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17 1 TECHNOLOGIES OF WAR, MEDIA, AND DISSENT IN THE POST-9/11 WORK OF KRZYSZTOF WODICZKO In the U.S. war on Iraq and the elusive , euphemistic “global war on terrorism ” manufactured in response to the events of September 11, video and surveillance have been used in radically diverse ways, eroding the line between public and private in the service of state control, political recruitment, terror, individual curiosity, and radical critique. These technologies have been used to scrutinize the body by government agencies, publicize beheadings by Iraqi insurgents, send global messages by Osama Bin Laden, and produce a recruitment tool by al-Qaeda now on the Internet.1 Many independent agents have produced private videos that have found their way to a global audience via Internet sites such as YouTube, and, of course, the news media rely on video, subject to the pressures of state control. Artists, too, draw on the technologies of video, surveillance, and the media to produce critical works about the troubling and often invisible effects of war. I want to examine some of these effects, focusing on the work of Krzysztof Wodiczko and his post-9/11 video, sound, and vehicle projects, which mobilize war and media technologies in order to perform a radical critique of the war on terror, particularly the political repression it has unleashed against immigrants in American society and the frightening impulses and enduring damage it has effected on soldiers who function as both perpetrators and cannon fodder in this imperialist adventure . Surveillance technology is everywhere in evidence today, from puffers , chemical scanners, and biometrics devices being installed in airports to radio-frequency chips being inserted into passports, and “machine-gun toting robots” being developed for deployment in Iraq to the thousands of video surveillance cameras in public spaces. One report notes, “If facerecognition software is linked to the cameras, police can effectively compile dossiers on Americans’ movements whenever they’re in public places.”2 And yet, despite ramping up public surveillance, it seems to have no effect on “security” according to official U.S. intelligence assessments between 2000 and 2007, causing the New York Times to note, “We live in a continuous Code Orange, despite thousands of lives lost and uncounted billions of dollars spent in the battle the White House now calls ‘the long war.’”3 The invidious practice of surveilling the body to contain and control the population promotes the illusion of safety through fear of the pervasive potential of terror without actually providing greater protection. But this surveillance serves as a signal example of the 18 THE ROMANCE OF WAR erosion of the line between public and private, civilian and soldier, or, put another way, between the peaceable domestic sphere and the perpetual militarization of domestic space. Video media such as television also exemplifies the increased blurring of the line between private and public. When television entered the home in the 1950s, it transformed the home from sanctuary and retreat from the threat of the outside world into a zone into which war could enter at any time.4 By the 1960s, however, television also had become a dynamic force for radical critique as well as a powerful state and corporate instrument. Artists such as Nam June Paik subverted the corporate and state-run hegemony of television by appropriating its real-time capabilities as a medium for democratic potential, which was critical for the turn to social and political issues in the radical art movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Radical video artists questioned the ideological monopoly of television by changing our relationship to video and television from a passive to an active one.5 Feminists, in particular, used video to interrogate conceptions of private and public, and responded to the way the mass media positioned the mass audience.6 If television allowed war to enter the home in the twentieth century, the Internet now allows the home dweller to interactively explore the world of war. The Internet user blurs the line between private and public by his or her ability to participate in the global blogosphere of the Internet community while nonetheless sitting at home alone, even preserving the ability to remain anonymous. Thus video and media technologies have been instrumental for dissolving the divide between public and private for both conservative and radical purposes, that is, for state and corporate influence and control, and for radical critique of those hegemonic institutions. As a form of dissent in the era of permanent warfare...

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