Death from above: art contemplates drone warfare

The US drone program is the most controversial and hotly debated military program in recent memory. Implemented only in the 1990s, unmanned aerial vehicles were chosen by the US military because of their numerous perceived advantages, including saving the lives of American servicemen, cost-effectiveness, lower risk to the vehicle due to flight altitude, long operational hours, accuracy, lethality against targets, advantages in collecting intelligence, and easier and faster deployment. However, the debate rages on as to how these advantages outweigh the extraordinary costs: civilian loss of life, counterproductive and destabilizing impacts on public opinion in targeted countries and at home, and the increasing distance between attacker and target (sometimes thousands of miles). While most of the focus is on the use of drones for military purposes in the Mid-East, Predators are also used heavily along the US/Mexico border to prevent illegal border crossings and reduce drug trafficking. ❧ In his book A Theory of The Drone, Grégoire Chamayou outlines the “unilateral” nature of drone warfare. "[Lieutenant General] David Deptula, an Air Force officer, identified their basic strategy: 'The real advantage of unmanned aerial systems is that they allow you to project power without protecting vulnerability.' …However, 'projection of power' is also a euphemism that obscures the facts of wounding, killing, destroying. And to do this 'without projecting vulnerability' implies that the only vulnerability will be that of the enemy, reduced to the status of a mere target… Warfare, from being possibly asymmetrical, becomes absolutely unilateral. What could still claim to be combat is converted into a campaign of what is, quite simply, slaughter.” ❧ Numerous contemporary artists have been struggling with the issues surrounding this new form of spectacular warfare, but in particular an inherent lack of empathy caused by alienation. All do so by recontextualizing the nature of these conflicts so that they are more understandable to American audiences. James Bridle addresses this with numerous social interventions lambasting in particular the General Atomics MQ-1, or “Predator,” and with the online intervention Dronestagram. Brian Bailey and Heather Layton do so in their installation Home Drone, which literally brings the war "over there" back to the US. Wafaa Bilal's 2008 work Domestic Tension gives participants the opportunity to act in much the same manner as drone pilots, or to act to save the artist from being shot. Omer Fast's film 5,000 Feet Is The Best brings audience even closer to the fold through the use of allegory and decontextualization.