Alienation in the information age: Wafaa Bilal's domestic tension

First person shooter games allow a restricted perspective in a coded and scripted environment in the form of subjective inhabitation of a character or avatar. [...]virtual play feeds into the actualities of war and circulation of capital and vice versa.17 As Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter note, 'virtualities are part of a wider polyphonic cultural chorus supporting militarisation, a multi-media drumbeat for war'.18 Baudrillard famously described the Western viewing experience of the first Gulf War via mainstream media as having the appearance of a war that 'did not take place'.19 Kerr Houston, too, notes that the television coverage of the 1991 Gulf War was a turning point in the American civilian experience of distant warfare. [...]the work was also a pointed critique of Western civilians' alienation from the brutal realities of war through their experiences of consuming the images of war in a context that encourages apathy and disaffection. [...]the tensions between near and far, domestic violence and remote violence in Bilal's work foreground new kinds of social relations under technology capitalism that provoked the old effects of alienation that Marx describes as estrangement from one's self, others, one's labour and even one's 'species-being'.37 Complicating the relationship of technology and warfare further still are recent clinical psychological trials that use digital Internet-based programs for the treatment of PTSD of local populations in conflict areas.38 One study notes that while the Internet thus far has rarely been used for humanitarian purposes in conflict zones, it is beginning to be used for e-mental health services or 'Interapy'.