Strike | Net Art Anthology

anthology.rhizome.org/velvet-strike

October 27, 2016

Velvet-Strike
Anne-Marie Schleiner, Joan Leandre, Brody Condon

2002

Velvet-Strike is a mod of the first-person shooter video game

Counter-Strike. The mod, developed by Anne-Marie Schleiner,
Joan Leandre, and Brody Condon, adds “protest sprays” to the
game’s existing graffiti function. Velvet-Strike’s sprays ranged from
being playfully out of step with the game’s self-serious violence
and machismo to spreading explicitly anti-war messages.
Velvet-Strike was developed just after 9/11, coming into existence
alongside the United States’ declaration of the “War on Terror.” It
was an early intervention into the space where gaming culture
and politics converge—a space that has become more contested
as gaming has become mainstream. Velvet-Strike was at the
forefront of artistic and activist gestures that questioned the
militaristic ideologies present in popular video games. Velvet-Strike
makes an important argument for the entwinement of “the real”
and “the virtual” when it comes to politics and demonstrates the
possibilities of activism in the virtual space of video games.

Velvet-Strike (2002). Video courtesy of the artists.

Counter-Strike is a video game that was first developed in 1999 as a mod for the popular sci-
fi first person shooter game Half-Life. Counter-Strike replaced Half-Life’s kill-the-aliens
objective with kill-the-terrorists. Players join either a team of government operatives or a
group of Middle Eastern terrorist militants, and are tasked with defeating the opposition.
The mod was turned into a game, which became widely popular in the early 2000s.

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Screenshot from Counter-Strike featuring a spray from the Velvet-Strike mod.

“It was clear, to us anyway, that these [video games] were

propaganda spaces. These were spaces were right wing ideology was
living an extreme. The nonstop destruction of the other in an arena
that never quits.” —Brody Condon
When Anne-Marie Schleiner and Joan Leandre met in Spain—around the same time that the
United States was beginning to bomb and invade Afganistan—Schleiner was already
interested in the politics of first person shooter games. The two put their heads together and
came up with the idea to make an anti-military game mod.

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Velvet-Strike website (2002)

Rather than program a full-blown game modification, Schleiner, Leandre, and Condon used
the game’s existing graffiti function to create Velvet-Strike. Counter-Strike allowed users to
upload custom-designed graffiti designs to spray throught the game’s maps. Velvet-Strike
simply uploaded anti-war, anti-military sprays and made them available to players. They also
encouraged players to create their own sprays to be made available on the Velvet-Strike
website. The Velvet-Strikers performed their modifications live during game-play. They
placed their sprays throughout the game’s maps and got killed constantly for doing so.

View Velvet-Strike sprays.

“I was excited at that time with the possibility of public space being
extended into the virtual and using game space as a place to get a
public message out.” - Anne-Marie Schleiner
Velvet-Strike’s tags were not just explicit anti-military protests. The visuals ranged from an
image of two soldiers kissing to pictures of pink teddy bears, calling to mind the women and
children affected by real world military conflict.

“I’m concerned with what game violence is coupled with: militaristic, heterosexist boys’ clubs
in the real life, outside the game, war time environment of the ‘war on terrorism.’ We are also
opposed to military fantasy masquerading as ‘realism.’ I am also disturbed that the binary
logic of the shooter is being implemented on a global military scale.” —Anne-Marie Schleiner

Read Mariam Naziripour’s essay on the politics Velvet-Strike.

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Screenshot from Counter-Strike featuring a
spray from the Velvet-Strike mod.
The project was met with hostility from the
gaming world. Many reactions from players
were angry and misogynist. They
particularly resented what they percieved
as a woman’s intervention in the game, and
accused Schleiner, Leandre, and Condon of
a naïvety around gaming. For instance, one
email read: “if you don’t realize that
videogame is just a VIDEOGAME, an that its
a fake world, well then, GO PLAY WITH
YOUR BARBIE!”

In actuality, Velvet-Strike consciously attempted to complicate “the real” and the suppositions
of the gaming world as an unreal space, particularly when it came to war and terrorism.
Counter-Strike presented a kill-the-bad-guys version of war, and Velvet-Strike reintroduced
the complexity, horror, and human element of armed conflict into its narrative.

Screenshot from Counter-Strike featuring a spray from the Velvet-Strike mod.

In contrast to how Counter-Strike players took it, Velvet-Strike, was well-received in

contemporary art contexts. Documentation of the project was exhibited in the Whitney
Biennial in 2004, and the project has toured exhibition spaces internationally.

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Anne-Marie Schleiner is engaged in gaming and net culture in a
variety of roles as a writer, critic, curator, and gaming
artist/designer. Her work investigates avatar gender construction,
computer gaming culture, hacker art and experimental game
design. She has curated online exhibits of game mods and add-
ons including the exhibits Cracking the Maze: Game Patches and
Plug-ins as Hacker Art, Mutation.fem, and Snow Blossom House.
She has designed the games Anime Noir and Heaven711. She
runs a site focused on game hacks and open source digital art
forms called opensorcery.net and has been actively involved in
the anti-war game performance art initiatives Velvet-Strike and
OUT. She has taught at universities and artist workshops and
participated in art residencies in Germany, Belgium, Spain and
Mexico. She has exhibited online and at the New Museum, NY, the
Whitney, Centro de la Imagen Museum, Mexico City, and
international galleries, museums and festivals. She is currently an
Assistant Professor of Fine Art at the University of Colorado at
Boulder and also lives in Mexico City.
Brody Condon addresses the identity of fantasy in contemporary
culture, poaching computer and live action role playing (LARP)
games and using their principles to stage performative situations.
Condon has participated in the Rotterdam Film Festival, the 2004
Whitney Biennial, Performa 09, and Greater New York at MoMA PS
1 in 2010. He has exhibited at the Yerba Buena Center for the
Arts, San Francisco, The Kitchen, New York, Stedelijk Museum,
Amsterdam, Kunstwerke, Berlin, LACMA, California, among others.
Institutions including Museum of Modern Art, New York, New
Museum, New York, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and
Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California, to name a few, have
hosted his performances.
Joan Leandre is a media artist and a member of the Unknown
Frame Observatory and the OVNI Archives. He has been involved
in numerous projects such as the OVNI Scanner in Barcelona, the
MAP Series Mega Assemble Project and the Oigo Rom Project at
the Institut Universitari del Audiovisual, Barcelona. In 1999, he
initiated retroyou.org, a project of manual web reading and soft
digesting: retroYou r / c [radio / control series] started as a project
of hard deconstruction of a racing game for PC, presented among
other places in: OnedotZero, Barcelona; dina digital is not analog,
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Bologna; Arco 001, Madrid and Transmediale 02.media artist and
activist. He has carried out such diverse actions as the
manipulation of innocuous car race videogame computer code;
compilations of documentation on technological euforia, both
commercial and military; or the challenge to a powerful computer
to create a model of the highest ever mountain. Leandre goes
deep into the inviolable code of all types of image software, from
simple videogames to flight simulators and even sofisticated
military war games. He transforms their functionalities and
converts the most banal use of popular technology into a
visionary experience, a mission into the unknown, or a fun-filled
journey without gravity.

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