The term “drone aesthetics” has been used of late to describe the work of several contemporary photographers and artists who have tackled the complex subject of modern technological warfare, in particular the use of missiles fired from unmanned planes at suspected terrorist targets in remote areas of Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. This digitally controlled form of remote killing has changed the face of war, made it, in fact, faceless, detached and disturbingly similar to the virtual violence relentlessly produced by the computer games industry.
The artist Omer Fast recently created a powerful video piece, 5,000 Feet Is Best, in which he overlaid images from drone surveillance with an extended recording of an interview with a drone operator sitting in front of a screen somewhere in the American west. Photographer Trevor Paglen has long made the advanced technology of global surveillance and military weaponry his subject. Now comes Lisa Barnard’s ambitious and multi-layered new book of photographs, Hyenas of the Battlefield, Machines in the Garden, which is as complex and thought-provoking as its mysterious title suggests.
Barnard’s previous book, Chateau Despair, used the abandoned former site of the Tory party central office to summon up the ghost of Thatcherism in all its mundane, ruthless functionalism. Here, though, she moves between the human and the virtual, the simulated and the real, in order to explore what Eugénie Shinkle, in her afterword, describes as “the increasingly virtual spaces within which war is waged, and the digital weaponry that is used to wage it”. To this end, Barnard visits various intriguing locations, including the Institute for Creative Technologies in Marina del Rey, Los Angeles, which chief psychologist Albert “Skip” Rizzo describes as “the unholy alliance between Hollywood, the military and academia”.
ICT is the main research centre for training soldiers in enhanced digital warfare and dealing with its psychological fallout. An American soldier suffering post-traumatic stress disorder, for instance, can undergo an immersive exposure therapy system called Virtual Iraq where he or she can revisit the scenario that caused the trauma and experience it again in a safe, controlled simulation.
Barnard also attended the annual unmanned systems conference held alternately in Washington and Las Vegas, where military and government officials mix and exchange information on the latest technological developments with representatives from global corporations such as Boeing and General Atomics Aeronautical Systems. It is one of the more visible manifestations of the new global network of power, commerce and control, a kind of deathly parallel universe that seems to operate on the outer limits of democracy, just beyond the reach of meaningful public debate or mainstream media scrutiny.
Barnard’s gaze shifts from the unreality of virtual weaponry – sleek, matt-black helicopters, the crates in which drone self-assembly kits are transported – to the landscapes where drone strikes are carried out. She gives several pages to almost identical aerial views of vast swaths of mountainous terrain targeted by the US military. A sense of the unreal pervades these images too, but we are jolted back to the reality of drone warfare by her still lives of mangled Hellfire missile fragments found in the mountains of Waziristan and collected as evidence by the artist and activist Noor Behram.
This is a constantly surprising and often disturbing examination of how war is now conducted from afar by operators sitting in front of computer screens, whom Barnard dubs “bored witnesses”. What then, her book asks, does that make us?
Hyenas of the Battlefield, Machines in the Garden is published by GOST Books (£35)
