http://www.fridericianum-kassel.de/ausst/balkan03/kuenstler/59.html#english
The Making of Balkan Wars: The Game is a multinational project which includes the participation of a large number of artists (more than 40) working with new media to express their reaction to past and current religious, social and political conflicts that persist in the area. It will be an exhibition, a web site, a video game, a catalogue, a CD Rom ...
The goals of this project are:
-to show the sensitivities of artists belonging to different cultural, religious and historical backgrounds, mostly from the south eastern region of Europe, who through their time and within history have found the inspiration for their work and experience over the will to communicate their thoughts, in order to understand the existing differences …
-to promote a virtual, international discussion between artist/audience, artist/critic and between the artists themselves, creating an important art net in the region …
-to explore the field of new media art and new technology tools …
The idea of project came from discussions within the Personal Cinema artistic group concerning the (virtual) reality presented through official narratives and industrial entertainment, about war games and epic strategy video games, about the primacy of an American Californian industry in the production and control of this specific market, which engages millions of people, worldwide. In a frenzied search for the creation of local heroes and imagined zones of conflict, the creators of these hyper-realistic virtual games, often present a simplified interpretation of human history and culture. As a consequence this form of virtual reality does not adequately describe the experience of the people who are caught within the actual war games, and by entering homes all over the world threatens the character of national identity and any kind of democratic principles and rights to free opinion. In the live real-time/real-war videos of global news broadcasters and in video games, this simplification of culture and history is itself a form of violence.
The project uses the formal characteristics of the epic adventure video game to critique the real historical game that transpires on the plane of geopolitics and everyday life. The idea is to create a game like platform based on real time historical facts in which the chosen storyboard territory is the Balkan Peninsula.
