The art of watching: military drones in 21st century visual artwork

Military drones have been in operation in various forms since the First World War, and in their present-day incarnation since 2004. The technology of unilateral remote warfare develops continuously, and with it, an ever-rising threat to human lives and freedom from an array of actors, mostly state powers, that seek to use oppressive force against civilian populations. These tools are characterised by an inscrutability that renders them illegible to the majority of the world’s inhabitants: those in a position to be targeted or otherwise victimised by them. Drones are represented by many political visual artists, whose work represents military operations and resources in ways that recontextualise the processes of visual targeting enacted by the drones themselves. In this thesis I explore in what ways certain visual artists’ work enacts this renegotiation, and how it informs us of the impact by drones and their visual politics onto our human relation with visuality. I consider in particular the oppositional relation that drones and visual art have with temporality, and how the operative strategies of slowness and simultaneity arise in technology and in art. To explore these questions, I enact a self-conscious gesture of slow art-watching, which emphasizes a returning gaze and an associative writing style, to combat the inscrutability of the drone and to elicit a meaning-making dialogue between myself and the artworks I discuss. My work takes place over four chapters, in which I view artworks that each bear a different relation to the representation of the drone and its operations. Following a variety of theorists’ work, particularly that of T.J. Clark and Ariella Azoulay, I create a slow incision into the scholarship of military drones and political art, enacting a gesture of looking that uncovers what it means to see and be seen in a world shared with remote weapons.