In my essay, "A War Zone I Can't Escape," which ran in the magazine a couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how the urban, decimated streetscape of the Middle East city in the combat video game that my stepson was playing had looked disquietingly similar to my native city Beirut, which during my childhood was enmeshed in a civil war between Lebanon's innumerable, and irreconcilable, militias (outside forces, like Syria and Israel, also played considerable roles).
I was surprised to discover, then, the work of Mark Tribe, a New York-based artist who uses digital landscapes created for first-person shooter video games and films of militia training sites as the basis for his project "Rare Earth." (Tribe is also married to Emily Eakin, who wrote an article on Napoleon Chagnon that appeared in last weekend's issue of the magazine.)
Anchored by a series of screenshots of tranquil-looking scenes used as backgrounds for warfare in video games, Tribe's "Rare Earth," which was shown last summer at Momenta Art in Brooklyn, highlights the increasingly murky line between the fictionalized terrain of virtual combat and the real-life environment of militia drill exercises. In collaboration with the artist Chelsea Knight, Tribe had been working on another project, "Posse Comitatus," for which he and Knight had turned militia movements into a dance performance that they filmed. For "Rare Earth," he made five videos, each composed of a single static shot of an upstate militia campground whose topography is chillingly indistinguishable from that of the game-derived stills.
The mesmerizing rural vistas in "Rare Earth" that Tribe has rendered into high-resolution pigment prints call to mind the exquisite landscapes by the Hudson River School, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Jan van Goyen, J.M.W. Turner and Caspar David Friedrich.
But while landscapes can be seductive, and even comforting, it is easy to overlook the fact that they are not neutral territory. "They're always some kind of projection of our desires: economic interests, imperialist designs, or military fantasies," says Tribe, who is the founder of Rhizome, a new-media arts organization, and assistant professor of modern culture and media studies at Brown University. The images he extracted from combat video games, he says, "are yet another example, a new genre of landscape representation that is freighted and fraught with complex agendas having to do with violence and power, preparedness, self-defense, camaraderie and manhood."
Tribe's project on the virtual renditions of nature — the most sedate aspect of combat video games — is thought-provoking and revelatory. "It is interesting that most game publishers invest tremendous resources in producing beautiful, vivid, lush landscapes as backdrops for violent conflict," he said. "They seem to see nature as the ultimate stage on which to perform acts of aggression."
Tribe and Knight's ongoing "Posse Comitatus" will be exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris from June 20 to Sept. 8.
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