This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

In May 2007, an artist living in Chicago moved into a new place.

It was a small room with white walls.

The interior design was minimalist.

There was a bed, a desk, a computer, a lamp, and a paintball gun.

A fix to the gun was a webcam.

It live-streamed the room to the internet.

Anyone could look in, and anyone could take control of the gun, aim, and fire.

At all hours of the day and night, the paintball gun would spring to life

and begin shooting yellow pellets into the room.

Some hit the walls or the furniture.

Some hit the artist.

I was shot at 70,000 times, and I received 80 million hits on the internet from 128 countries.

Wafa Bilal spent one whole month in the room, targeted tens of thousands of times by random strangers around the world.

Why would he choose to do this?

Wafa was born and raised in Iraq.

He came to the U.S. in the early 90s.

I live this duality of living in two places. One is a comfort zone of the United States, and the other one is the conflict zone in Iraq where my family, friends, live.

In 2004, Wafa says one of his brothers was killed in an airstrike.

One of my brother, Haji, was killed in air to ground a missile,

and I didn't know what to do.

Wafa is a performance artist,

...