Modern War Trilogy (2010)

	Modern War Trilogy installed at House of Foundation, Norway Black Hawk Down
	Three action films about war and conflict in the Middle East in the pre-9/11 era of the West’s ‘holiday from history’ are remade based only on the subtitles for the hard of hearing that accompany them. This secondary text, a list of generic audio actions which flattens out the specific tonalities of those sounds as they occurred in the film, was used as a list of input search terms in Youtube to find corresponding videos, in a second act of translation, this time audiovisual content. The resulting films are a montage of sound-videos, providing a tour through the contemporary media landscape via home made footage, news broadcasts, music videos, adverts, TV shows and films, taking the viewer on a tour of the military industrial complex and representations of the Muslim world, alongside familiar Youtube tropes like whistling birds, funny cats and cute babies. The films used (listed in both historical order and date of production) are Three Kings; an action movie set in the first Gulf War; Black Hawk Down, about the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, and The Kingdom, a more recent film about the 1996 bombing of the Khobar complex in Riyadh.  All the films are set in Muslim countries, allowing a snapshot of the representation of Islam as it appears in Western culture. All of them fit into the action movie genre, or more specifically the ‘modern war’ genre that repackages war for its aesthetic and spectacular qualities, which were of course acknowledged by terrorists as integral to the methods used and targets chosen in the September 11th attacks. Click here to view The Kingdom Installation at Møllebyen Literature Festival