Me gustas pixelad_ 2020
Third edition of Me gustas pixelad_ [I Like You Pixelated], the festival where the performing arts meet the world of computer screens, the internet, and video games. The focus of this year’s festival is violence perpetrated through technology, disembodied violence.
While a swarm of LED micro-drones executes a choreography in the Epiphany parade in Madrid, the Spanish Army’s first next-generation military drones land in Badajoz. While our governments try to detach us from conflict zones—delegating the dirty work of warfare to robotic weapons—Me gustas pixelad_ attempts to deconstruct the process whereby technology devised for military use becomes an object of mass entertainment. And at the centre of it all is the festival’s main attraction, The Automated Sniper by Julian Hetzel.
During the two-day festival, this piece will be presented in two different formats—as an interactive long-play installation on Friday, and as a performance on Saturday—inviting spectators to play the part of a military officer in charge of a remote-controlled combat drone. We will each be given a weapon and the choice of how to use it. Although it may seem like just another form of entertainment, there’s much more at stake in this game. The artist gives physical form to a global question: “Why are we dehumanising warfare?”
In addition, Elena Castro, Laura Tabarés and Clara Harguindey are offering two workshops. In Strolling You Down, they will demonstrate and teach us personal defence techniques for digital environments. These artists/digital analysts ask why our online alter egos bring out the worst in us, and how a tool like the internet, supposedly invented to help us connect with others, has become a verbal battlefield. The other workshop, Feeling Raid, will lay down some guidelines about how to move through the video game and all play together to create a new affective map in the game.
These two parallel projects also question the economic interests behind citizen security: the government invests 158 million euros in four Predator drones, as they have been dubbed, and meanwhile certain agents are trying to repeal policies against gender violence, homophobia and racism—policies designed to stop flesh-and-blood predators.
Curated by Matías Daporta
