Alex Quicho

Under the drone's shadow, there is no guise of equal combat and little chance of escape. Instead, its presence signifies pure dominance: ludicrously expensive, surgically accurate, and tightly engineered, it has been designed for Western hegemony, utterly to spec. The singular dread of the military drone — known best as the Reaper or Predator, with their domed, Beluga-like heads, backthrust wings, and gunmetal grey bodies — is complicated by civilian drones, which, in their accessibility, offer more hopeful horizons. And yet it has become clear that technologies developed for the military cannot be de-militarised: instead, it is our civilian sphere that is becoming increasingly weaponised. 

This tripartite text examines how military technologies become utterly mundane, and considers how these developments are changing how we see ourselves and each other. These essays appear in the order of the drone’s own life cycle, moving from military to civilian to transhuman. An essay on Laura Poitras’ Bed Down Location (2016) and the nature of militarised sight is followed by a meditation on Anne Imhof’s Angst II (2016) and its atmosphere of constant anxiety. A narrative about Korakrit Arunanondchai’s Painting with History in a Room Full of People with Funny Names 3 (2015) concludes the project, where the drone is cast not as an agent of death but of the afterlife. 

Unlovable, morally suspect, the drone nonetheless contains multitudes. Its inhuman nature has lent it human or animal qualities in our collective imagination. It’s paranoid, lingering, eroticised, intuitive. It watches predatorily; it waits and then strikes. A net of relationships keeps it suspended in the sky. Still, if it can be said that consciousness, action, and intuition can be transferred into the drone, what then happens to its human minders? And what happens to its victims — living, for better or worse, under vertical control?