If U.S. citizens knew how it felt to be targeted by deadly flying robots, it might shape domestic attitudes toward the Obama administration’s drone program. Artist Tomas Van Houtryve is using video and photography to foster that discussion by putting average Americans under drone-like surveillance.
“The drone has become the preferred tool of the ‘War on Terror,'” says Van Houtryve. “We live in the most media-connected age ever, and yet the American public has no visual narrative of the drone war. This is a secret war, making it easier to push to the back of our minds or only think about in abstract terms.”
To make the abstract real with his series Blue Sky Days, Van Houtryve mounted his DSLR on a quadcopter he bought online. He flew it over weddings, funerals, groups in prayer, and people exercising in public places—circumstances in which people have been killed by U.S. drone strikes abroad. “We're told that the drone program saves American lives, and that civilian casualties are avoided with the surgical precision [of the technology]. The former claim is true, the latter is seriously in doubt,” says Van Houtryve.
The Obama administration doesn't release a lot of details, so firm figures are hard to come by. But the Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates unmanned aerial vehicles have killed between 2,296 and 3,718 people, as many as 957 of them civilians. Last week, Dr. Larry Lewis of the CNA Corporation, a non-profit research and analysis organization, called on the government to to gather and disclose more accurate data regarding civilian casualties from drone strikes. Many of these strikes are covert, which makes it difficult for the public to even know about them, let alone debate their merits. "If a technology with extremely powerful spying and killing capabilities is shielded from public scrutiny there is bound to be abuse,” says Van Houtryve.
Because the government's drone program is shrouded in such mystery, Van Houtryve 's work has drawn tremendous interest from the media, curators and NGOs. “They’ve reached out to me for partnerships more than with any of my previous subjects,” he says. “There is a hunger to know more.”
Blue Sky Days was produced in partnership with Harper's Magazine and was first published across 16-pages in its April 2014 issue. It is the longest photo essay in Harper's 164-year history. Additional support came from a Getty Images Grant and the Pulitzer Center.
“When Tomas first told me he was planning to create a photo project about domestic and foreign drone policy, I was immediately intrigued. His idea was daring, elegant, and perfectly timed,” says Stacey D. Clarkson, Art Director for Harper’s Magazine.
To accompany his photographs, Van Houtryve made In Drones We Trust, a video of collected live feeds transmitted from the drone to his ground station. Grain and glitches record the natural interference of low-res black-and-white transmissions and the footage is overlaid with communication audio of drone strikes.
The voiceover in In Drones We Trust comes from Lynn Hill, a Predator drone intel analyst: "God is always watching over me. He knows everything I'm doing and everything I've done. The Predator is not God, but I think for the sake of safety I would rather have ... my safety be taken first over my privacy." Hill's chilling point of view goes to the heart of the drone debate: Are we willing to forgo our civil liberties in order to achieve a sense of safety? And, how do we know that privacy and safety connect in the ways we are told by governments?
In Drones We Trust has only been released online as 15-second teaser clips on Instagram. The full 5-minute film is currently on show at the New York Media Center, as part of the Surveillance.1.0-USA exhibit.
“All the surveilled situations are very banal," says Liza Faktor, curator of Surveillance.1.0-USA. “In Drones We Trust tries to recreate what you would feel like if a drone strike came out of nowhere—if one hit a New York playground, for example.”
Colliding the mechanical with the personal, Van Houtryve captions his images with statistics about drone strikes, deaths and casualties. The title Blue Sky Days is personal too. It is inspired by a testimony by 13-year-old Zubair Rehman at a 2013 congressional briefing in Washington D.C. Rehman’s grandmother was killed by a drone strike in northeast Pakistan as she picked okra in her village. Rehman was injured by shrapnel in the attack.
“I no longer love blue skies,” said Rehman to U.S. lawmakers. “In fact, I now prefer gray skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are grey.”
The crisp photographs in Blue Sky Days are gripping. Van Houtryve captures decisive moments even with equipment that is remote and impersonal. In one photograph, a flower girl at a wedding looks up when all others are oblivious to the looming drone. She meets the robotic menace with her own direct stare.
The video In Drones We Trust doesn't forge new aesthetic ground with his video. Due in large part to WikiLeaks’ Collateral Murder video and official military releases, we are quite familiar with POV military footage. Instead, Van Houtryve is adding to a young trend in which artists and activists toy with subverting the visuals of drone warfare.
John Vigg has his Google surveilled drone research labs and airports; Jamie Bridle traced a drone shadow in Washington D.C. last year and launched Dronestagram to populate social media sites with satellite views of drone strike sites; Josh Begley’s App MetaData alerts users to drone strikes; Trevor Paglen has photographed drones at distance; Raphaella Dallaporte took a drone to Afghanistan under the auspices of archaeological surveying; and most recently Not A Bug Splat is attempting to tweak the consciences of drone operators by putting giant portraits of children in their sights. Artworks such as these are direct challenges to the manipulated distance at which drone warfare is conducted and the human lives it extinguishes.
“The only two factors which tend to push the American public to question U.S. military campaigns," says Van Houtryve, "Are the deaths of U.S. service men and woman, or media coverage of the horrors of war on innocent civilians. The drone program manages to quash both factors, greatly facilitating it's continuation and expansion.”
He hopes his work can provide another entry point to this largely abstracted issue.
“It is clear that drones touch a nerve with the public,” he says. “Especially when presented in a way that brings them close to home.”
*Correction: In the original article we stated that Van Houtryve used a GoPro to film In Drones We Trust and that effects were added in post production. He in fact used a high-resolution camera, from which he recorded a live video feed transmitted to his ground station. No effects were added in the post-production of *In Drones We Trust.
