First Person Shooter | 2015
Much like a gun can empower its operator by reinforcing their sense of efficacy and agency, image production and dissemination plays a foundational role in shaping public perception, and therefore shaping personal or collective processes of self-determination.
The three traditional ethnographic subjects depicted in First Person Shooter each bear a distinct legacy of cultural misrepresentation, whether carried out historically by anthropologists or currently by tourists. Overtime, such skewed depictions solidify into cultural stereotypes, from the starving African child to the stoic Native American to the illegal Mexican immigrant.
Through overlaying the aesthetics and logic of a first person shooter video game onto found documentary footage, this work lays bare the symbolic violence often committed towards numerous “others” as defined by the imbalance of representational authority.
Exhibits:
Docu{rithm}, Power Plant Gallery, Durham, NC, 2015
Docu{rithm}, Keohane-Kenan Gallery, Durham, NC, 2015
Docu{rithm}, La Muestra Internacional Documental de Bogotá, Bogotá, Colombia, 2015
Copyright © 2015 Aaron Kutnick. All rights reserved.