldsuffer for being a strategically important base of theBritish Armed Forces. Clips of soldiers and aerialcombat were interspersed between shots of familiesstuffed into tessellated chambers.

After the film my tour guide pointed to burn markson the stone walls that came from torches used tonavigate the labyrinth. Closer to the center, cabinetswere dug inside the walls and high off the floor, linedwith stacked empty bottles. Inside the small roomsaltars with religious statuettes were recreated toillustrate the pervasive Catholic legacy during a timeof distress. Near the exit a sign read, This shelter isdedicated to the children who have suffered due tothe conflicts of others. The sign gave me an entirelydifferent perspective of my grandparents time there.Somehow it made their ordeal less personal and alittle more distant, even though the intention was tomemorialize my ancestors.

My visit to the Mgarr air raid shelter made me veryaware of the myth of war and how it changes depend-ing on the nuances of its recitation. War correspon-dent Chris Hedges vividly recounts his adrenaline-pumping experiences on numerous battlefields inthe book War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning. Forhim and the many soldiers, journalists, and civilianshe profiles, there exists a self-perpetuating machinein which the myth of war sells and legitimizes thedrug of war. It is through this mindset that my ownknowledge of war is transmitted. Much like with mygrandparents stories, Hedges guided me throughother peoples versions of war, sometimes with tellinginconsistencies. Distortion, exaggeration, and perhapseven a fondness for living under incredible circum-stances have informed my experience of this epicthing that I hope to never truly understand.

- Christina Vassallo

From the curators:

One After Another

Other Peoples Wars

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