This is Hidden Brain from NPR. I'm Shankar Vedanta. 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 US in the early 90s.

I live 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 air strike. One of my brother, Hajji, was killed in air to ground missile. And I didn't know

what to do. Wafa is a performance artist, and he wanted to engage others in the conversation that

was running through his mind. Three years after his brother's death, he got an idea. In January of 2007,

I was watching TV, and I was watching an interview with an American soldier sitting in the United

States, the soldier directed drones to fire missiles thousands of miles away in the Iraqi desert.

I was shocked how the soldier completely disconnected physically and emotionally from what happened on

the ground of any Iraq. At the time, Wafa was living in Chicago. He came up with a proposal and

presented it to a gallery. I said, I want to lock myself in the gallery space for 30 days, and I

get a built a robot connected to the internet. And the robot shoots a pinball and viewers online

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