I love those faked levitation pics, they're just so goofy. They're a tribute to artist Yves Klein, who famously photographed himself levitating in the 1960s. (The photo was faked, just like Hiller's.)

Hiller's new show also includes a weird piece called "From Here To Eternity," a collection of nonsensical looking mazes with diferent colored dots in them. There's also a collection of pictures of people's personal auras, spoofing the idea that a special camera can capture someone's personal aura or nimbus. A past work, "From India To The Planet Mars," consists of weird, ghostly photo negatives.

Also, says the Guardian, the new exhibition includes:

Films, buzzing installations, galleries full of strange noises, miniature miscellanies like the ever-popular "From the Freud Museum," with all its queer little boxes full of improbable objects - each time, she bypasses the banalities of scientific proof to examine the greater conundrum of faith. We say we don't believe and yet are fascinated by the very phenomena we claim to doubt.

During the course of this show, for instance, you will find yourself pondering the potent beauty of tarot symbols, the formality of automatic writing, the rhythms of seances and assorted paranormal images. Whatever your belief or bias, it will be rearranged as Hiller's art begins to absorb you.

Take a classic like Magic Lantern, which takes the form of a son et lumiere. On screen, discs of primary colours overlap, merge, materialise and fade in a continuous flow of images and after-images - dark suns, blue moons - that hypnotise the eye. On headphones, you hear bursts of speech in foreign languages that are supposedly the voices of the dead caught on tape by a Latvian scientist.

But my favorite of her works is probably the UFO survivors one, just for how bizarre and spacey the dangling earpieces look. It's conceptual art at its most jarring, and maybe its truest as well. The exhibition, "Proposals and Demonstrations," runs until the end of the year.

[Guardian and Guardian]

When we posted about Bilal's "Domestic Tension" project, plus his more recent project where he inserts himself into an anti-George Bush video game, reaction among io9 readers was definitely split, with several people lambasting Bilal for cheap sensationalism.

So it's interesting to read Bilal's own account of his creative process, which starts from his feelings of constant trauma. Imprisoned by Saddam, Bilal managed to escape to the U.S., but his family stayed behind in Iraq. He writes about running for his life on several occasions, but also reading the news about Iraq with a punch-in-the-gut feeling. He also talks about his guilt about living in the "comfort zone" of the U.S. while his family and friends suffered, and his desire to bridge the "comfort zone" and "conflict zone" somehow. He also was inspired by the U.S. Army using video games as a major recruiting tool.

In the book, the story of Bilal's art installation is interspersed with his account of growing up in Iraq and feeling constantly surrounded by madness. He talks about his father going insane when he was a child, and how his father was abusive or psychotic even when he wasn't pretending to be a sheep. Later, an "epidemic of insanity" hits his town of Kufa later, as young people pretended to be insane to get out of fighting in the Iran-Iraq war. How can you tell the difference between a real insane person and a fake one? For those who are faking insanity, it's an act "born out of desperation," he writes. Later, Bilal's brother kills a man who raped him, and Bilal's family has to flee their town or face revenge killings.

As the book goes on, Bilal's project gets more and more famous, and the book becomes more of an exploration of cyberculture and gaming culture. After about a week, the site runs out of bandwidth, and the project almost grinds to a halt — but a Chicago web developer steps in and donates a dedicated server, becoming one of the project's main sponsors. The constant stress, loneliness and grief starts to take a toll on Bilal, who hides his tears from the webcam. And then there are moments like this one:

A tall, fresh-faced young man with a crew cut ambles into the gallery. His name is Matt Schmidt, and he tells me that until recently he was a U.S. Marine. He saw the YouTube video where Estonia killed the lamp, and how upset I had become. He holds out a plastic bag. "I got you a new lamp and some light bulps," he tells me. "I figured you can use all the help you can get."

Matt says he never thought much about the consequences of killing in war. He says he and his fellow Marines were always too busy trying to survive to be worried about their targets. But the paintball project has made him see things in a different light, enabled him to see his adversaries as human beings. He wishes his Marine buddies could visit the gallery.

In general, the onslaught is furious, traumatizing and overwhelming — and that's before Bilal's site hits on Digg. "I survived Digg day," Bilal writes. People spread rumors the site is a fake and Bilal is animatronic.

If you want to see just how surreal online culture can get — and get a taste of where confrontational art is heading in the future — you should totally pick up a copy of Shoot An Iraqi.