Snowden has told us something new about NSA/GCHQ; they have an instrument, styled
Dreamy Smurf, for taking over your phone and instructing it to take pictures-presumably of you. From Snowden we also now know more about NSA's in-house graphic design styles usually derived from magic and fantasy (smurfs?). More interestingly another Snowden slide contains an image of an online game called
Shadowfist in which a monkey fights a robot. We already know that the CIA recruit from young Xbox wizards for their drone bombing controllers. There is an art form (Machinima) which uses video game technology to make films. Feng Bo is a Chinese '8 bit' artist, famous for
The Long March, a pixellated account of Mao's struggles.Ahmed El Shaer, more adventurously, in his work
Nekh, tackles the Tahrir square camel battle in Cairo in the now-forgotten Arab spring: in the game aspect of
Nekh nobody wins- hopefully the Mukhabarat don't have an 8 bit section.
There is a new genre emerging: SIGDEV is the overall term for the world of surveillance. What about SIGART? Candidates are
Dreamy Smurf and Shadowfist. But El Shaer's Venice Biennale video installation
Green is more complex: the colour geeen is manipulative; mosques are often green; in
Green there is a 'green' terrorist organisation. SIGART embraces the art of the Watcher (
Shadow Fist) and the Watched as they watch each other.
