Interface

"Media interfaces are not simply a question of usability but, as Bjørn Erik Haugen’s simply entitled Interface shows, also an embodiment of politics and power. The work’s imagery offers a vision of war as seen through the augmented reality lens of a soldier operating a machine gun from an Apache helicopter as he communicates with military headquarters. From the solider’s perspective human life is abstracted to a series of on-screen moving targets, which have more in common with virtual polygon characters in a computer game than with their flesh and blood counterparts in reality. A touch of the red button is all that is required of him; with deadly precision the missile meets and destroys its target. The interface dematerialises the violence of war and turns the act of killing into just another click of a button." Bjørn Erik Hagen Website, retrieved July 5, 2019.