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Themesicon: navigation pathCyborg Bodiesicon: navigation pathCollective Bodies
 
Velvet Strike (Schleiner, Annemarie), 2002Last Year by Color and Composition (Bollinger, Rebecca), 2001
 
 
 

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Civil War that dominated my childhood, albeit in forts made of tall grass in vacant lots and wastelands.

Anne-Marie Schleiner has adopted almost diametrically opposed strategies in her critical relation to gaming than the ones described above. She has written on several essays on gaming subjects as well as developing and curating patches that modify existing games to feminist desires. In response to the Bush administration’s «War on Terrorism», Schleiner developed «Velvet Strike», «a collection of spray paints to use as graffiti on the walls, ceiling, and floor inside the popular network shooter terrorism game «Counter-Strike». Furthermore, rather than develop ironically hyperbolic new games or expand the external or enunciative realm of the game into case mods and performance, Schleiner tends to work through feminist intrusions and modifications within the frame of the game. She reports that she and a collaborator in «Velvet Strike» in Barcelona are working on an update that includes «games inside games». with little girl games like hopscotch and jump rope that are going to play inside «Counter-Strike» online servers. In another «game inside a game», the gamer matches portraits of

 

military men in a kind of «map».that is like a bureau des etudes—but not as detailed—describing relations between military games, military institutions and movies. Critical gaming strategies such as Schleiner’s and Stern’s are a relatively new field for art that seeks to influence very large collective cultural forms.

Sublime Information: Rebecca Bollinger, Jordan Crandall

Rebecca Bollinger’s video installations demonstrate how information landscapes can reveal otherwise imperceptible ordering processes: for example, «Last Year by Color and Composition» (2000, 2002) flattens every subject and object with the same weight and value. [26] On the other hand, it produces an imaginary point of view onto vast data landscapes. This five minute DVD movie loop is displayed on a 42” plasma screen. It is «a movie of every image stored on [Bollinger’s] computer within one years time including eBay photos, artwork documentation, personal photos, stock images and search result pictures.» The sorting program that arranges by color and composition rearranges categorical and chronological material into

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