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The consequences of war

This week, the exhibition The Shadow of War ends at the Artists' House and thus also the artist Thomas Kvam's digital monitoring of the image that forms the basis of his work in the exhibition. We talked to him.




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

By Nina Toft

In the panel debate during the seminar, Thomas introduced Kvam to talk about the notion that today is propagated about a humanitarian war. We want a content-rich life without risk, as at the same time philosopher and cultural critic Slavoij Zizek says we drink coffee without caffeine and beer without alcohol. In today's narrative of the wars, in which Norway also participates, there reigns a kind of notion of a war free from the consequences of war. A notion that with the help of precision weapons and advanced technology, properly trained troops and international conventions we can wage war without the bestialities of war, evil and de-humanization.

Kvam's works The five selected Consisting of five huge enlarged sections of soldiers' faces, each portrait has a computer mounted that has buzzed and gone with face recognition software that has searched through the internet's unfathomable image streams with the intention of identifying these individuals. The excerpts are from a photograph Kvam has downloaded from the website nowthatsfuckedup.com. A site that is just as fuckedup as possible. An American porn distributor started a website in 2004 that offered online pornography in exchange for images of soldiers' daily lives in war. The premise of barter was at best ethically irresponsible, but the imagery quickly degenerated into a kind of competition in bestiality, with the soldiers surpassing each other in showing the atrocities of the war in pictures and comment threads.
«A key point with this project is to question the current surveillance regime, ”says Kvam.“ The technologies used by those in power to monitor the citizen can also be turned into becoming the citizen's tool. The project thus has two axes, one is the hunt for five war criminals, the other is to provide a practical example of a reversal of the surveillance society. I do not think the battle for the Internet's original humanistic ideals is either lost or in any way over.
The trophy picture shows us five American soldiers who can be portrayed in front of a charred corpse. The soldiers behave like a group of boys on a trip. Smiling, waving, posing, thumbs up. All of us who have not been at war experience this as a morally reprehensible act.
«The photograph of the five soldiers arouses an almost instinctive discomfort, "Kvam admits. «They seem to pose as if they have been on a fishing trip and the catch – are the remains of the enemy. Although such trophy images have existed, so to speak, from the childhood of photography to our time also in war – there is something about the Jack Ass generation's stagings and media flair, which signals a different lease. The barter between pornographic images and the soldiers' indescribably cruel photographs from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – tells us about a fundamental disrespect for man – but also, as I thought, a portrait of our time.»

In the book Get the war from 1924, the peace activist Ernst Friedrich published a collection of photographs from frontline soldiers in Europe's trenches during World War I, thus giving us such a contrast to the public narrative of the war told by the state and the officers – a commoner's point of view. The book was immediately censored. In the encounter with this book, Kvam found his approach to using the censored material he had been using since 2006.

In today's media landscape, citizen journalism has become an integral part of the news picture and the warriors themselves are also photographers and disseminate their experiences via publishing in social media and news channels. There are today a number of parallel alternative narratives to the publicly constructed narrative of today's wars, the challenge is to identify it in it in the unstoppable stream of images. Kvam's project represents one of these. Digesting such images is a very hard diet and a natural question that arises in the encounter with them is: where does the evil come from? Is the de-humanization of the enemy a necessary survival technique to go through a war? For someone who has never been near war, this is impossible to imagine.
 In the book To battracted the suffering of others from 2004, Susan Sontag talks about how we accept cruel images of "the other's" suffering, while e.g. the US television broadcast of images from the Sept. 11 attack was heavily censored in its lack of graphic representation of the dead victimsCan the warrior's perspectives move us away from this distant view of the suffering of others that she describes, in the direction of another form of identification with the actors in war and thus increase our awareness of the consequences and realities of war?

Toft is a visual artist and co-editor of Debris fanzine.com

The chosen five

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