Richard Whittle knows a great deal about the Predator. Not the 1987 movie; rather, the General Atomics MQ-1 Predator surveillance and strike drone, which Whittle contends started the drone revolution. Indeed, the Predator’s distinctive profile has become a symbol for drones in general: ask the average person what a drone …
High & Low Bureau is a curatorial duo comprised of Yael Messer and Gilad Reich. Their work explores how power, technology, and activism interact in the 21st Century. Their latest show, Decolonized Skies, explores the ways in which artists and activists have worked to reappropriate the aerial view from the surveillance …
In the span of less than two years, Joe Noci and his wife, Gisela, went from working in the aeronautical drone industry in South Africa to building conservation drones out of their home in Namibia. Their SurVoyeur drones, which the Nocis design and build from scratch, have proven to be …
This is an excerpt from an interview published on Bookforum.com In 1999, Richard A. Clarke, the US Counterterrorism Czar for Clinton and Bush, wanted to attach Hellfire missiles to unarmed Predator drones so that he could kill Osama bin Laden. In the months before September 11, Predators set their cameras …
Tomas van Houtryve is a prolific photojournalist who explores conflict and state-sponsored surveillance. In March, Harpers Magazine published a folio of his photographs titled “Blue Sky Days,” the longest folio in the magazine’s 164 year history. The photos, which van Houtryve took with a small drone over everyday spaces and scenes in …
Published in conjunction with Motherboard.- VICE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vZzqjKIBNc KATSU is an artist and vandal. His work pushes our idea of what can be achieved with the graffiti artist’s limited tool set. Having established himself as one of New York City’s most prolific and imaginative taggers in the 1990s, KATSU garnered admiration from …
Ryan Calo is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Washington. His work addresses a daunting question: “How should our legal system respond to the inevitable proliferation of autonomous robots in domestic life?” Calo is often looked to as a leading expert on the legal implications of domestic …
James Bridle is the creator of bold artistic interventions into the contemporary drone debate. He is perhaps best known for his Drone Shadows, 1:1 scale paint outlines of U.S. military drones, which he has painted on sidewalks, roadways, and parking lots in the U.K., Turkey, Norway and the U.S. His …
While the public conversation about drones is dynamic and vibrant, it has often failed to represent the voice of industry beyond the single soundbyte. The likely reason is that industry figures often resist the very word “drone,” which hapens to be the definitive, unifying piece of vocabulary around which the …
Daniel Klaidman is the author of Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency, which has become a seminal text on the inner workings of the Obama administration’s covert drone war. Klaidman is an investigative correspondent for The Daily Beast/Newsweek, writing about the intersection …
Trevor Paglen is a photographer, writer and investigator. His work takes aim at the U.S. government’s network of secret facilities and programs that have burgeoned since September 11; as he puts it, this means that “there is very little evidentiary material in the images that I create.” His interest in …
Nobody outside of the U.S. government knows exactly how many drone strikes have happened in the War on Terror. But we do know a great deal more than we would have known if it hadn’t been for the work of Alice K. Ross. Ross heads The London-based Bureau of Investigative …
