Contesting post-digital futures: drone warfare and the geo-politics of aerial surveillance in the middle east
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Contesting post‑digital futures: drone warfare and the geo‑politics of aerial surveillance in the middle east Heba Y. Amin1 · Anthony Downey2 Accepted: 13 September 2020 © Springer Nature Limited 2020
Abstract The following conversation with artist Heba Y. Amin draws upon a series of projects that we have been working over an 18 month period, including our volume Heba Y Amin: The General’s Stork (Sternberg Press, 2020) and her solo UK show, “When I see the future, I close my eyes”, at the Mosaic Rooms (London), 1/10/20–28/03/21. Throughout the conversation, we focus on the research background to The General’s Stork, alongside other works, and the threat presented by drone-based forms of aerial surveillance and targeting across the Middle East. In particular, we enquire into how the post-digital future of surveillance technologies will impact on the region and how, in turn, those regional politics of drone technology increasingly define the geopolitics of global aerial surveillance. Keywords Surveillance · Drone technology · Digital methods · Middle East · Reseach-led pratice
Introduction I first became aware of Heba Y. Amin’s project The General’s Stork in 2016 when, during a meeting in Berlin, she outlined the ongoing research she had been undertaking in relation to it. The facts were simple enough, but the implications, as I began to understand, were far from straightforward. In 2013, Egyptian authorities detained a migratory stork that was accused of espionage. Reportedly captured by a fisherman, who viewed the bird with suspicion after noticing an electronic device attached to it, the unfortunate stork was handed over to the local police station in Qena (a city situated on the east bank of the Nile in Upper Egypt). Upon further investigation, it transpired that the “camera device” was in fact a functioning tracking instrument attached by Hungarian scientists who were researching avian migratory habits. While the entire incident may at first appear risible, the event highlighted a nation-wide level of mistrust in relation to aerial surveillance and its threat—a level of apprehension which, as we will see, was and remains understandable if we consider the extent to which the region has * Anthony Downey [email protected] 1
Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany
Birmingham City University, Birmingham, UK
2
been topographically quartered through the means of military reconnaissance and the ever-present, and all-too-real, menace inherent in forms of drone surveillance across the region (Fig. 1). In a broader regional context, as The General’s Stork demonstrates, the episode references the political economy of aerial surveillance from both a bird’s eye view and, in an age of digitally defined warfare, remote controlled drones. Against the backdrop of biblical prophecies, un-crewed aerial vehicles (UAVs), and colonial narratives, The General’s Stork discloses how conquest from the sky—through land surveying, mapping, bombing and advanced drone technologies—has transformed western power
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