Steven Cottingham's practice emphasizes the constructed nature of images, not to underline their fakeness, but rather to reveal the technological systems and social conditions through which meaning emerges. Lines Drawn in Sand Become a Valley brings together a series of video works that reflect on wargames and simulations, questioning their use. Do they act as representations of war or, rather, as models for war? Further, how do ideologies of war and emergency depend on the conflation between real and representational to sustain legitimacy? 

The exhibition’s two main video works, As far as the drone can see and Magic Circles Ringed in Barbed Wire, while generally genre-bending in form, might be contextualized as virtual photojournalism. Here, the artist forays into the virtual world of Arma 3, a military simulation widely used by law-enforcement training programs, private military companies, and wargamers alike. Beyond documenting the virtual world, however, Cottingham plays the game to subvert — or invade it. He interrupts the landscape with its own historicity. He replaces billboards with archival photos documenting real war refugees who might have traversed the land. Complicating its surface, within the so-called photorealistic world of the game, he embeds commemorative paintings that bring a reminder of the broader sociopolitical contexts in which wars occur — the people, women especially, who have dealt with war from distant proximities. Perhaps most transgressively, he introduces a female player and genderfluid cell of fighters into the entirely male-inhabited world, thereby narrowing in on how doctrines of war intercede upon identity and gender, and how their rehearsal within virtual frameworks omits certain real conditions of war and invisibilizes its casualties.