How to Share Space with a Drone: James Bridle’s Drone Shadow at the Imperial War Museum
摘要
Responding to weaponized drones and their deployment, James Bridle’s art series Drone Shadows (2012–ongoing) engages with verticality, invisibility and subjecthood in art viewership. The artwork interrogates the obfuscation of information surrounding both the aircraft and the operational program of which they are part. Bridle’s published instructions on how to make one’s own Drone Shadow bring this work into the public domain, challenging notions of authorship, authenticity, ownership of public space and institutionalised art-viewing. My chapter asks, how are the concepts of verticality, subjecthood and targeting interrogated by Drone Shadows? In what ways does this representation capture and/or resist the drone’s operational strategies? What is the effect of the wider context of the Imperial War Museum—and its colonial history—as the site of display of Bridle’s work? How can art viewership function as resistance to a form of war that ruptures the citizen body’s relation to space and place? To explore these questions, I respond to (among other criticism) work on war’s impact on human rights by Lisa Parks, Caren Kaplan and Eyal Weizman, and writing on drone warfare by Jordan Crandall, James Bridle and Derek Gregory. I discuss the datasphere through work by Sarah Lucie, following Mark B. N. Hansen. I draw on my own ethnographically framed viewing of Bridle’s work that took place during the IWM’s exhibition Age of Terror: Art Since 9/11 in 2017.