War is a concept that most people don’t understand. It’s abstracted into raw numbers; the number of dead, the number of soldiers deployed, or the number of dollars we spend. There has always been a glory to war that has been exaggerated through books and video games, TV shows and movies.
To many, war is a game. It’s nothing more than maps on a screen with colourful arrows. The game of war has penetrated out society to the deepest levels, there are toy guns for children and once they grow up hyperrealistic video games that have more blood and gore than the real thing. But in these games no one pays the price, the dead live on and there is always the knowledge that the foam darts can’t hurt you.
I wanted to explore the idea of the ‘playfulness of war’ and how we’ve turned it into a game. The viewer isn’t supposed to mistake these images for the real thing, in fact they are meant to be playful images full of fantasy. The images are of an absurd set of characters in less absurd situations.
