The above image is an aerial view of a 100’x70′ vinyl banner entitled “Not a Bug Splat,” depicting a Pakistani girl said to have survived a drone attack that took the lives of her parents and either “two siblings” or “a sibling” (the information at Democracy Now! is inconsistent). A product of collaboration between French, American, and Pakistani artists and activists (or activist-artists or artist-activists), the work takes its title from jargon referring to computer-generated bomb damage models.
Our friend b psycho asked for comment, and my twitter response was that “as a political gesture it’s pointed, possibly late” and that “there’s a second order of intention or meaning to it.” I now have some time to expand on the thoughts, if not yet to incorporate them into a theory of The Drones, a project whose urgency has subsided along with the frequency of drone attacks1: thus the “possibly late” part of the reply tweet.
Notes:
- As was predictable. [↩]