Air Power Over Hampton Roads air show, Hampton Roads, Virginia #2 by Christopher Sims
Christopher Sims has documented people, mostly young men, engaged with the Virtual Army Experience, a traveling entertainment/recruiting station found at NASCAR events and air shows. According to its website, the Virtual Army Experience provides "participants with a virtual test drive of the United States Army." Its interface is that of a combat video game.
The Virtual Army experience homepage
The body of work Sims has created from these portraits is titled Hearts and Minds, and of it he says,
These portraits remind us of the computer and television screens through which most of us have lived the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the filters of distance and media that create for us our own virtual homeland experience. The army reveals itself to be a keen reader of American adolescent emotions and passions, and employs this understanding through a brilliantly designed and bloodless simulation of the thrill of the fight.
Regardless of your political beliefs, it's impossible to dismiss the degree that video game technology suits contemporary military recruitment needs. The quality of combat simulation must absorb the player to such a degree that the psychological job involved in actual training is already in motion. This phenomenon has also been documented by photographer and video artist Robbie Cooper, in his series Immersion. Using equipment not unlike, as he acknowledges, Errol Morris's one-way mirror/camera known as the Interrotron, Robbie presents the unnerving concentration people reveal when wrapped up in violent video games, and other screen-based fantasia (including porn). See a video sampler of Immersion at the New York Times.
This combination of estrangement from the physical world and intense engagement with the virtual makes the job of message producers—be it the military, advertisers, or pornographers —that much easier. Christopher's portfolio of Hearts and Minds, as well as his significant work from Guantanamo Bay and mock Iraqi and Afghan villages for military training, are available at Ann Stewart Fine Art.