Remote Control consists of 64 still images appropriated from unclassified videos of Coalition airstrikes from U.S Military Central Command. Using the grid as a multivalent structure, the piece aims to expose the increasingly powerful impact that technology has on our understanding of warfare. Advancing technologies allow an enemy to be surveilled, targeted and killed at a distance using unmanned drone airplanes that are fully automated on a computer screen. Although these strikes occur frequently and have caused many civilian casualties in foreign countries, we remain mostly unaware of the nature of the attacks. The process is ultimately dehumanizing as both aggressor and quarry become disembodied.

The structure of the grid indicates both an underlying world-order and complete dissociation from reality. The frames of Remote Control invite the viewer to experience the confines of the screen, a domain so familiar and yet so very far removed from the real world. The chessboard offers the viewer an ordered system while at the same time exposing technological warfare as a series of artful strategies, a game played through a computer screen. The white squares on the grid represent the attacker’s view moments before the missile is dropped. The black squares are images created at the moment of detonation, when the light generated by the explosion blinds the camera. The language of the grid is also evocative of the way in which the distribution of power has changed from a horizontal to a vertical form of control, dividing foreign land into a conquerable virtual territory. As the spectator moves across the space, they must read the destructive horror of the drone from a height, and as they look down they are both implicated and removed.