Video Installation, 02:30 min.

​​In her three-channel video installation, Tal Alperstein blurs the lines between reality and virtuality. Using the perspective of a protagonist in First Person Shooter video games, she transforms familiar landscapes into unfamiliar territories as the character navigates toward an unknown destination. In computer Quest games, players try to survive in violent, 3D animated worlds, constantly on the lookout for enemies, money, and weapons. Walking towards the unknown, among the multiple opponents they will fight, they encounter NPCs (Non-Player Characters) who, like extras, have no impact on what is going on, and the ongoings have no impact on them. Their movements, predetermined and repetitive, translate into the ideal images and never-ending loop of Zionism: struggle and rehabilitation, draining swamps and war. The actions are repeated, neither progressing nor developing; the body keeps moving, but the purpose is lost. Amid online conspiracy theories suggesting that our entire world is one big simulation, where we are mere NPCs, Alperstein explores the possibility that even though we exist, our world is shaped by the digital experience; a world in which wandering on screen is the predominant experience, an existence where the representation of reality feels more real to us than reality itself. The game is filmed in a transitional urban landscape—on the city’s outskirts, between desolation and habitation, in an intermediate moment between the greenery of a rainy season and the yellowing of summer, in the interstice between Israel as a fantasy and Israel as a reality. We may not know what the shooter in Alperstein’s game is looking for, but we do know what he finds—sun-scorched fields, absurd actions alongside futile attempts to act, piles of dust alongside the remains of Zionism and the dream that initiated it.

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Text by: Vardit Gross