Vertical interference: video, drone witnessing, and the myth of precision targeting

Abstract

Artists and filmmakers frequently problematize drone warfare through their creative practices, contesting military surveillance and violence by appropriating, parodying, and turning the drone’s gaze back at itself. Challenging and subverting the myth of ‘precision targeting’ – the military’s claim to perfect accuracy in aiming their weapons only at ‘bad guys’ – is central to artists’ engagement with drone warfare. By looking at recent work by Nicolas Brynolfson, George Barber, and eteam, the author argues that these artists pose drone vision – how and what drones see and look at – as a site of compromised looking, where the indexical and objective is rarely just that, but always layered by and interpreted through discourse, ideology, compression, and noise. By performing ‘drone witnessing’, these artists tease out the connective tissue between state surveillance and remote warfare, raising key questions about sovereignty and autonomy in the age of operational images.