Skip to main content

O.U.T. Operation Urban Terrain

Anne Marie Schleiner

2006 00:18:00 United StatesEnglishColorStereo4:3Video

Description

O.U.T. is a work documenting the emergence of computer games which train players to fight in cities among civilians, (Military Operations in Urban Terrain). O.U.T. contains sampled footage and machinima (stories told with video games) from five military simulation games. Following is a documentation of the performance, (Operation Urban Terrain), an urban wireless intervention by Anne-Marie Schleiner and an international cast of game expert and art activist collaborators. Two women, dressed in sexy soldier garb, form the ground unit and are connected wirelessly to a team of players. O.U.T. was performed in three locations in New York City during the Republican National Convention of 2004. The final performance shows two enemy game soldiers dancing together. Only in 2006 was the entire piece completed with new MOUT machinima footage placed at the beginning of the video. 

Partially funded by the Lyn Blumenthal Memorial Fund for Independent Media.

"O.U.T. confronts the dual reality of these "games," raising important questions about their social implications and underscoring the danger of blurring boundaries between what is entertainment and what is "real."

–Creative Time website

About Anne Marie Schleiner

Anne-Marie Schleiner was born in 1970 in Providence, Rhode Island. She is engaged in gaming and net culture in a variety of roles as a writer, critic, curator, and gaming artist/designer. Her work investigates avatar gender construction, computer gaming culture, hacker art and experimental game design. She has curated online exhibits of game mods and add-ons including the exhibits Cracking the Maze: Game Patches and Plug-ins as Hacker Art, Mutation.fem, and Snow Blossom House. She has designed the games Anime Noir and Heaven711. She runs a site focused on game hacks and open source digital art forms called opensorcery.net and has been actively involved in the anti-war game performance art initiatives Velvet-Strike and OUT. She has taught at universities and artist workshops and participated in art residencies in Germany, Belgium, Spain and Mexico. She has exhibited online and at the New Museum, NY, the Whitney, Centro de la Imagen Museum, Mexico City, and international galleries, museums and festivals. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Fine Art at the University of Colorado at Boulder and also lives in Mexico City.