The Harvest of Death 2.0 - Karl Burke
Whether it is computer hardware development’s heavy bias toward physics-rendering in order to aid in weapon research of all kinds, or the seemingly playful software built to popularize such platforms (such as “Spacewar!”), war and computers are deeply intertwined. Today, this trend continues, where many popular videogames are in the first-person shooter (FPS) genre, featuring big-budget companies racing toward ever more physics-realistic depictions of combat violence. The U.S. military has even funded games to aid in recruitment and training and used game interfaces in its remote weapons. But in the face of these heroic, abstracted narratives of brotherly war, photography has a long history of showing wars cruel, brutal, and messy reality. Karl Burke’s unsettling tintype series “The Harvest of Death 2.0” is not incidentally named after one of the first graphically explicit photographic images of war made by Timothy O’Sullivan. This series, documenting the simulated-lifeless avatars of dead soldiers in FPS games draws these two lineages together through its very material—the one-of-a-kind, human-handmade, shimmering tintype in the lineage of the early photographic processes that were common during the Civil War that O’Sullivan showed so mournfully. Exploring our increasing digital relationship to military violence, and the awkward role of photography to show us modern war, filled (or rather absent-ed) with hacking, drones, and guided missiles, Burke’s quiet images ask us to think deeply about the a-human stories that populate our fantasies.
Artist: Karl Burke
Link: http://www.karlburke.com/the-harvest-of-death-v20
Connections:
Timothy H. O’Sullivan - “A Harvest Of Death”
Susan Sontag - Regarding the Pain Of Others
Anohni - “Drone Bomb Me”