äWhen you point finger at the enemy, three fingers are pointing back to you" Sam Keene, Faces of the Enemy

AMERICA'S FINEST

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In 1830, both the camera and the Colt were invented. Slightly more than half a century later, in 1888, Etienne Jules Maray perfected a gun that substituted film for bullets. There has long been a historical relationship between the camera and the gun, not only because both use essential ideas of capture, surveillance and shooting, but because of the overlapping relationship of media images to assasinations. As an example, many serial killers photograph their victims, as if to capture and posess them. The associative notions of gun/camera/trigger link all media representation to lethal weapons. America's finest is a camera-gun designed to document the horrors of our century that have been perpetrated by weapons and then translated into memory through the media. A frame buffer captures the viewer/participant's image as he lifts the gun off the swivel pivot. The viewer/participant can aim the gun at anything in the space. He is able to see and record anything he looks at through the site/monitor. The interaction is instigated through the trigger itself, which, when squezzed, activates the image the viewer/participant just looked at places the viewer/participant within the gunsight (his/her entire body, holding the gun, appears captured in miniature). The entire body of the viewer appears in the scene that was just shot. It fades into scenes of horrors randomly interjected and overlaid onto the viewer's image that exits inside the specially made gunsight mounted on top of the barrel. Through this complete immersion, there is a loss of control, and the viewer's image transforms into a floating non-body. The viewer/participant becomes a witness to his/her own image fading and reviving (like a last breath that gives way and then unexpectedly resuscitated), linking the idea of surveillance, capture, death and rebirth. After a few seconds, ghosts of the 40 cycling images dissolve into the present and then fade back into a lurking history. The weapon becomes an assault and, in effect, a conscientious objectifier to what it is seeing, tracking and recording. By pulling the trigger, the viewer/participant becomes the agressor and subsequently the victim of his/her own actions

THE GUN ITSELF BECOMES A SITE-SPECIFIC WEAPON.

Thus far there have been three different guns made:
.An M16, which was the weapon used in Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf War, and the weapon that was aimed at äAmerica's Finest", a term for foot soldiers.
.A replica of a AK47, the gun that was aimed at American soldiers as they used their M16s.
.A Colt, which was originally made in 1830, but later remade to look like an M16 rifle.
The images are held by a frame buffer. The gun is attached to a swiveling mount station at the center of a room. In the gun barrel are an LCD monitor and video equipment aimed in the same direction as the barrel and connected to a hidden computer with video grabbing and mixing capabilities. This piece uses a Targa Plus graphics adapter, custom software programmed by Paul Tompkins in C for the Targa Board; three-inch active matrix color LCD monitor, monochrome video camera and an ELO MN401E micro camera.