Personal Cinema is a collaborative initiative of a group of artists that formed
out of necessity to address some particular problems associated with the production,
exhibition and distribution of works of new media.
The term New Media is applied to a diverse range of technologies applied
to an equally diverse range of practices in the arts,
these activities include the development of such forms as video games,
interactive cinema, special effects for movies, digital animation and the internet (www).
More generally we can speak of the role of new media with respect to visualization
in science and medicine military applications in the form of control interfaces for unmanned vehicles
or aircraft simulators, digital typography and desktop publishing in the print industry, and so on.
The idea of The Making of Balkan Wars: The Game project came from one of those
discussions within the Personal Cinema group about the reality (or virtual reality)
presented through official narratives and industrial entertainment, about war games and
epic strategy video games, about the primacy of an American Californian industry in the
production and complete control of this specific market, which engages millions of people, worldwide.
In a desperate search for the creation of local heroes and imagined zones of conflict,
the creators of these visually realistic virtual games, very often present a simplified interpretation
of human history and culture. As a consequence this form of virtual reality does not adequately
describe the experiences of the people who are caught within the actual war games,
and by entering homes all over the world threatens the character of national identity
and any kind of democratic principles and rights to free opinion. In the live real-time/real-war videos
of CNN and in video games, this simplification of culture and history is itself a form of violence.