Group Performance: Unit 5: Electronic Warfare

This performing group was pretty small, it was just one person who performed on the actual day, and then later, the second person showed a video at the beginning of another class.  

The first part of the performance was a game about contamination, in which each member of the class was assigned a number - 1, 2, or 3 - with handshakes designated to numbers 1 and 2 (3s were only receivers of the handshakes).  The goal of the 1s and 2s was to convert members of the other two groups to "their" numbers, but the conversion only happened by chance - if you encountered someone with a different handshake, you had to play rock-paper-scissors with that person and whoever lost the rock-paper-scissors had to convert to the winner's number.  By the end, almost everyone was a 1.

Then there was a Q&A.  We had two special guests that day - one of Gail's friends, who was an officer in the Army, and one of that friend's friends.

Then several weeks later, the other performer showed a video of contemporary warfare, an Army video taken in infrared or nightvision of a scene in which enemy combatants were targeted by Army sharpshooters.  The video, even though it was real footage, looked like a video game because the moving targets were just dark figures and when they were shot, their blood spattered outward in blue clouds, not like real blood.  

Evan: The game was fun.  I don't know what I got out of it.  I got more out of the video.

Wafa: I always got confused about the term "green world."  No technology?  I think I'm green kind of.  I would have liked it if they emphasized that more - about green world vs. closed world - b/c that's what the unit was about.  It was good but it was just focused on warfare. 

Naomi: It was hard b/c the two performers didn't work together. 

Gail: It's always tough when, due to illness, a group performance has to take place on separate days.  It would definitely have been more coherent if they'd been able to go together, but each piece was very interesting by itself, too.  The discussions that followed each part of the performance were really fascinating, in which we talked about total war, whether we are "too" dependent on computers to fight our wars for us, or whether computerizing war and making it more technological will give us the dream of a "bloodless" war, a war that is so precisely fought that there are no more casualties or waste than is strictly necessary.