Network Performance Daily: How are you doing?

WB: I'm fine, thank you. It's up and down, just sometimes it feels good when it's quiet, and then sometimes when I get bombarded, it feels really terrible here.

Could you explain a little bit about the project?

WB: The idea here is to move (*bang*) my living room into the gallery space and to set up a system where you have a paintball gun pointed at me 24 hours, seven days a week, for an entire month. The entire mechanism (*bang*) is hooked up by the Internet, where people can log in from anywhere and shoot.

This is the 13th day, and so far, 6,500 shots were taken at me.

Could you tell me about yourself?

WB: I was born and raised in Iraq, and I worked against Saddam Hussein's regime in a passive resistance movement through artwork. I was arrested by his regime a few times. In 1990, I refused to go to war in his army to invade Kuwait. As a consequence, I was blacklisted and I had to flee Iraq, so in 1991, after the uprising, I had a chance to escape and ended up in (*bang*) Saudi Arabia for two years (*bang*) until I had the chance to come to the United States and study for my BFA as the University of Delphi, New Mexico, I got my MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago, and now I teach there. (*bang*)

What inspired this particular project?

WB: I think it's a combination of things. (*bang*) One, it is understanding the culture and how people interact with each other in this digital age. But, the trigger of this project was that I was watching (*bang*) the news - in fact, ABC news, when they had an interview with an American soldier sitting in a base in Colorado, and she was firing missiles into Iraq (*bang*) after being given information by American soldiers on the ground (*bang*) in Iraq, and when asked if she had any regard of human life, she said "No, these people are bad, and I'm getting very good intelligence from people on the ground."

Also, I just wanted to bring this closer to myself. I left Iraq in 1991, and I wasn't able to see my family, and we had some losses in 2005. I lost my brother and he was killed by American soldiers in Najaf, and I lost my father two months after that. Now my family is confined to their own homes, and they cannot even leave, and I ask them sometimes "What do you do?"

They said: "We are at home, and the only time we leave is when one of us risks his or her life going to the market to get food and come back."

I wanted to put myself in the same physical way they are so that I could feel closer to them and to support them.

Can you tell me more about the technical aspects of the project?

WB: The technology is extremely simple and available to anyone. I worked with a very good crew though - Ben Chang, Dan Miller, and Dimitris Michalaros, my colleagues at the Art Institute of Chicago.

There are a couple of components to it. The hardware is a small-motor connected to a card. That's the pan mechanism behind the movement of the gun and the camera. The trigger on the camera is connected to a solenoid. Everything is driven by software and connected on a web page (*bang*) and so when you go to the Web page, you (*bang*) press left or right, the gun will move five degrees each time, and when you shoot the gun, the signal goes from your browser to the card, then to the solenoid, which pulls the trigger, and simply fires.

How many times have you been hit?

I lost count how many times I've been hit, but, as I said, today the count is up to 6,500 shots. I think day 13 - today - I entered kind of a survival mode, trying to protect myself by barricading myself and navigating through the room so that I'm not in the direct line of fire. But that does not mean I don't forget that I am facing the gun 24 hours a day, and it happens so many times I forget for a second, and get hit.

Yesterday I got two of them really close to my head, and I do not wear any head protection except goggles, just because I wanted to feel that danger from the gun that's pointed at me.

These paintballs hurt and I think it's obvious that paintballs hurt. There were 6,500 pulls of the trigger - I don't think that's all one guy doing it, so what have you learned about the human condition?

(*bang, bang*) I mean, I'm trying to (*bang*) see where these shooters are coming from, and what's behind it, and there's really not one thing that you can say about them. The project attracted so many different people with different points of view. It varies from guys in their office having fun, to someone bored somewhere and shooting all day and all night, to some other people trying to engage in a political dialogue.

That's at least part of the intention of this project - to attract people who may never want to engage in a political dialogue about the war, or violence, or civilians, or lack of privacy, and it's working in that sense.

I always said that I wanted to play with the idea of aesthetic pleasure versus aesthetic pain, to the point that it becomes an encounter, instead of a didactic art. When you encounter it, you are drawn to it because of aesthetics on the surface and the appealing quality, but then, that encounter leads you to something else entirely.

Do you think the pseudo-anonymity of the internet and the distance has a lot to do with how this project is turning out?

No doubt about it. I mean, (*bang*) it is an internet base, and it is using the latest way of communication, but by design (*bang*), I wanted to remove the viewer from any physical impact. You log on the set, and you don't even have sound (*bang,bang*) I mean, you're hearing it right now, because we're on the phone, but when you're on the site, you never hear it. That's speaks of the virtual war that's being conducted against Iraq and other nations as well.

Is there anything else you'd like to add?

At this point, I look forward to when this gun is silent and when all the guns are silent.

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