Non-Person Shooter

online / November 25, 8:00 PM

Digital shooters usually offer players two possible perspectives of gameplay: first-person shooter, with the gun in the foreground, or third-person shooter, where the player sees the entire character on screen and controls them from a distance. Some games allow you to switch between these two perspectives depending on your preference. By choosing a particular point of view, you can control the level of immersion and determine your own relationship to the world presented – whether you prefer to pull the trigger yourself, or force someone else to do it by pressing R2. Whether we become the protagonist of the narrative or control the narrative of the character we observe.

Non-person Shooter collects video works in which the narrative is conducted from the perspective of a non-human subject, or in which causality – even if placed in human hands – is determined by non-personal systems. Thus, the artists give the floor to non-human narrators appearing in the works: artificial intelligence, amazon virtual assistants, a digitally emulated brain, or an Australian magpie. Shooter appears here in a double sense, because it defines both the shooter as some destructive force, and the trigger operator, e.g. of a camera or a camcorder, or the subject who selects particular frames to shoot, thus creating a message based on a very subjective reality.

Dagmara Domagała