One of the tenets of Zionist aesthetics is harmlessness. When harmless, being a perpetrator is unthinkable and this underpins the Zionist performance of eternal victimhood. In MICCHAN, a collaboration between artist-researchers Noura Tafeche and Tobia Paolo Bettoni, the gamified synthesis between harmless cuteness and total violence (in Tafeche’s earlier work neologized as “Kawayoku”) is pushed to a breaking point in the form of a dummy Twitch livestream by gijinka-turned-streamer MICCHAN (crasis composed by the acronym for Military-Industrial Complex and the Japanese honorific-chan). The archive of TikToks starts to flicker. The images are representational insofar as they portray girl-life inside a genocide organ. But these images also carry operational aspects that redesign the line between warfare and gamification. Not only are the drone-strikes live live-streamed, but the gamified frame of genocide acts limits the possibility of images being images. MICCHAN exposes the way the Zionist media apparatus not only aestheticizes genocide but drafts these aestheticizations as active agents within the game-frame of war.

MICCHAN project hosts a repository folder containing a blend of video references and the original content used in the video capsule. Given the transient nature of the content we deal with, having some video downloaded and readily available for viewing could prove helpful if an account gets deactivated or a video hidden by the account owner.

Follow the link to access the repository here: MICCHAN Repository