Drones as Machines of Sacrifice: Enframing the Zoological Components of On-Screen Warfare

Abstract

This article examines how drone warfare transforms the targeted region into a zone of indistinction governed by anthropocentrism. Alwazir’s ‘Yemen Inside Out’, Behram’s ‘Not a Bugsplat’ portrait, and Chishty’s drone art undo the dehumanising rhetoric of ‘Bugsplat’, the US drone software, by redefining the distance between what is being targeted on the ground and drone pilots conducting on-screen assaults from above. Theorising the relegation of right-bearing humanness to the marginalised status of bare insecthood, I draw on Heidegger’s notion of distance, nearness, and the disappearance of nearness between the viewer and what is being viewed on a screen. I then invoke Agamben’s understanding of nearness, as I demonstrate how the artwork I examine enacts a distinctive subversion of Bugsplat’s political anthropocentrism and a challenge to the portrayal of the loss of life as something as easily erasable as the splat that the killing of an insect leaves on a surface.