"A new work by Toronto based video master of the mash-up, Jubal Brown, Total War lifts off at a symphonic scale, proffering a dystopian take on the lure and the lurid on view via mass media today. Brown alludes to several influences in his conceptualizing of this complexly structured piece. In particular, he cites Baudrillard’s hugely influential treatise on the violence of the image as crucial to his own dissection of contemporary capture culture and Hollywood cinema.

Indeed, some of that philosopher’s words return like an acid reflux of representations in TOTAL WAR, a work whose main image bank is drawn from YouTube. Remembering Baudrillard’s take on this, “…. murder of the secret of the image, drowned by hyper-visibility, by unconditional transparency” (2004), we are haunted by Jubal Brown’s shaman-like ability to literally “wear” the skin of this murder in TOTAL WAR, inducing a trancelike state in the viewer, as the banality of this “hyper-visibility” sinks in. As viewers, we exist in the same arena as those hunted by computerized killing screens of soldiers bombing in Iraq or kicking down doors of frightened civilians, or shooting rabbits or deer or boar – anything that will die - with the night scope on, or killing time on the couch with a bunch of goofy friends. It’s all the same really in TOTAL WAR. The inevitability of these images ending up on YouTube is inarguable; it’s the initial impetus to record that gnaws near the base of consciousness.

Baudrillard again, “The last violence done to the image - the very final violence - is the technological one : electronic and computerized, synthetic images issued from numerical combination, combined and reworked on the surface of the screen.” This could almost read as a blueprint for the technique employed by Jubal Brown in much of his video work." - Lisa Steele