Abstract
Drawing upon the critical scholarship on drone warfare, this article argues that drones’ mistargeting of civilians is neither exception nor error but is instead intrinsic to the rationale behind militarized drone strikes. A historical overview of the cultural imaginaries and biopolitical formations corresponded to drone warfare reconfigures drone technology as an apparatus of racialized state violence. Therefore, an analysis of the affordances corresponded to drone technologies cannot be thought in isolation from the historicity of the material and discursive systems that underline those strikes. Forensic Architecture’s investigations of covert drone strikes address the material, media, and legal systems through which these strikes operate and thus intervene in the time-space relations that characterize the entangled politics of verticality and visuality. As a result, they invert the forensic gaze through an architectural mode of analysis and political commitment to “the right to look” in Nicholas Mirzoeff’s terms. Ultimately, their investigations are direct interventions into the operationalization of drone technology as a technical, discursive, and political apparatus.
Keywords
Drone Warfare, Affordance, Vertical Mediation, The Right to Look, Forensic Architecture
Forensic Aesthetics for Militarized Drone Strikes: Affordances for Whom, and for What Ends?
ÖZGÜN EYLÜL İŞCEN
Duke University, U.S.A.
“… But the right to look came first, and we should not forget it”
(Mirzoeff, 2011: 2)
Drones, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), have become fetishized technical objects. They are popularly known for their technological acuity, despite the fact that they regularly fail (Chandler, 2017; Parks, 2017). Weaponized drones in particular regularly crash or hit civilians[1], [2]. Drones’ aerial perspective and seeming removal of human pilots from active conflict zones speak seductively to Modern fantasies of omniscience and omnipotence (Kaplan, 2006: 401; Rhee, 2018: 141). In actuality, drone technology is far from mastery, as it is contingent upon an expansive assemblage of bodies, machines, algorithms, and signals as well as noise, ambiguity, and delay. Militarized drone strikes operate through the further triangulation of: the visualization methods of drone surveillance; the procedures of target-construction (which rely on both human and artificial intelligence); and the materials (e.g. the air that signals go through) and bodies (e.g. human laborers) involved in strike events (Kearns, 2017: 14).
A variety of juridical arrangements, cultural imaginaries, and biopolitical formations also accompany the operationalization of militarized drone strikes (Parks & Kaplan, 2017: 8). Individuals are produced as threats, and thus as legitimate targets, while the spaces where this form of state-sanctioned violence occurs are rendered unruly, and therefore threatening (Kearns, 2017: 15). And yet, drone surveillance does not lead to greater precision, but rather to a prevalent misapprehension of both the technology’s limits and the civilian casualties, whose actions and social customs are misread as a terrorist activity (Rhee, 2018: 142). Drones do not help to cut through the fog of war and the uncertainties that accompany war practices, but are instead enabled through them. The oversight and secrecy of these operations, paired alongside the elasticity of definitional terms, generate a form of intangibility through which militarized states mobilize rationalization for drone violence (Kearns, 2017).
Militarized drone operations enact a form of necropolitical violence that produces regions and populations where death is deemed acceptable. This is enabled through the articulation of racialized distinctions, drawn between populations deemed worthy of life and populations whose very livelihood is framed as a threat to the essential health and safety of the former (Allison, 2015: 121). Working within this context, drone operators do not only misidentify their targets due to the difficulties of coordinating disparate flows of information in real-time, but also as a result of the racialized modes of knowing that govern and that are actualized through militarized drone strikes (Rhee, 2018: 135). This is made explicit, in part, through the aesthetics of drone vision. The scale and delay of satellite images turn all bodies into indistinct human morphologies that cannot be distinguished from one another. The representation of bodies as depersonalized pixels as well as the corresponding erasure of difference – ambiguity, complexity, and context – facilitates processes of dehumanization (Wall & Monahan, 2011; Parks, 2017; Rhee, 2018). These erasures generate a racialized homogeneity that collapses all individuals into an indistinguishable threat. The results are further concretized through the drone’s technological apparatus itself, as local and non-Western characteristics are rendered illegible through the decidedly Western and Eurocentric socio-technological codes available to drone operators (for example, in relation to social customs and clothing) (Rhee, 2018: 141). In Jennifer Rhee’s terms, drones are not designed to see humans, but rather to surveil the already racially dehumanized (161). This racializing logic persists as certain people’s territories, bodies, movements, and information are selected for monitoring, tracking, and targeting regularly enough to become “spectral suspects”[3] (Parks, 2017: 145).
Drawing upon the critical scholarship on drone warfare, this article argues that drones’ mistargeting of civilians is neither exceptional nor erroneous but is instead integral to the operation and rationalization of militarized drone strikes. Instances of mistargeting should therefore not be overlooked merely as failures of design in need of fixing; rather, they are aligned with and actively materialize historical and structural issues associated with the colonial legacies and racialized logics that underlie the development and current applications of drone technology. The operationalization of a drone strike is predicated on telecommunication networks and ground stations (which require access to land) as well as ground surface, air, spectrum, orbit, labor and energy (Parks, 2017: 137). Thus, militarized drone strikes do not only operate through technologies of vision, navigation, and pattern recognition, but also rely upon a set of political, territorial, and juridical reconfigurations, which make the rationale of drone technology far more diffuse than the straight line between an aircraft and a target (Weizman, 2014: 369).
Complicating the vertical field further, Lisa Parks reconfigures drones as technologies of “vertical mediation,” capable of registering the dynamism of materials, objects, sites, surfaces or bodies on Earth. Parks’ conceptualization of “vertical mediation” refers not only to “the capacity of drone sensors to detect phenomena on the Earth’s surface,” but also to “the potential to materially alter or affect the phenomena of the air, spectrum, and/or ground” (135). The drone’s mediating work occurs extensively and dynamically through the vertical field, moving from geological layers and built environments to the domains of spectrum, the air and the outer limits of orbit. By emphasizing verticality, Parks underscores the materializing capacities and effects of drone operations that reorder, reform, and remediate life on Earth in the most material ways. This is how drones establish, materialize, and communicate “vertical hegemony,” the ongoing struggle for dominance and control over the vertical field (Parks, 2018: 2)[4].
Although he did not share a similar emphasis on the politics of verticality[5], James J. Gibson’s ecological understanding of affordance might prove a useful entry point for addressing the vertical reconfigurations of militarized drone strikes. According to Gibson, the world is not a physical girding or a container of bodies in space, but is better understood through the complexity of environmental relations and the notion of the medium (Parikka, 2010: 169)[6]. For Gibson, environmental interfaces, such as the earth, act as groundings for an organism’s action ([1979] 2015: 119-120). We act and perceive at the level of mediums, surfaces, and substances, which is to say, in terms of affordances. An object is not that which is “of itself,” but is conceived instead as that which it might become in correspondence with other elements. Gibson underlines how these affordances are relative to the physical properties of both the environment and the organism in question, thereby emphasizing the relationality of affordances (121). This relationality, however, is not only comprised of physically instantiated objects. Indeed, Eric Snodgrass proposes the term “compositional affordances,” to underscore how:
[a]ffordances (e.g. of skin, silicon, the electromagnetic spectrum) form and are informed by the inclusions and exclusions of further intersecting discourses (of politics, computer science, economics), the expressions and processual actualization of which can be seen in the situated, executing practices of any given moment (2017: 25).
Thus, Snodgrass’ reformulation of affordance in compositional terms positions it as a form of mediation that cuts across material and discursive systems and the intersecting registers of power that become manifest in such moves. From this perspective, drone technology can be reconfigured as discursive and political apparatus as much as a material one.
What emerges from this context is a series of questions concerning how material and discursive systems shape the possibilities and actualizations of certain affordances over others; which is to ask how the perceived affordances of a given technology emerge within and help to intensify, maintain, or negotiate existing regimes of power. As the asymmetrical relations that militarized drone strikes operate through might suggest, this is ultimately a question of “affordance for whom?” In this regard, this paper argues that the notion of affordance cannot be thought in isolation from the historicity of a given technical object and its operationalization, which is never merely technical but always already highly political. Correspondingly, it attempts to develop a position from which to assess and actualize what computational media might afford in terms of confronting state-sanctioned forms of drone-enabled violence. The potential for and terms of critical intervention will be explored through an analysis of multiple case studies undertaken by the multidisciplinary and collaborative research group Forensic Architecture. Forensic Architecture’s investigations of covert drone strikes[7] address the material, media, and legal systems through which those strikes operate, and thus intervene into the time-space relations that characterize the politics of verticality and its entanglement with the one of visuality.
Drones today: The entanglement of preemptive logic and spaces of exception
The U.S. has been conducting overseas drone strikes since October, 2001. In the aftermath of 9/11, during the presidency of George W. Bush, the American administration launched a secret program that put hundreds of unmanned surveillance and attack aircraft into the skies over Iraq and Afghanistan (Satia, 2014). Since then, the highly secretive Central Intelligence Agency and Joint Special Operations Command have carried out hundreds of strikes in countries outside U.S. active war zones, including Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia, while Israel, an American ally, has been conducting drone attacks over Gaza since 2004. Advocates argue that the drone program reduced the need for messy ground operations like those associated with the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. However, those militarized drone operations killed or injured hundreds, if not thousands, of suspected “terrorists” and civilians, many of whom have never been counted or identified.[8]
After Barack Obama came into office[9], drone use increased dramatically with the expansion of signature strikes based on a “pattern of life” analysis (Chamayou, 2013: 46). Signature strikes target groups of adult men, who are believed to be militants affiliated with terrorist activity, but whose identities are not confirmed. These strikes, made without knowing the precise identity of the individuals targeted, rely solely on the target’s tracked behavior and how the corresponding pattern aligns with the “signature” of a predefined category that the U.S. military deems to be a suspected terrorist activity. The preemptive logic underlying these strikes assumes that people can be targeted not for the crimes that they have legitimately committed, but rather for actions that may be committed in the future. As Grégoire Chamayou emphasizes, this marks a shift from the category of “combatant” to “suspected militant” (145). The decision to target is based on the identification of a behavior or a pattern of life that merely suggests a potential affiliation with terrorism. Thus, the “predictive” algorithms used for determining targets underscore the preemptive logic of drone warfare as symptomatic of the more general phenomenon of preemption – which often operates as a racializing technology within the context of the Global War on Terror (Miller, 2017: 113).
American and Israeli administrations rely on the indefinite elasticity of the terms that define a legitimate target. This currently brings most civilians living in so-called “troubled zones” under a constant state of surveillance and threat of drone strike (Chamayou, 2013: 145). It is through a long history of colonial law in the Middle East and South Asia that such “frontier” and tribal zones are produced as places where the sovereignty of its people is intentionally overlooked, delineating a “politically productive zone of exception” (Burns, 2014: 400).[10] As Madiha Tahir argues, regional governance and U.S. drone warfare undertaken in tribal zones are extensions of British colonial administration and policing, and intrinsically tied to the governance on the ground including the spatial organization (2017: 221). Far from being in a state of “lawlessness,” tribal zones are instead subject to what Sabrina Gilani calls “an overabundance of law” (2015: 371). This “respatialization” has produced what Keith Feldman refers to as “racialization from above,” recasting “Orientalist imagined geography” through new scales of relation and division (Parks & Kaplan, 2017: 4)[11]. Therefore, the time-space relations that characterize drone warfare underscore the politics of verticality and its historical underpinnings.
Historical underpinnings of drones as an “apparatus of racialized distinction”[12]
The weaponized drone aircraft is not a mechanism of violence that came into being in a sudden moment of techno-military innovation. Instead, “drone bombings emerge and thus can be also critiqued as the latest episode of a more protracted process of state violence and domination” (Afxentiou, 2018: 302). While a thorough review of these histories exceeds the scope of this article, it is worth highlighting a few key historical episodes that informed the discursive and political emergence of aerial technologies, shaping their realization as racialized technical apparatuses.
Tracing the colonial histories of aerial technologies, Priya Satia (2014) proposes a continuity between the British rule in Iraq in the 1920s and the American invasion of Iraq (with the UK as its ally) in the 2000s. The British Mandate used aerial control and bombardment in early 20th century Iraq, where surveillance and punishment from above were intended as permanent, everyday methods of colonial administration (Satia, 2014: 2). The region was defined as somewhere “out of senses,” which created an epistemological and political problem out of an unknown that needed to be kept under control. Satia argues that a cultural understanding of the region, shaped by unruly and illegible geographical conditions and a coinciding set of orientalist ideas, guided the invention and application of British aircrafts at the time of the British Mandate. Racist and imperialist understandings of cultural difference shaped the practical organization of surveillance in the Middle East, giving rise to and in turn legitimizing its violent excesses (Satia, 2014: 11).
According to Satia, Royal Air Force officers justified the brutality of the interwar air control scheme in Iraq by relying on racist assertions. For example, F. H. Humphreys, the head of the British administration in Iraq, cautioned against distinguishing between non-combatant and combatant civilians as “the term ‘civilian population’ has a very different meaning in Iraq from what it has in Europe … the whole of its male population are potential fighters as the tribes are heavily armed” (Humphreys, cited in Satia, 2014: 10). The idea that colonized populations were always already liable to being bombed was therefore a result of what was understood to be their inherently “disobedient” nature, meaning that air control did not simply denote a reactive military action, but also a preventative measure intended to keep colonial subjects under control; maintaining a state of horror became an effective means of preserving colonial order in the long term (Afxentiou, 2018: 312-313).
The U.S.’ current deployments of militarized drone operations indicate an effective reproduction of these historical and material conditions of colonial violence. Even more broadly, contemporary tactics of “Global Counterinsurgency” call upon computational methods to racialize and categorize certain regions as threatening, weak or failing states requiring permanent control (Mirzoeff, 2011: 307; Vasco, 2013: 90).[13] As Timothy Vasco argues, this formalization of space and the bodies within it (which he refers to as “reconnaissance-strike complexes”) performs ‘the labor of simultaneously separating friend from enemy, here from there, us from them, while at the same time exposing the latter to the self-evidently necessary violence of a drone strike in which the presence of a secured, singular, and universal power like the United States is fully realized’ (90).
Referencing Nishant Upadhyay’s notion of “colonial continuum,”[14] Rhee explains that “drone strikes are evoked as events of exceptional violence that occur overseas, rather than part of a continuum of state-sanctioned racial violence that occurs in the West and is, as Upadhyay notes, both normalized and foundational to the production of the West” (148). Indeed, Rhee draws a connection between overseas drone strikes and the histories and present realities of state-sanctioned violence within the U.S., thereby positioning the historical and continued influence of colonialism across nation-states and regions.[15] Ultimately, Rhee argues that militarized drone technology works to affirm the continued dominance of the Western, post-Enlightenment subject (of reason, autonomy) as an ontological and epistemological center, while rendering other populations disposable, exploitable, or exposable to racialized violence (2018: 136)[16].
According to Rhee, racial dehumanization – various inscriptions and erasures of the human – is embedded in both the present drone technology/policies as well as in the earlier histories of cybernetics (2018: 137). As Peter Galison details, cybernetics, as a war science, was an entry point to the machine-human systems that were already shaped around racialized discourses (1994). The founding cybernetician Norbert Wiener’s work during the Second World War was dedicated to anti-aircraft defense systems which aimed to track and predict the flight patterns of enemy pilots. As Galison demonstrates, however, enemies were not all alike (1994: 231). On one hand, there was the Japanese soldier who was barely human in the eyes of the Allied Forces. On the other hand, there was a more enduring enemy, a “cold-blooded and machine-like” opponent composed of the hybridized German pilot and his aircraft (231). Galison calls this enemy the ‘cybernetic Other’, arguing that it led the Allied Forces to develop a new science of communication and control in line with the fantasies of omniscience and automation.
As a legacy of the Cold War period[17], cybernetics became a framework through which the idea of the human was increasingly conceptualized. Wiener and his compatriots’ efforts to predict the future moves of the enemy airplane became an effort to compute human action, and, ultimately, an aspiration to develop communication between a range of entities – humans, animals, and machines (Halpern, 2005: 287). Thus, early computational machines proposed that human behavior could be mathematically modeled and predicted. Rather than describing the world as it is, their interest was to predict what it would become, and to do it in terms of homogeneity instead of difference: “This is a worldview comprising functionally similar entities – black boxes – described only by their algorithmic actions in constant conversation with each other, producing a range of probabilistic scenarios” (287). According to Orit Halpern, the early cybernetics, as well as the information theory it inspired, relied on a “not-yet-realized aspiration to transform a world of ontology, description, and materiality to one of communication, prediction, and virtuality”[18] (285).
Drawing upon methods of techno-feminist critique[19], Lauren Wilcox argues that cybernetic conceptualizations of “the human” that seek to promote an “other than” or “more than” human reifies a particular normative version of humanity, which in turn enables distinctions between more or less worthy forms of life (2017: 15). According to Katherine Chandler (2018), much of the analysis of drones forefronts the technical systems that undergird these “unmanned” and autonomous aircraft, while dismissing the decisive role that humans play in their operation. Drones are either positioned as “superhuman,” referencing drones’ capacity for performing various tasks “better” than humans, or they work to “de-humanize” drone warfare, by ostensibly replacing the humanity of the operator or targeted person with a set of technical operations (Chandler, 2018). In either case, the analysis of drone aircraft as an assemblage of human-media-machine is reduced to a fascination with the technology’s capacity for replicating and improving upon human actions, which is also imagined as technologically inevitable.
Following Donna Haraway’s pioneering work in A Cyborg Manifesto, Chandler reinterprets drones as cyborgs in order to reformulate binary worldviews embedded within the dominant rhetoric of “unmanning”:
Indeed, today’s drones might be cyborgs, a point that underscores the text’s cautionary reminder that the synthesis between human and machine it celebrates is first and foremost a product of the Cold War military-industrial complex. Yet cyborgs and drones remain bastards, never acknowledged for their mixtures (2016: 3).
By complicating the cyborg nature of drones, Chandler demonstrates how drones are not dualistic, but rely instead on a dissociative logic that disconnects the parts – human and machine – that their operations actually link together (2016: 4). To illustrate this point, Chandler examines the jet-powered drone aircraft known as the ‘Firebee’, which was developed during the Cold War period to be deployed by the U.S. Army as a training target for aerial combat. Borrowing from the cybernetic discourse of the period, drone aircraft were presented as automata despite the fact that humans remained imperative to their operation. Chandler’s analysis shows how the Firebee’s control system produced confusion between who or what responds to external conditions: “Written in the passive voice, the “black box,” not a human operator, transmits command signals to the drone’s “electronic brain,” while suggesting the system’s apparent autonomy” (9).
For Chandler, the drone is a cyborg, and yet, the connection between operator and aircraft is obscured, as it is understood simply as inputs and outputs filtered through a black box. Despite the syntheses that constitute the basis of drone operations, popular accounts are therefore able to dissociate human and machine, war and home, and friend and enemy. Indeed, the networked operations of so-called unmanned aircraft undo all these binary categories. In return, as Chandler argues, “the term cyborg reminds us that the problem is not the drone aircraft per se, but the ways drone systems tie into ongoing practices of patriarchal capitalism, the legacy of colonialism, and techno-determinism” (2016: 19). Accordingly, any effective challenge to weaponized drone technology as an apparatus of racial distinction must explore the dissociative logics that animate and justify the racialized violence of militarized drone operations.
Vertical mediation and the politics of visuality
Computationally-informed technologies of visualization, like drone imagery, operate through the material surfaces of the Earth and the physicality of the electromagnetic spectrum as well as the embodied grounds of human perception. These same technologies in turn render the earth and bodies intelligible as they are mapped, calculated, and managed. Gibson’s ecological understanding of mediation emphasizes the extensivity and dynamism of the vertical operations of computational media. And yet, it needs to be reformulated in order to appropriately grasp the multifaceted struggles for the dominance and control over the vertical field; which is to say, the politics of verticality. I would therefore like to rethink Gibson’s ecological understanding of mediation through Lisa Parks’ definition of drone technology as a mediating machine that appropriates the vertical as the medium of its movements, transmissions, and inscriptions. Inspired by the work of Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska[20], Parks defines vertical mediation “as a process that far exceeds the screen and involves the capacity to register the dynamism of occurrences within, on, or in relation to myriad materials, objects, sites, surfaces, or bodies on Earth” (135):
As a drone flies through the sky, it alters the chemical composition of the air. As it hovers over the Earth, it can change movements on the ground. As it projects announcements through loudspeakers, it can affect thought and behavior. And as it shoots Hell fire missiles, it can turn homes into holes and the living into the dead. Much more than a sensor, the drone is a technology of vertical mediation: the traces, transmissions, and targets of its operations are registered in the air, through the spectrum, and on the ground (Parks, 2017: 135-136).
Parks mobilizes the term verticality to highlight the infrastructural and perceptual registers through which militarized drone operations remediate life on Earth in an intensely material way. This is also why she looks at the forensic cases of drone crashes, where the drone’s relation to the material world becomes intelligible, and thus contestable. Parks’ emphasis on verticality resonates with the works of those media theorists who have employed Gibson in their work. For instance, Matthew Fuller asserts that “ecology” is the most expressive language with which to indicate the massive and dynamic interrelation of processes and objects, flows and matter in the field of media theory (2015: 2). As Fuller emphasizes, technology is both a bearer of forces and drives as much as it is made up of them; it is thus constituted by the mutual intermeshing of a variety of technical, political, economic, aesthetic and chemical forces, which pass between all such bodies and are composed through and among them (56).
Similarly, Snodgrass reformulates Karen Barad’s “material-discursive” approach,[21] which underlines the mutually constituted and generative forces of “matter and meaning”, to coin the term “compositional affordances” (2017:13). According to Snodgrass, compositional affordances directly inform the process and practice of making any given computational media executable:
These affordances can include those of skin, silicon, the electromagnetic spectrum, and further on into issues such as discursive norms within areas such as computer science, economics and politics, all of which can potentially participate in informing, to various degrees, the question of what is executable in any particular instance and how an executable process might specifically be composed (2017: 13-14).
More importantly, Snodgrass brings the question of power into the picture by asking how particular affordances lead to particular enactments of power. This is ultimately a matter of asking for whom such networked and computationally-afforded practices work, and which bodies, relations and forms of expression are included and excluded through such practices (2017: 14). In response, Snodgrass emphasizes the politics of visuality that shape the underlying material-discursive networks through which computational media operate. For instance, he analyzes the techniques of control and accompanying migration politics that European countries have enacted over the Mediterranean Sea in order to manage and control both this body of water as well as the vessels and bodies that travel across its space (235).[22] A variety of intersecting legal, economic, technological and enforcement-oriented practices, paired alongside and realized through the affordances of matter (of water, boats, the electromagnetic spectrum), shape the ongoing migration situation taking place within the Mediterranean Sea.[23] Snodgrass underlines how the affordances of particular forms of imagery, such as those that enable sea navigation (i.e. satellite mapping and GPS tracking of the territory) and those that circulate as a part of the racist media spectacle, enable the articulation of discriminatory discourses and troubling migration politics (253). This is how the entangled relationship between the cruel abstractions of surveillance technologies and racialized practices of media industry helps militarized states to enact and naturalize their violence.
As Rhee puts it, race is embedded in the history of surveillance technologies; which is to say, surveillance, as a technology of racial sorting and subjugation, shapes the dehumanizing tendencies of drone technology (2018: 164)[24]. According to Judith Butler, the visual field is never neutral to the question of racial violence since seeing is not a matter of direct perception but “the racial production of the visible, the workings of racial constraints on what it means to ‘see’” (Butler, 1993: 16). For example, drone vision turns all bodies into indistinct human morphologies that cannot be differentiated from one another. This pattern, however, does not render everybody equal because data are made visible in ways that can be made productive within existing regimes of power (Parks, 2017: 145).
Indeed, strategies of racial differentiation are restructured along the vertical axis of power since drone surveillance monitors and targets certain territories and people with a greater frequency and intensity. The abstractions of surveillance technologies and vision are violent, not only because of the destructive consequences of those abstractions, but also the racialized knowing that shapes the operationalization of those abstractions in the first place. Militarized drone strikes enact an “exclusionary politics of omniscient vision,” through which ambiguous visual information is operationalized within “functional categories” that “correspond to the needs and biases of the operators, not the targets, of surveillance” (Wall & Monahan, 2011: 240). Tyler Wall and Torin Monahan have coined the term “drone stare” to mark a corresponding type of surveillance that abstracts people from contexts, thereby reducing variation and noise (243). “Governmental technologies” and “political rationalities” shape the process of target identification by turning the information on potential target’s behaviors, and by extension the human targets themselves, into analyzable patterns (Shaw, 2013: 548-549); this is a reduction that ultimately transforms them into what Giorgio Agamben has termed “bare life”[25]. In the age of “big data,” uncertainty is presented as an information problem, which can be overcome with comprehensive data collection and statistical analysis that can identify patterns and relations between persons, places, and events (Wang, 2018: 238).[26]
The abstractions and erasures that underlie drone surveillance and vision rely on what Donna Haraway calls the “god-trick” of Western scientific epistemologies; they reproduce the illusion of being able to see everywhere from a disembodied position of “nowhere” (Wilcox, 2017: 13). Such dominant epistemologies underline long and complicated histories of militarism, colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy. As Rhee argues, drone warfare points to a broader racial violence at work that affirms the continued dominance of the figure of the Western, post-Enlightenment Subject, while rendering other populations governable and disposable. Indeed, the Other occupies a space in which there is “nothing to see” (Mirzoeff, 2011: 1). According to Mirzoeff, the nonhuman/non-European became a space in which there was “nothing to see,” not only through the invisibility or dehumanization of the colonized, but also through the idea of man’s superiority – promoted by the ideal of conquest of nature (Immanuel Kant) and of sovereign (Thomas Hobbes) (2011: 218).
As Mirzoeff highlights, visuality is a technique for the reproduction of the imaginaries through which the state-capital nexus justifies and maintains itself.[27] Interestingly, the opposite of the “right to look” is not censorship, but visuality:
This practice must be imaginary, rather than perceptual, because what is being visualized is too substantial for any one person to see and is created from information, images, and ideas. This ability to assemble a visualization manifests the authority of the visualizer. In turn, the authorizing of authority requires permanent renewal in order to win consent as the “normal,” or every day, because it is always already contested. The autonomy claimed by the right to look is thus opposed by the authority of visuality. But the right to look came first, and we should not forget it (2).
In the case of militarized drone strikes, the oversight and secrecy of the operations generate instances of absence and intangibility through which militarized states attempt to legitimize drone violence (Kearns, 2017). The ability to hide and deny a drone strike is not an insignificant side effect of this technology, but is instead a central part of its official campaigns. As Parks argues, it is precisely the issue of not being able to verify or confirm the identities of suspects that fuels counterterrorism as a dominant paradigm and drone warfare as its method of response (2017: 146). According to Roger Stahl, drone or satellite imagery manifests a way of seeing not only as a tool of strategic surveillance but also as a prism through which state violence publicly manifests. This way of seeing thus orients (the Western) publics’ relation to the state military complex through an array of signs, interfaces, and screens (2018: 67).[28]
On the left of Fig.1 (below), there is an enlargement of a satellite image at the presumed location (DigitalGlobe, March 31, 2012). On the right, there is the hole in the roof through which the drone missile entered the same building (MSNBC Broadcast, June 29, 2012). The team was unable to identify the hole in the roof because it was smaller than the size of a single pixel. Case: Miranshah, FATA, Pakistan, March 30, 2012. https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/drone-strike-in-miranshah
It has become increasingly difficult to detect these practices of violence traversing across multiple scales and durations, which points to what Eyal Weizman calls “violence at the threshold of detectability” (2017). The relationship between image resolution and missile size allows official institutions like the CIA “to neither confirm nor deny the existence of or nonexistence of such targeted assassination”[29]. As Fig.1 illustrates, the material and architectural signature of a drone strike (a hole on the roof that the missile went through) disappears under the threshold of detectability as the intricate particularities of physical damage are erased when rendered through the standard resolution that undergirds satellite imaging technologies and therefore also the publicly available images that they produce. This mode of erasure calls attention to instances of state secrecy as well as to the states’ efforts to exact violence and control over the means through which its own violence is publicly documented and rendered accessible. The pixelated resolution of these technologies and images is not only a technical result of optics and data-storage capacity, but it also determined legally with reference to security-oriented rationales: it is not only important details of strategic sites that are camouflaged in the 50cm/pixel, but the consequences of violence and violations as well (Weizman, 2017: 29). In other words, the denials of drone strikes are not only rhetorical gestures, but also amount to an active production of territorial, juridical, and visual characteristics that make this deniability possible. As Kearns puts it, “residue signifies processes of state violence that are ongoing in the present but that remain absent from the public sphere” (16).
This is why, as Mirzoeff emphasizes, the “right to look” is not merely about seeing. Rather, the right to look claims autonomy, not in the form of individualism or voyeurism, but as a claim to political subjectivity and collectivity. As Derrida captured through his conceptualization of the “invention of the other,” a recognition of the other is required in order to have a position from which to both claim a right and determine what is right (Mirzoeff, 2011: 1). This claiming enacts a mode of subjectivity that has the autonomy to arrange the relations of what is seeable and sayable. For Mirzoeff then, the right to look is not merely about seeing, but instead realizes a mode of subjectivity that is better able to confront the police who say to us, “move on, there’s nothing to see here”[30] (1). In this regard, Forensic Architecture mobilizes acts of witnessing, documenting, and evidence-making as counter-visual practices that are capable of inverting the asymmetrical relationship between individuals and militarized states. It is at this juncture that artistic collaborations might be able to generate critical insights and meaningful actions for enacting the right to look.
Forensic architecture: The right to look and counter-visuality
Fig.2 is from a session in which the eye witness helped with a digital reconstruction of the scene of the strike in a 3D-model. Düsseldorf, May 21, 2013. Case: Mir Ali, North Waziristan, October 4, 2010. Photo: Forensic Architecture. https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/drone-strike-in-mir-ali
Directed by Eyal Weizman and based at the University of London, Goldsmiths, Forensic Architecture is a collective of architects, software developers, filmmakers, investigative journalists, artists, scientists and lawyers. In the case of covert drone operations, their aim has been to describe, document, and prove the effects of these strikes on the ground. In each case, they cross-reference different types of data available to them, including satellite imagery, media reports, witness statements, and on-the-ground images when and if they could obtain them. In turn, they have provided their analysis to different groups who have used it to help seek accountability for drone strikes or who are involved in pursuing legal processes against states using or aiding drone warfare.
In the case of covert drone operations, the violence against people and their surroundings is often redoubled by the violence against the evidence (Weizman, 2014: 11-12). The material ruins are usually the only visible traces of a covert drone strike, and yet, as the earlier discussion exemplified, they are often at the threshold of detectability. People are invisible in publicly available satellite images, which are degraded, for reasons of privacy and security, to a resolution at which the human body from the aerial view disappears within the square of a single pixel (Weizman, 2017: 25-30). As a result, the space and occurrence of strike events need to be reconstructed based on different kinds of evidence, including evidence collected from a satellite image to an eye-witness report (Fig.2). A forensic-architectural problem arises here, forcing an examination of “the relation between an architectural detail, the media in which it could be captured, a general policy of killing, and its acts of denial” (27). Similar to Gibson’s ecological approach, Forensic Architecture reanimates material residue in an effort to expand the focus of analysis from the object to the field, which is characterized as “a thick fabric of lateral relations, associations and chains of actions between material things, large environments, individuals, and collective actions” (Weizman, 2014: 27).
In order to process this expanded field of information, Forensic Architecture takes advantage of new methods of evidence collection and develops relevant means of verification. They achieve this by harnessing the affordances that computational and networked media offer to such investigations. For instance, they use 3D modeling as an optical device through which to evoke the eye-witnesses’ memories of the strike event and reconstruct the scene despite the lack or messiness of the evidence. Significant in this case is their appropriation and repurposing of the technologies of measurement that are primarily designed and used within the military-industrial complex. It is these reoriented technologies that enable their direct, critical, and creative interventions into broader techniques and applications of evidence. They present their formulated evidence at public fora, such as international courts and art exhibitions, while expanding the perceptual and conceptual frames of these institutions[31]. Thus, Forensic Architecture inverts the forensic gaze by intervening in the means and practices of evidence collection, collation, and exhibition, which, when activated within political, legal, and media systems, work to expose coinciding forms of racialized technologies of state violence. By ultimately claiming “the right to look” as Nicholas Mirzoeff has articulated, they contest the politics of visuality and erasure through which militarized states attempt to legitimize drone warfare. Therefore, their investigations act not only as disclosures of covert drone operations, but also serve as a direct intervention into the very operationalization of drone technology as a technical, discursive, and political apparatus.
Forensic Architecture’s investigations underscore how ecological analysis helps to demonstrate the territorial, urban, and architectural dimensions of drone warfare; which is to say, its vertical mediations. As Weizman highlights, we can no longer rely on what is captured in single images, and should instead call upon what he refers to as “image complexes” (2015) (Fig.3). A time-space relation between hundreds of still images and videos generate multiple perspectives of the same incident, including views from the ground, air, and outer space. The act of seeing through this form of “image complex” is a multifaceted construction of a limitedly accessed strike event. Thus, architecture becomes useful not only as an object of analysis but rather as an optical device – as an additive and materially grounded way of seeing. For instance, their investigations develop frame-by-frame analysis or panoramic views of multiple visual materials where the angle of shadow/sun or a subtle surface disturbance detected on an image helps them to locate the strike, model the building, and reconstruct the trajectory of the missile. These images mark the intersection of ‘image complexes’ and the ‘images’ imprinted upon and through architectural materials, resulting in the emergence of what Weizman refers to as “architectural-image complexes.”
Animating the shadows cast of different days and at different times helped the team to model the scene through the shadows visible in the satellite and video images, thereby collaborating the volumes as well as determining the approximate time – 3pm – that the video was shot. Case: Miranshah, North Waziristan, March 30, 2012. Photo: Forensic Architecture. https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/drone-strike-in-miranshah
The practice of detecting and making sense of the material registers of strike events, especially when mediated through architectural-image complexes, can benefit a lot from the artistic insight. As Lawrence Abu Hamdan, one of the artists involved with the group puts it, environmental thinking plays a key role in the architectural mode of inverting the forensic gaze:
There are ways that truth claims, which are expressed or made differently to how the law or science delineate the truth, can be folded into the production of an artwork. And that’s a very important distinction to make, especially because law and science draw outlines around their objects. For example, law says: ‘This here is a millimeter-thin wood veneer that covers this cupboard as an object that is separated from the world in which it’s surrounded.’ Whereas I think that an artistic process of telling the truth is the opposite: it’s about blurring the line between the veneer, the door, the space and its reflections, taking into account its sound and all the other phenomena around it. This way of working is the extension of the way artists approach their work as a spatial and environmental practice; so that a video artist knows the electricity cable going to the screen is an important part of the work, or a painter knows the light conditions of the room are an element of the work. We are trained in this environmental way of thinking (Abu Hamdan, 2018).[32]
Abu Hamdan’s emphasis on environmental thinking recalls Gibson’s ecological understanding of perception or what he calls “ecological optics”. In contrast with analytical and physical optics, which reduce objects and surfaces within the environment to points and atoms, ecological optics consider the reciprocal dynamics of environmental relations as well as the movement of the observer ([1979] 2015: 59; 80-81). Similarly, Forensic Architecture’s investigations retrieve the thickness of surfaces and bodies involved in the strike event, thereby rendering it tangible, and thus contestable[33]. In contrast to the abstractions and erasures through which drone technology operates as a racialized apparatus, Forensic Architecture’s counter-visual practice restores the context within which the operationalization of militarized drone strikes is embedded. According to Weizman, they are “building narratives, not only dismantling state ones, by cross-referencing different kinds of aesthetic products such as images, films, haptic materiality, memory, language and testimony.”[34];[35] The forensic-architectural model is not composed of a series of visual perceptions in a given physical space, but is instead formed by a set of relations that combine information, imagination, and insight into a rendition of physical and psychic place. In contrast to the authoritarian and objective discourse of science, “counter-forensics”[36] is politically committed and motivated by the sense of solidarity (Weizman, 2014: 13).
Through their revisitation of the critical affordances of ecological thinking, Forensic Architecture heightens the investigative capacity of architectural methods and artistic insight. These are further elevated through their production and presentation of evidence through the form of public address and political claims. Unlike recent trends within the field of human rights and international law, Forensic Architecture’s investigations do not identify a solid object as the provider of a stable and fixed alternative to the human uncertainties and anxieties that are part of the practice of testimony and evidence. According to Weizman, forensic aesthetics:
[…] is not simply a return to a pre-Kantian aesthetics in which the sensing object was prioritized over the sensing subject – rather, it involves a combination of the two. Material aesthetics is merely the first layer of a multidimensional concept that Thomas Keenan and I called forensic aesthetics. Forensic aesthetics is not only the heightened sensitivity of matter or of the field, but relies on these material findings being brought into a forum. Forensic aesthetics comes to designate the techniques and technologies by which things are interpreted, presented, and mediated in the forum, that is, the modes and processes by which matter becomes a political agent (2014: 15).
Forensic Architecture expands the material residue over the thick fabric of relations between material things, discursive practices, and collective actions. In other words, their investigations acknowledge the historicity of discursive and technological systems (legal, media, etc.) within which the material residue is generated, documented, and represented. In this vein, Forensic Architecture’s investigations activate the political affordances of the material trace. These affordances do not only retroactively restore the critical potential of matter, but the material traces that they hinge upon also become viable grounds through which to transmit information about strike events to the public, thus generating a possibility for a collective action.
What is ultimately at stake here is Forensic Architecture’s activation of the right to look. As noted before, the right to look is a claim to a political collectivity by reorganizing the fields of what is seeable and sayable, thereby opposing the authority which seeks to legitimize its domination with the practice of visuality. As Mirzoeff emphasizes, visuality supplements the violence of authority by presenting authority as self-evident, that “division of the sensible whereby domination imposes the sensible evidence of its legitimacy” (Rancière, [1998] 2007: 17 as cited in Mirzoeff, 3)[37]. In contrast, counter-visuality opposes the “unreality” created by the authority and proposes a real alternative.
Finally, Forensic Architecture repurposes computationally-informed technologies for connecting singular events to larger patterns of contemporary warfare. For instance, their investigations reveal connections between spatial patterns of drone strikes and the increased number of civilian casualties that are concretized within the militarized states’ reorganization of urban spaces and policing strategies.[38];[39] Indeed, their investigations do not only render the events and sites of covert drone operations visible but also trace the continuum along seemingly dissociated spatial and temporal relations underlying the contemporary technologies of visuality, surveillance, and violence that are operational to the current neoliberal governance at a global scale. For example, militarized drone strikes are based on predictive algorithms that are not unlike those used in the technical analysis of the financial stock market or environmental degradation, all of which interpret and display future outcomes by analyzing past patterns[40].
Surely, all these incidents are not the same; however, when mapped together, they demonstrate that any effective analysis of militarized drone technology as a complex technical, discursive, and political apparatus must explore the interconnections – spatial, vertical, and historical – that it exposes or produces. In this regard, the “right to look” in Mirzoeff’s terms takes the form of this very mapping that resituates affordances of militarized drone technology within larger flows of aesthetics, violence, and capital. Ultimately, the affordances of any given technology cannot be thought in isolation from its compositional affordances, namely the affordances which it is enabled by and which it helps to make possible; which is to say, its historicity.
Conclusion
By drawing upon the critical scholarship on drone warfare, this article argues that drones mistargeting civilians is neither exception nor error but central to the operation of and rationale behind militarized drone strikes. The historical overview of its cultural imaginaries and biopolitical formations reconfigures drone technology as an apparatus of racialized state violence. Thus, militarized drone strikes operate through a set of political, territorial, and juridical reconfigurations, which make the rationale of drone technology far more diffuse than the straight line between an aircraft and a target (Weizman, 2014: 369). Here, I find Lisa Parks’ notion of “vertical mediation” and Eric Snodgrass’ understanding of “compositional affordances” useful to reformulate the concept of affordance as a form of mediation that cuts across material and discursive systems that animate militarized drone operations today. There arises the question of how material and discursive systems shape the possibilities and actualizations of certain affordances over others, which is to ask, how affordances of a given technology emerge within and help to intensify or negotiate the existing regimes of power.
In the case of covert drone operations, the violence against people and surroundings is redoubled by the violence against the evidence (Weizman, 2014: 11-12). The material ruins are usually the only visible traces of a covert drone strike but they are often at the threshold of detectability. Thus, Forensic Architecture inverts the forensic gaze by intervening into the means and practices of evidence within political, legal, and media systems that animate this specific form of racialized technology of state violence. By claiming “the right to look” in Nicholas Mirzoeff’s terms, they contest the politics of visuality, through which militarized states attempt to legitimize drone warfare. Therefore, their investigations act not only as disclosure of covert drone operations, but also a direct intervention into this very operationalization of drone technology as a technical, discursive, and political apparatus.
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Notes
[1] According to the statistics of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the U.S. drone operations in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, and Afghanistan caused between 769 and 1,725 civilian deaths since the bureau began recording data. For further information on drone numbers, see the related site of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism: https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/projects/drone-war
[2] There is a huge disparity in civilian death tolls between the U.S. official reports and other resources (e.g. reports prepared by other states, NGOs, journalists, and independent investigators), which is largely caused by the U.S. method of counting who is an enemy combatant. According to U.S. drone policy, a “military-aged male” is defined as any man who is an adolescent or older. Any military-aged male who is killed in a drone strike is classified as an enemy combatant unless posthumous evidence to the contrary is provided. However, the U.S. has no procedure in place to determine whether someone who was killed by its drone strikes was a civilian or an enemy combatant. The remains of the dead are often unidentifiable due to the intensity of the damage caused by missiles. For further information, see: Living under Drones: Death, Injury, and Trauma to Civilians from US Drone Practices in Pakistan (International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic, Stanford Law School and Global Justice Clinic, NYU School of Law, 2012). As of March 2019, the U.S. President Donald Trump revoked the Obama-era requirement that U.S. intelligence officials publicly report the number of civilians killed by U.S. drone strikes outside its active war zones.
[3] With this term, Parks refers to the process of visualization of data (e.g. temperature) “that take on the biophysical contours of a human body while its surface appearance remains invisible and its identity unknown” (145). Parks examines aerial infrared drone imagery, which is able to isolate suspects according to the energy emitted by their bodies. In this regard, Parks argues that visual surveillance practices are extended beyond epidermalization while operating within a radiographic episteme and at spectral levels.
[4] In her examination of U.S. hegemony after 9/11, Parks coins the term “vertical hegemony” which “involves efforts to maneuver through, activate technologies within, occupy, or control the vast stretch of space between the earth’s surface and the outer limits of orbit as well as the kinds of activities that can occur there” (2018: 3). The struggle for vertical hegemony is based on the predominant assumption that controlling the vertical field that satellite, aircraft, and broadcasting operate through is equivalent to controlling life on Earth.
[5] Gibson’s theory of ecological perception was rooted in his wartime research with aircraft and pilots while appointed at the U.S. army. During the Second World War, Gibson became interested in pictures and films as a psychologist concerned with training young soldiers to fly airplanes (Gibson, [1979] 2015: 261-262).
[6] Parikka connects Gibson’s “ecology of visual perception” to the works of media/cultural theorists as well as philosophers, whose works contribute to what is characterized as “milieu-medium theory” (2010: 169-171).
[7] Forensic Architecture conducted detailed case study analyses of the U.S.’ and Israel’s drone strikes that took place in Pakistan, Yemen, and Gaza: Datta Khel, North Waziristan, March 16-17, 2011; Mir Ali, North Waziristan, October 4, 2010; Miranshah, North Waziristan, March 30, 2012; Beit Lahiya, Gaza, January 9, 2009; Jaar and al Wade’a, Abyan Province, Yemen, 2011. For further information on Forensic Architecture’s investigations of covert drone strikes as well as their broader investigations of air strikes, please refer to the relevant pages of their website: https://forensic-architecture.org/category/airstrikes
[8] The information is gathered from the following websites of Forensic Architecture: https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/projects/drone-war and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/projects/drone-war
[9] The current U.S. President Donald Trump inherited the framework of drone operations outside the declared battlefields from his predecessor, Barack Obama. Nonetheless, strikes doubled in Somalia and tripled in Yemen in 2017, the first year of Trump’s presidency:
[10] According to Derek Gregory, the U.S. has capitalized on and contributed to a series of overt legal maneuvers through which the FATA has been constituted as what Giorgio Agamben has called more generally a “space of exception”: a space in which “a particular group of people is knowingly and deliberately exposed to death through the political-juridical removal of legal protections and affordances that would otherwise be available to them” (2017: 28-29).
[11] Feldman, K. (2011) ‘Empire’s Verticality: The Af/Pak Frontier, Visual Culture and Racialization from Above’, Comparative American Studies, 9(4): 325-241.
[12] Allinson, J. (2015) ‘The Necropolitics of Drones,’ International Political Sociology, 9(2): 120.
[13] Referencing Foucault, Mirzoeff argues that the goal of counterinsurgency is not to generate stability. Instead, it normalizes “the disequilibrium of forces manifested in war,” not as politics, but as “cultural,” the web of meaning in a given place and time” (307).
[14] Upadhyay, N. (2013) ‘Pernicious Continuities: Un/Settling Violence, Race and Colonialism,’ Sikh Formations 9(2): 263-268.
[15] Here, Rhee refers to Wall and Monahan’s emphasis on the commonality of the strategies and disproportionate targeting between the U.S.’ domestic war on crime (e.g. New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk program) and the global war on terror.
[16] Here, Rhee draws upon the works of Denise Da Silva and Sylvia Wynter as well as Nishant Upadhyay (135-136).
[17] Cybernetics’ premises of control and predictability cannot be thought in isolation from the constant threat of nuclear warfare during the Cold War. According to Joseph Masco, the U.S. Global War on Terror mobilized a wide range of affective, conceptual, and institutional resources established during the Cold War (e.g. existential danger and state secrecy). See: Masco, J. (2014). The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold war to the War on Terror. Durham: Duke University Press.
[18] Here, Halpern uses the term “virtuality” in terms of possibility rather than a simulation.
[19] For this particular point, Wilcox draws upon Katherine N. Hayles’ book How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (University of Chicago Press, 1999).
[20] Kember, S. & Zylinska, J. (2012) Life after New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
[21] Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, p. 3.
[22] Snodgrass draws upon the Forensic Oceanography project, undertaken by Charles Heller and Lorenzo Pezzani who are part of the Forensic Architecture team. For further information: https://www.forensic-architecture.org/case/left-die-boat/
[23] Rancière, J. (2011) “Ten Theses on Politics,” Translated by Rachel Bowlby, Davide Panagia, and Jacques Rancière, Theory and Event 5(3): 217.
[24] Here, Rhee refers to Simone Browne’s book Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), which demonstrates how the history of surveillance is entangled with the history of transatlantic slavery and the continued targeting of blackness.
[25] See Agamben, G. ([1995] 1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen). Stanford: Stanford University Press.
[26] As Wang argues, data is interpreted and visualized not as a reflection of empirical reality; rather, data extraction and visualization actively construct the reality and predict the future, which has material consequences in the present.
[27] According to Mirzoeff, “visuality’s first domains were the slave plantations, monitored by the surveillance of the overseer, the surrogate of the sovereign. This sovereign surveillance was reinforced by violent punishment and sustained a modern division of labor. From the 18th century onward, visualizing was the hallmark of the modern general, since the battlefield became too extensive and complex for any one person physically to see” (2011: 2). Visualizing became a task for maintaining the authority of the visualizer above and beyond the visualizer’s material power. Also see: Mirzoeff, N. (2014) ‘Visualizing the Anthropocene,’ Public Culture, 26(2): 213-232.
[28] By the Gulf War of the early 1990s, the view through high-tech weapons, such as smart or seeing bombs, became publicly available and came to dominate the Western perception of wars at a distance. As Roger Stahl emphasizes, the “weaponized gaze” restructured the civic sphere as an extension of the military, governing the relationship between civil and military spheres in the West (2018). Eventually, this gaze has evolved into “a powerful means through which the military-industrial complex apprehends civic consciousness” (3).
[29] Taken from the video prepared by Forensic Architecture:
https://www.forensic-architecture.org/case/drone-strikes/
[30] See Rancière, J. (1998) Aux bords de la politique. Paris: Gallimard.
[31] Even though it is beyond the scope of this paper, it is important to highlight the changing dynamics of the presentation and reception of Forensic Architecture’s reports. As they move from one region/institution to another, the audience, actions, and meanings they engage with also keep changing and lead to different political implications.
[32] The quote is taken from an interview with Lawrence Abu Hamdan, conducted by Mohammad Salemy, published on April 6, 2018 and accessed on March 6th, 2019. Available at:
https://ocula.com/magazine/conversations/lawrence-abu-hamdan/
[33] Drone images, captured by drones and transmitted to the operators, are exemplary of what Harun Farocki calls “operational images,” referring to the images that do not represent an object but instead constitute a part of an operation. As Farocki suggested these images are devoid of social intent, not meant for a reflection. Similarly, Paul Virilio traces a co-constitution of militaristic and cinematic ways of seeing in the 20th century with the rise of aviation technologies, subsumed by his notion of “logistics of perception”. In this regard, Forensic Architecture performs a counter-visual practice in Mirzoeff’s terms that contests and converts the operational aesthetics of militarized drone vision.
[34] https://frieze.com/article/id-rather-lose-prizes-and-win-cases-interview-eyal-weizman-turner-prize-nominated-forensic
[35] Even though this article’s focus is on the politics of visuality, both Weizman and Abu Hamdan’s emphasis on the multimodality of the aesthetic mode of analysis speaks to how violence and investigations of that violence can operate through means other than the visual; like sound. For further examination of the role of sound in drone warfare, see: Schuppli, S. (2014) ‘Uneasy Listening,’ in: Forensic Architecture, ed., Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth. Berlin: Stenberg Press, pp. 381-392.
[36] Keenan, T. (2014) ‘Photography and Counter-forensics,’ Grey Room, no. 55.
[37] Rancière, J. ([1998] 2007) The Future of the Image (trans. G. Elliott). New York: Verso.
[38] In a collaboration with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Forensic Architecture developed a platform, which provides a spatial analysis of the drone strikes in the frontier regions of Pakistan between 2004 and 2014. This mapping shows that as buildings become the most common targets for drone operations, the casualties have predominantly occurred inside them, thereby indicating a relation between target type, location and casualty count: http://wherethedronesstrike.com/
[39] Eyal Weizman discusses in depth how a city can operate as an apparatus with which warfare is designed and conducted in the case of Israel’s Architecture of Occupation of Palestine. This is also where he tackles the politics of verticality: Weizman, E. (2007) Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. New York, NY: Verso.
[40] The associations, which algorithms work through, escape the laws of cause and effect, as they rely on correlational patterns, and thus operate in a fluid state of exception. Predictive algorithms encompass the financial sector, the military-security nexus, and the entertainment industry. See Abreu, Manuel. “Incalculable Loss”, The New Inquiry. August, 2014. https://thenewinquiry.com/incalculable-loss/
Özgün Eylül İşcen is a PhD candidate in the Program of Computational Media, Arts and Cultures at Duke University, United States. Her dissertation examines the historical and current applications of computational media within the context of the Middle East and underlines wider flows of technology, culture, and capital. She received her BA in Sociology from Koç University, Turkey, and MA in Interactive Arts and Technology from Simon Fraser University, Canada.
Email: eyluliscen@gmail.com
This article is from the special issue, Rethinking Affordance (Media Theory 3.1), edited by Ashley Scarlett and Martin Zeilinger.
The official version of record is available here: http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/86
The full issue is available here: http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/issue/view/4
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