SOCIAL GLITCH

Serious Games 1, Watson is Down, Foto © Harun Farocki 2010

HARUN FAROCKI (DE)

Serious Games I: Watson is Down. 2010.

video (double projection, color, sound). 8 min Director: Harun Farocki. Cinematographer: Ingo Kratisch. Sound: Matthias Rajmann. Editing: Harun Farocki. Online-editing: Max Reimann, Jan Ralske. Script: Harun Farocki, Matthias Rajmann. Production: Harun Farocki Filmproduktion, Berlin. Supported by medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg GmbH, Bienal de Sao Paulo and KUB, Kunsthaus Bregenz

Harun Farocki (1944-2014) on Serious Games 1: Watson is Down:

"In the autumn of 2009 we filmed a drill at the Marine Corps Base 29 Palms in California. Four marines sitting in a class represented the crew of a tank. They had laptops in front of them on which they steered their own vehicle and watched others in the unit being driven through a computer animation Landscape. The simulated Afghanistan is based on geographical data from the country. A street in the computer landscape runs exactly as it would in the real Afghanistan; the same holds for every tree, the vegetation on the ground or the mountain ranges. The instructor places explosive devices and sets insurgents out in the area. A sniper shot the tank gunner, which we documented with the camera. When the tank drives over the fallow it kicks up a dust tail. The more vegetation there is, the less dust. On the asphalt street, no dust. Even with all this attention to detail, death in the computer game is still something different than the real one."