New York University photography professor Wafaa Bilal, previously known for his work on a videogame mod called The Night of Bush Capturing: A Virtual Jihadi that cast players as a suicide bomber, is making waves once again. This time, he's gone and implanted a camera into the back of his skull for a new photography experiment that sounds really painful.

A magnetic camera mount was surgically attached to the back of Bilal's head by a body modification artist. The artist gave Bilal a "transdermal implant" which includes three titanium plates and posts, which the base for a 10-megapixel camera was screwed into. He says it "hurt a lot."

The Escapist : News : Man Attaches Cyborg Camera Implant to His Skull

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Isn't there anything in the koran that prohibits sugically implanting cameras in your head?

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What makes you think he's Muslim?

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Maybe he's not. I guess sometimes I confuse people who hate America, make video games about assassinating the president (by a suicide bombing no less), who are of middle eastern decent; with radical Muslims.

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Ah, then I think he may have been talking about you when he wrote this about Night of Bush Capturing: Virtual Jihadi:

"This artwork is meant to bring attention to the vulnerability of Iraqi civilians, to the travesties of the current war, and to expose racist generalizations and profiling."

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So if I make a video game about assassinating say the president of Iran, that would be considered a piece of "art" to expose the racist generalizations and profiling of Americans and Jews vulnerable to attack in the Middle East? I would probably be murdered by terrorists/Muslims if I made such a game wouldn't I? Even cartoonists get killed over criticizing the peaceful religion of Islam.

You obsess about protecting your family from people who may accidentally run a red light, but profiling a population much more likely to commit terrorist acts against your family is "racist" and just plain not very nice. You can take extra caution at a red light to make sure someone didn't run it. How do you know that glass of water you just poured doesn't contain arsenic?

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Bilal didn't make the game; he modified a hacked version of Quest for Saddam. But yes, if you took a piece of the culture and inverted it to expose its brutality, racism, etc., then I'd consider that art.

Huh?

ETA:

Did you ever read Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal? They made us read it in high school. Swift seems to advocate eating Irish babies to solve both the food shortage and population problem in Ireland, but really, he's taking a farcically extreme position for the purpose of social commentary. Any reasonable person can figure that out from the context. I'm sure that if you try, you can see that Bilal didn't make art that advocates suicide bombing or presidential assassination.

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