The Cultural Centre Conde Duque presents a critical stance on the conflicts in the Balkans through an interactive exhibition.

Madrid. While video game battles resemble more and more the actual battlefields, real wars are approaching fictional ones. This concept is projected by a group of artists from all over the world in the development of The creation of the Balkan Wars :The game, a project that is open to visitors in the Cultural Centre Conde Duque. It is based on an extensive interactive game with reference to strategy and war games that comment the conflict in the former Yugoslavia.

The presentation, which the art counsellor Alicia Moreno visited yesterday, is a project that belongs to Arco 2004, which this year was a tribute to Greece. The creative team of the project demonstrate a stance against the conflicts of war and against corporations that produce video games.

The visit to this unique exhibition starts from a room were three large screens project images of a video game in which the leading roles are soldiers and objects of the Balkan wars. Between the three screens there is a joystick, the same used in video games.

The visitor then enters a room with dimmed lights and music (commonly played in Cyber cafes), were computers covered with a camouflage pattern are installed. The computers are connected with the web and allow each user to choose a persona in order to continue surfing the virtual domain through videos, sounds, images and texts related to the Balkan wars. A warning must be made: the visitor can not kill the soldiers as in a common video game or free the civilians, but the aesthetics of the images he/she watches on the screen is very similar to a computer video game.

Thus, what the player can actually do is to interact with the rest of the participants that are connected that very moment, for example by throwing various symbolic objects. “ It isn’t a classic video game with action and many battles. It is a realization of a virtual walk through the perspective of war conflict that the participating artists in the project experience with the use of the aesthetics of computer games”, said Ilias Marmaras, one of the coordinators of the project.

Thus, the player is in motion and using the keyboard he/she enters in rooms that represent graveyards, bars, aeroplanes that fly over cities and other rooms were religious conflicts occur. The artists use photography, sketches and new technologies in order to recreate the various environments.

The first thing that the player must do is to choose three adjectives from a list, which he/she will use to characterise the population and the history of the Balkans. There are adjectives that satisfy every taste: spiritualism, egoism, eroticism, violence, endurance, tolerance…The words have been chosen from books about the region published from the 18 century until today. From this point the visitor surfs on his computer in different rooms were he observes the works of various artists and interacts with them. The screen shows the player an index of balkanization. “According to the behaviour of the player during the game the balkanization will increase or decrease”, Marmaras explains.

“The objective of this project is to display the concerns of artists with different cultural, religious and historical backgrounds; to promote the international debate between artists and to explore the art of the new media and the possibilities that the new technological tools offer”, says Nina Vagic from Serbia, also a coordinator of the project. “ The visitor shall be offered a manual in order to follow the exhibition, as is offered in the package of any other video game”, she adds Indeed it easy for someone to get lost while confronting the originality of the project. Moreover, two guides shall be constantly present in the room to assist the visitors if necessary.

The 50 artists that have created the game, whose work is presented in the Caja Suiza of the Cultural Centre Conde Duque are members of an artistic team called Personal Cinema, which is active since 1998 in the field of new media. The majority of the participating artists come from the area of the Balkans and Oriental Europe.

The presentation The creation of the Balkan Wars: The game incorporates a part dedicated to denounce the effects of war using publicity discourse. Various artists from Serbia united in the artistic team Hammer Creative created unique billboards that criticize war conflicts with an ironic stance. The artists have mixed commercial advertisements with photos taken during the Balkan War.

One of the billboards in the exhibition imitates the advertisements of IT corporation, Microsoft. Under photos of broken windows from the bombarded houses of Serbia, the caption reads: Windows 99. This software does not exist (there are only Windows 97 and 2000), but 1999 was the year that the NATO bombardiers bombed Serbia.

Another billboard plays with the words of the tire brand Good Year and the commercials of this American company. The project shows a photo of a car destroyed by the bombs and the caption reads: Not so Good Year.

A third billboard has an irony on the Playstation Video games. A photo reflects the real image that a pilot sees when he is targeting an objective from the sky.

Exactly underneath there is a photo of a Playstation console and the words: It’s not a game.

The artists from Serbia that had the ideas for these billboards work together since 1991 under the guidance of artist Milos Jovanovic.

Photo Caption: One of the computer generated personas of the installation of the Balkan war.

Exhibition The creation of the Balkan Wars: The game. Until March 14 in the Cultural Centre Conde Duque. Entrance is free. www.balkanwars.net.