Inflight’s first exhibition for 2010 is Other v2.0 by Sydney-based artist Baden Pailthorpe. In exploring representations of the “Other” in violent, on-line video games, Pailthorpe’s work grapples with notions of photographic reality and postcolonial discourse and applies them to the world of new media. The work highlights the relationship between military and gaming technologies used in the ‘war on terror’, as they contemporaneously parallel popular online games in which enemy figures are reduced to pixels on a screen. Today the space between the referent and the game becomes increasingly opaque as real individuals are indistinguishably represented as video game characters in actual military combat, whilst US soldiers use Xbox controllers to direct drones in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Baden Pailthorpe recently completed his Masters of Art at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales. He has exhibited in Sydney, Perth and Melbourne. Baden currently lives and works in Sydney.