Post Newtonianism (War Footage/Call of Duty 4 Modern warfare footage) This piece is a two channel video with sound. The video on the left consists of a loop of actual war footage taken from cameras mounted on American military aircraft, from both airplanes and helicopters. Taken during the first Gulf War in 1991, and the current occupation of Iraq the footage shows the bombing of vehicles, military targets as well as the shooting of insurgents and oppositional forces. In contrast the footage on the right is from the popular video game "Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare". The sound track is a mixture of audio taken from the video game and the footage released by Wikileaks approximately two months ago in which the US military killed two reporters working for Reuters as well as a number of unarmed civilians. Read from left to right the video acts as a timeline, showing the ways in which war has been presented to my generation. First as surreal black and white (sometimes green from night vision) grainy video, to the hyperrealist, slightly less grainy representation in the video games many Americans have grow up playing . As the first true, real time, television war the first Gulf War was experienced by many as grainy, soundless video, devoid of people, clear representations of devastation or human loss. Instead we were confronted with this amazing, surreal, real time footage that was disembodying. I remember watching it with my family and hearing my dad say it was like watching ...
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