Image: booktwo.org. James Bridle

Surveillance in the shadows

“We all live under the shadow of the drone, although most of us are lucky enough not to live under its direct fire. But the attitude they represent – of technology used for obscuration and violence;… of, frankly, endless war – should concern us all.” This is the concluding quotation from James Bridle’s blog booktwo.org, on a post which explains his new project Drone Shadows, a public art project for which he has written a handbook that is available on Creative Commons and encourages people not only to think about the nature of drones, but also to draw them.

This project came to Warwick Arts Centre on Sunday 5th October in association with George Brant’s Grounded which is on tour with the Gate Theatre across the country and runs from the 7th – 10th October. “Grounded is about a fighter pilot, grounded after having a baby and reposted to Nevada where she reluctantly becomes a drone operator.” Says Head of Audiences and Programming for Warwick Arts Centre, Matt Burman: “I’m keen to extend the narrative of the show outside of our building and install one of James Bridle’s Drone Shadows outside the Arts Centre. This would also connect to the Mead Gallery’s autumn show Unreliable Evidence which explores how artists have captured and reflected moments of history, many of which involve conflict and violence.” A drone was drawn in masking tape at the front of the Koan, as a part of the awareness that Bridle wants to draw to the fact that we could always be watched by this invisible technology.

Indeed Bridle believes that the whole way that drones operate in warfare and surveillance speaks strongly to our modern way of life and our obsession with being able to observe people constantly: “There is much excitement in many quarters about the possibilities of civilian, journalist, and DIY drones, but for the moment they remain primarily a military and law-enforcement tool.” It also, says Bridle, on his blog post Under the Shadow of the Drone tells us a great deal about our relationship with technology as well as the ethical difficulties that arise from using independent technology in warfare in particular: “The drone also, for me, stands in part for the network itself: an invisible, inherently connected technology allowing sight and action at a distance. Us and the digital, acting together, a medium and an exchange. But the non-human components of the network are not moral actors…”

This speaks quite deeply to the Grounded production, which, as Sam Crawford comments in his review of the piece below: “The play keeps coming back to the idea of being watched: there’s the pilot watching from the sky, there is the person at mission command watching the pilot, and then there is us, the audience, sitting and watching the play…it is as though we’re being brought into the play and forced to own up to the actions of our armed forces in the Middle East, which seem so much more morally ambiguous than they did before the lights went down.”

Bridle too comments on this sense of responsibility and moral judgement in his blog post: “In Gaza, which is under daily surveillance and attack by Israeli drone, the Palstinians call the aircraft “Zenana”, meaning, roughly, “buzz”, although it’s also a slang term for a relentlessly nagging wife. I am reminded of the Nazi “doodlebugs” or “buzz bombs” of the Second World War, which fell on London and elsewhere, and which were condemned as “terror weapons”.” This project forces you to consider the ethics of war, as well of surveillance, as well as challenging your attitudes towards these issues. In attempt to make the consideration of these issues public, Bridle has begun to draw these life size representations of drones within public spaces. Roads and pavements are the main canvas for this revealing artwork, the first of which was drawn by the artists and Einar Sneve Martinussen in London, in January 2012. He has since gone on to paint more in Istanbul, Brighton and perhaps notably in Washington DC. Yet he does not want this project to stop at his own drawings, and encourages budding artists and activists to draw drones with the help of his freely available guide, which provides diagrams and profiles of each modern drone.

Three Warwick students became involved in the project whilst the artist was on campus, Ed Frankin, Alex Millen and Billy Barrett, all joined in the course and assisted in the drawing of the drone next the campus Koan. Ed Franklin, a third year English and Theatre student, felt that the next step needed to be taken in protesting against drone surveillance and warfare: “”I got involved because I’m signed up for Lucy Ellinson’s workshop on Art and Activism at the Arts Centre next week, and Matt suggested this project as a way of putting those principles into action. The drone has become a symbol for a kind of modern warfare in which culpability is muddied, violence is dehumanised and the value of human life is diminished; this is a shift we should be recognising and rallying against.”

Alex Millen, an English Literature finalist, commented on how the project speaks to our relationship with technology: “I got involved with the Drone Shadow project because I am quite ignorant as to what drones are and what they do. I don’t think I am alone in this. There’s something spooky about drones, made all the spookier by the fact that the you don’t see much about them in the news. What I think is so brilliant about James Bridle’s project is that it is both subtle and oh-my-god-what-is-that at the same time. Some people walk by, pounding their thumbs into their phones, quite unaware of the 14m wingspan image they are walking on, and there’s a certain (sad) beauty in that, I think. It speaks to the phantom-like presence that these things have in the sky.”

However the project speaks to people not primarily about warfare and surveillance, says Bridle, but also about politics and the constant human question of “who is responsible”: “This politics reflects the drones themselves: it is a politics of violence, of obfuscation, of radical inequality of sight and action, and it is sustained by that obfuscation and that inequality. The Drone Shadow is not just a picture of a drone. It is a diagram of a political system.”

You can fine James Bridle’s Drone Shadow Handbook as well as his post Under the Shadow of the Drone at booktwo.org.

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