Fruit salad Mess With Collateral Surgical Precision
time-based media piece & sound score
manipulated stock media-propagated imagery,
1 minute, 2007

Public Screenings:
Palace of Arts, Cairo, 2008
Casa Arabe, Madrid Spain, 2010

The title of the project is a manipulation to –and inspiration by– contemporary military terms describing pseudo-intelligent warfare machines like: missiles of surgical precision that cause no collateral damage.

Fruit salad Mess With Collateral Surgical Precision is based on imagery from broadcast cable news. I am probing what I like to call aesthetics of demolition or aesthetics of war. The broadcast images of violence, aggression, death, dismemberment, physical disfiguration of humans and architecture became visually accessible and acceptable by common taste. Such imagery and its constant re-broadcasting shape behaviors of younger generations into carelessness and apathy to everything that is being broadcast.

 

I used deja-vu press images that I collected from printed magazines, daily newspapers and the Internet; all images were digitally processed and manipulated then placed on a video time line.

I created the audio from accessible –in fact democratic is a more accurate word– computer generated program loops, principally Garageband, to match the processes of accessibility and recycling of the visuals. I used a rhythmic tempo and percussions as a metaphoric audio representation of the drums of war.

 

Khaeld Hafez

2007