When he first slid behind the controls of a Shadow UAV [Unmanned Aerial Vehicle], the point and click operation turned out to work much the same way.”8 In response to this, the uncanny power of #NotABugSplat derives from the way it upscales and upturns that most human of all images – the face – in a way that fundamentally upsets the logic of distant, vertical and machinic vision. [...] Throughout the operation there is a sense of the drone controllers’ desperation to destroy the people and destroy the vehicles – whatever the evidence of their clearly civilian nature. [...] The purported aim of the group is to “educate members of Congress and the public on the strategic, tactical, and scientific value of unmanned systems; actively support further development and acquisition of more systems, and to more effectively engage the civilian aviation community on unmanned system use and safety.”58 In addition, the main industry lobby group in the US, the Association for Unma. [...] In such ‘non-cooperative’ tracking of people by their biometric signatures, the upturned face of the human beneath the drone, rather than a means of challenging the eye of the drone, as in the NotaBugSplat project, becomes, instead, the very signature that allows the drone to deepen its hold. [...] As in the deployment of lethal drones abroad, moreover, the use of police drones, inevitably, will rely on the internal prejudices of policing cultures in stipulating what or who is an ’enemy’ in a world where such prejudices are used to simplify the radical complexity and opaqueness of the world viewed below.
- Pages
- 31
- Published in
- Netherlands
