Abstract
The following article unpacks the portrayal of digital or screen-based trauma and the gamification of war within contemporary video art. A riff on Harun Farocki's eponymous multi-channel video installation Serious Games (2010), the article questions if the screen has the power to transmit violence and thus affect trauma, or if this focus heightens what Judith Butler termed precarious life. Conversely, for those who experience PTSD, as noted by Freud, the gamification or dreaming following traumatic events brings one to an entirely different game. This repetition, re-play, as I note, is for premonition, mastery or sight, while war in the age of simulation is characterised by a lack of human optics. As information bombs and pop monuments to atrocity flood the public imagination, what other experiences are also covered over? What lies behind the schism between the virtual and the lived?
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