Bob Paris
Our Clean Battlefield comments on the sanitized way that American television news reports on the nation’s wars. TV’s preference to avoid actual human casualties and chart the progress of the war by satellite fly-overs, special effects, and animations gives the conflict an insidious unreality that distances viewers from the true human cost of war. Its portrayal of unbloodied militarism becomes a propagandistic device to calm moral objection and critical scrutiny.
Bob Paris’s videos have screened at the Whitney Biennial, the Image Forum Festival in Tokyo, the Rencontres Internationales in Paris and Berlin, and other venues. His work frequently investigates mass media, social duplicity, and our culture of violence. He is currently the director of The Cluster Project, a multimedia web exhibition surveying the universe of cluster bombs, civilian casualties, and Western denial (project launches in November 2011). Paris is an associate professor in Kinetic Imaging at Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of the Arts, where he teaches video production and socially engaged media.