1 Samuel 26:10
As surely as the LORD lives,” he said, “the LORD himself will strike him, or his time will come and he will die, or he will go into battle and perish.
As surely as the LORD lives,” he said, “the LORD himself will strike him, or his time will come and he will die, or he will go into battle and perish.
A giant art installation targets predator drone operators
In military slang, Predator drone operators often refer to kills as ‘bug splats’, since viewing the body through a grainy video image gives the sense of an insect being crushed.
To challenge this insensitivity as well as raise awareness of civilian casualties, an artist collective installed a massive portrait facing up in the heavily bombed Khyber Pukhtoonkhwa region of Pakistan, where drone attacks regularly occur. Now, when viewed by a drone camera, what an operator sees on his screen is not an anonymous dot on the landscape, but an innocent child victim’s face.
The installation is also designed to be captured by satellites in order to make it a permanent part of the landscape on online mapping sites.
The project is a collaboration of artists who made use of the French artist JR’s ‘Inside Out’ movement. Reprieve/Foundation for Fundamental Rights helped launch the effort which has been released with the hashtag #NotABugSplat
Children gather around the installation
Ground view of the gigantic poster of the child victim.
The child featured in the poster is nameless, but according to FFR, lost both her parents and two young siblings in a drone attack.
The group of artists traveled inside KPK province and, with the assistance of highly enthusiastic locals, unrolled the poster amongst mud huts and farms. It is their hope that this will create empathy and introspection amongst drone operators, and will create dialogue amongst policy makers, eventually leading to decisions that will save innocent lives.
Drone Art Project Hopes To Make Pilots Think Twice Before They Shoot
The Huffington Post
Apr/07/2014
By giving a face to the victims of drone strikes abroad, a powerful new art project is forcing U.S. drone pilots and policy makers to ponder the deadly consequences of one of America’s key counterterrorism programs. Two weeks ago, artists gathered in a rural community of Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province to unveil a gigantic portrait of a local child whose parents and siblings were allegedly killed by missiles fired from a U.S. drone.
The installation can be seen from the cameras of drones that are known to fly over the region and is called #NotABugSplat, in reference to the slang used by the military for a man killed in a drone strike. This type of dehumanization of war is exactly what the project is trying to rally against. As the artists explain on their website, it is their hope the project “will create empathy and introspection amongst drone operators, and will create dialogue amongst policy makers.”
While the visage of a Pakistani child is front and center to the project, the artists behind it have chosen to remain largely faceless, referring to themselves simply as an artist collective in Pakistan and the U.S., who made use of the French artist JR’s Inside Out movement. The exact location of the installation is also unknown, as the media spokesman for the group has previously declined to specify its whereabouts out of concern for the safety of the locals.
#NotABugSplat is one of many projects that attempt to raise awareness of what has been a deadly element of President Barack Obama’s light-footprint foreign policy. U.S. drone strikes are believed to have killed over 2,400 people in the past five years. The strikes are an incredibly contentious issue in countries such as Yemen and Pakistan, with protests over the killing of civilians and violation of national sovereignty abound.
UPDATE Tuesday April 8: In a statement to The Huffington Post, French artist JR described the #NotABugSplat installation as a “fantastic use of the Inside Out Project.”
“For the past 3 years, with Inside Out, people have been using art and their faces to express a statement – we have sent over 200,000 posters in more than 110 countries,” JR said. “In this case the local artists were very courageous and achieved an incredible outcome in order to raise awareness on civilian casualties made by the use of drones in Pakistan. They definitely managed to express a statement in a powerful manner,” he added.
