It looks like a war videogame in demo mode, but it is a critical video about the “culture of war” in which real Persian Gulf War (1991) footages got blended with a fictitious 8-bit game. The Persian Gulf War was the first war broadcast live on television. To be able to show a real war on television without any audience age restriction, the biggest US TV channels had transformed something intrinsically bloody and violent into a videogame lookalike transmission. Even the TV-journalists seemed very enthusiastic about the effectiveness of the sophisticated “smart missiles” (laser-guided missiles) and the nightvision cameras, deliberately supporting the war, without the minimum signal of neutrality. Suffocated for the censorship in their own country and blinded for a technology fetishism, the great majority of the reporters who covered the war had constantly used “we” when they meant “U.S. Army” and made it seem that the main target at this war was a single person, Saddam Hussein (as if wars are fought against single individuals).

In 1993 a war videogame called “Cannon Fodder” was released with the slogan “War has never been so much fun”. The game was criticized in many countries for being violent and for glorifying the wars, being banned for sale to minors in Germany. Recently, the U.S. government (with the U.S tax dollars) has developed an online game called “America’s Army”, intended to increase the army’s reputation and to work as a recruitment tool. The game is distributed for free through the official website and is one of the most popular online games of the world. War propaganda with entertainment has been the main focus of some videogame companies as well as of the biggest television channels. This video collage is all about that: the transformation of war in entertainment.

WHNBSMF was exhibited at the following festivals:

•  Athens Digital Art Festival
04/2007 
Athens, Greece 

•  Slowtime - Quicktime as an Artistic Medium
11/2007 
Cologne, Germany