Station 4: Gulliver

Tiefort City, Fort Irwin, California: Those willing to risk their lives can venture into a miniature version of a fake village in the Mojave Desert as used by the US Army as a training ground for urban warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq. This pragmatic cinema-of-the-mind offers a taste of the defining element of significant parts of our daily lives and media landscape – technological progress through warfare or “misuse of military devices” as the media theorist Friedrich Kittler once wrote. These models destined for destruction are echoed in today's ubiquitous digital combat and war games. Programme platforms such as Virtual Battlespa are being constantly refined and deployed throughout the world for military training purposes. In these visual regimes and image wars, original and copy, digitality and reality, simulation and system are very hard to tell apart.