TITLE: Paintball field (3.06 billion cycles per second)
AUTHOR: paula roush
MEDIUM: newspaper work
PAGES: 24
DIMENSIONS: 35 x 50 cm
PAPER: 55gsm newsprint
BINDING: Endorse folded not stapled
PROCESS: digital
COLOUR: Black and white
TEXT: Paintball safety rules
PUBLISHER: msdm publications
YEAR: 2018
£28 (free shipping)
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The publication includes twenty-four photographs and has been designed to be read as newspaper or as individual posters which can also be hung on a wall. 

Paintball Field was made during a residency in the ‘schist’ mountain villages of Portugal. The area has become depopulated and is now being developed as a destination for tourists. The title of the work refers to a local recreation area where visiting families come with their children to play war games using guns firing balls of paint. The photographs conjure up a hunting scene in which a female figure wearing a cork mask – resembling those that were used by the original villagers during carnival – is being pursued. More than a simple ironic take on violence and war, the work draws on ethnographic connotations, evoking a dramatic encounter between the rural traditions of the past and present-day cultural practices.

(3.06 billion cycles per second is the clock speed of the computer used to create the photoworks, expressed in gigahertz: 3.06 GHz. The computer is only one of the mediating elements in this practice, connected to capturing, editing, printing and publishing devices. An underlying trauma is the feeling of loss: emotional, social and technological. Loss of loved ones, lived spaces and computing power)