Nicholas Hubbard

When his Internet Hunting website was outlawed in 2005, entrepreneur John Lockwood asked, "What's the different between pulling a trigger and clicking a mouse?" In an era of drones and digital violence, Live Shot: after John Lockwood, an interactive video installation, revives and responds to his question.

Description

Live Shot: after John Lockwood is an interactive video installation created for Readymades in Spring 2015. One of the central aspects of a readymade as we have defined it in class is taking an object (whether physical or digital) and placing it in a new context to endow it with new meaning and affect. The piece is inspired by the odd case of Live Shot, a website founded in 2005 by John Lockwood to allow hunters to login remotely, control a motorized rifle via attached cameras, and kill live animals fenced-in on Lockwood’s property and baited into the line of camera vision when a hunter was online. Immediately after the site launched there was a massive backlash from a coalition of Animals Rights activists, the NRA, and hunting organizations, outraged by the allegedly inhuman nature of this form of hunting. 48 states passed legislation to ban remote/internet hunting. Lockwood responded by questioning whether it is different to sit camouflaged in a blind waiting with a mounted gun, then pull a trigger, than to sit in your home controlling a mounted gun, then click a mouse.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/07/AR2005050701270.html

In this project I have combined found footage of hunting trips with plastic models of the animals that were killed, built into a custom diorama. A live video feed of the diorama is displayed on a remote screen using a webcam and Isadora software. Using a mouse, users can aim the camera (and attached miniature rifle) and “fire” with a mouse click. “Firing” triggers footage of the animals being shot as well as intimate moments where the hunters pose with and comment on their kills.

Classes

Readymades