Digital animation. 3 works (of an original 4). 2003.
When the invasion of Iraq began in 2003, I wanted to stop the war. Of course, I could not. I had done nothing to cause it, and I had no power to stop what had already begun. Even so, I did not want to distance myself from what was happening. I wanted to see it, to understand it, and to oppose it.
I Did Nothing was born out of this contradiction.
The war itself was horrifying. The killing and maiming of people, the destruction of homes and cities, and the suffering inflicted on those living through it were the starting point of the work. But after a while, I began to sense something else. Violence was not confined to Iraq. Through the images of what was being done there, it was spreading outward, reaching the rest of the world.
I do not want to confuse these two things. What a person experiences while standing in front of a screen cannot be compared with what someone living through a war experiences. One is the direct physical destruction of a body and a life; the other is an encounter with its image. Nothing can be compared with the first.
What began to occupy me was the way violence itself seemed to extend into its own representation.
Killing someone, injuring them, or destroying their home is one thing. Showing that violence to the rest of the world is another. Particularly when the perpetrator is not merely unafraid of exposing what has been done, but turns its exposure into part of the demonstration of power.
Sometimes the perpetrator does not merely want to inflict harm. They also want that harm to be seen. They want their power to be witnessed through another person's suffering. At that point, the image ceases to be merely a record of violence. It becomes an extension of the violence itself.
For I Did Nothing, I created four digital animations. I used my own body not to explain this idea from the outside, but to place it inside a body. The body continues to see, hear, record, and speak while gradually losing control over these very functions. There is no escape, no possibility of remaining a detached observer, and no way to simply shut down perception.
The condition of this body also reflected my own state of mind in 2003. Something terrible was happening in the world. I wanted to intervene, but I could not. And still I continued to see and hear.
This compulsion was one of the darkest aspects of the images of war for me. There is an important distinction between witnessing and exposure. Witnessing can make another person's suffering visible. Exposure, however, can turn that suffering into an object through which the perpetrator's power is displayed.
My objection was never to witnessing. On the contrary, witnessing is necessary. My objection was to violence taking hold of witnessing itself and turning it into part of its own spectacle.
At the time, the internet had not yet become the continuous stream of images that it is today. I used that medium to create a website that brought the four animations together. It was not simply an online exhibition. Its delays, pauses, and insistence on keeping the viewer within the screen made the technological conditions of the early internet part of the experience itself. Over time, the site attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors each month.
Looking back at the work today, what still concerns me extends far beyond the Iraq War itself. I am still interested in where the boundaries of violence end. At the boundary of the body? Within the image? In the reproduction and circulation of the image? Or at the moment when we are made into spectators of violence inflicted by someone else?
I Did Nothing does not answer these questions. Nor was finding an answer what I was trying to do at the time.
I was trying to find a way to say something in a world where the violence of the powerful was being forced upon us not only as reality, but also as something we were made to watch.