After the technology of modern war brought upon by WWI, then to the atomic bomb and up to our present, every weapon became possible, whether for the high-precision targeting of an individual or for mass killing. The condition of war changed, through the cold war and biological war, to the informational and invisible war, while not dismissing the old means of carrying fights between states or between groups, such as guerrilla fight or bombings. What has been lost almost completely in the hundred years since WWI is the accountability of war, as well as the traceability of fire weapons. Shotguns can be bought without license at the corner shop, arms factories deliver their products to both belligerent parts of a war, state police is endowed with military gear, which it directs against the citizens it should protect and anyone with a 3D-printer can manufacture their own weapons.
In the work The Beginning I 3D-printed the bullets that killed Franz Ferdinand in 1914, returning the view to the moment when the entire world was about to change in the ways of bringing the devastation of war upon others and upon itself. In 1915, one year after the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian Archduke, The Times was reporting: “Those two shots brought the world to arms, and the war that followed has brought devastation upon three continents and profoundly affected two others (…). What face the world will wear when it is all over no man can predict, but it will be greatly changed, and not geographically alone.” This is one of the most concise and clairvoyant descriptions of the banal moment of shooting two bullets and the immense and irreversible ripples they created. As in other of my works dealing with war, I try to reduce this elaborate organism of annihilation that is the apparatus of war to a minimal element, and to place a historic lesson into the present.
