Abstract
The technological developments afforded by Artificial Intelligence (AI), algorithms, and machine learning increasingly guarantee that autonomous systems of surveillance and warfare are recalibrating the relationship of subjects (often designated as “targets”), digital images (specifically, the data extracted from them), and vertical models of drone warfare. Given the relatively inaccessible and occluded disposition of AI systems (their so-called “black box” logic), the continued levels of secrecy and defensive concealment raise a number of questions: How, for one, do we conceptualize the threat associated with the opacity of these recursive apparatuses? How, furthermore, do we assess the all-too-real impact of air-bound technologies on the populations targeted by models of hyper-surveillance? To address these and other concerns, this chapter takes Shona Illingworth’s three-screen video and sound installation Topologies of Air (2021) and the Airspace Tribunal (2018–ongoing), the latter being a series of in-progress “people’s tribunals,” as a starting point for a broader enquiry into algorithmic rationalizations of time and space. Can, I will ask in sections one and two, the interpretive and heuristic context of practice-based research, operating as it does from within the methodological framework of visual cultures, identify and distinguish the impact of satellite surveillance and drone reconnaissance on the realities of life and, increasingly, death? Continuing this enquiry, section three will observe how the future of war has been categorically programmed into algorithms that remain, at best, resistant to critique. This resistance is historical and, in section four, I will highlight the extent to which we need to understand the evolution of algorithmic apparatuses from both within and through the sinuous, utilitarian, and extractive technologies of colonization—specifically, how they have evolved into the neocolonial annexation of present-day realities and the de facto occupation of the future through AI apparatuses. Whereas colonial occupation was once largely achieved through actual invasion, I will argue in conclusion, it is now inevitably realized through the application of advanced surveillance systems, drone-led infractions of international law, and the extractivist logic of algorithms and advanced AI systems.
Human beings must learn anew to recognize the pattern of the earth from the perspective of the air.
—Harun Farocki, Images of the World and the Inscription of War, 1988
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Notes
- 1.
See, for example, Derek Gregory, “From a View to a Kill: Drones and Late Modern War,” Theory, Culture & Society 28, nos. 7–8 (2011): 188–215; Medea Benjamin, Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control (London: Verso, 2013); John Kaag and Sarah Kreps, Drone Warfare (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014); Grégoire Chamayou, Drone Theory (New York: Random House, 2015); Hugh Gusterson, Drone: Remote Control Warfare (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016); Ian G. R. Shaw, Predator Empire: Drone Warfare and Full Spectrum Dominance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016); Lisa Parks and Caren Kaplan, eds., Life in the Age Of Drone Warfare (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017); Atef Abu Saif, The Drone Eats with Me (Manchester: Comma Press, 2015); and Rebecca A. Adelman and David Kieran, eds., Remote Warfare: New Cultures of Violence (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2020).
- 2.
See Michael J. Boyle, “The Legal and Ethical Implications of Drone Warfare,” International Journal of Human Rights 19, no. 2 (2015): 105–26.
- 3.
I would note here, albeit in passing, the work of Heba Y. Amin, Helene Kazan, Forensic Architecture, Trevor Paglen, and, of course, Harun Farocki, the latter being the filmmaker and theorist often credited with forging the original inquiry into the economy of image production—and the emergence of “operational images”—in a postindustrial age through films as varied as Images-War (1987), Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1988), Eye/Machine I, II, III (2001, 2002, and 2003), and War at a Distance (2003).
- 4.
These burial mounds are protected as part of a UNESCO World Heritage site in the north of the island of Bahrain. They are evidence of the early Dilmun civilization, which prospered around the second millennium BCE, when the island was a trading hub for the region.
- 5.
See Kathrin Maurer, “Visual Power: The Scopic Regime of Military Drone Operations,” Media, War & Conflict 10, no. 2 (2017): 2.
- 6.
I borrow this phrase from Elleke Boehmer, who writes that “to assume control over a territory or a nation was not only to exert political or economic power, it was also to have imaginative command.” See Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 5.
- 7.
See Jeremy Packer and Joshua Reeves, Killer Apps: War, Media, Machine (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020). See also, Peter M. Asaro, “The Labor of Surveillance and Bureaucratized Killing: New Subjectivities of Military Drone Operators,” Social Semiotics 23, no. 2 (2013): 196–224.
- 8.
Andrew Hoskins and Shona Illingworth, “Inaccessible War: Media, Memory, Trauma and the Blueprint,” Journal of Digital War 1 (2020): 74–82.
- 9.
Hoskins and Illingworth, “Inaccessible War,” 74.
- 10.
The phrase “living instrument” has been used elsewhere in this volume by Hoskins and Illingworth in reference to the 2020 European Court of Human Rights Judicial Seminar. See “The Convention as a Living Instrument at 70,” Background Document, 3: https://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/Seminar_background_paper_2020_ENG.pdf.
- 11.
See, for example, Cynthia Rudin and Joanna Radin, “Why Are We Using Black Box Models in AI When We Don’t Need To? A Lesson from an Explainable AI Competition,” Harvard Data Science Review 1, no. 2 (2019). See also Cynthia Rudin, “Stop Explaining Black Box Machine Learning Models for High Stakes Decisions and Use Interpretable Models Instead,” Nature Machine Intelligence 1 (2019): 206–15.
- 12.
Jutta Weber, “Keep Adding. Kill Lists, Drone Warfare and the Politics of Databases,” Environment and Planning D. Society and Space, 34, no. 1 (February 2016): 107–125 (108).
- 13.
Joseph Pugliese, “Death by Metadata: The Bioinformationalisation of Life and the Transliteration of Algorithms to Flesh”, in Security, Race, Biopower: Essays on Technology and Corporeality, ed. Holly Randell-Moon and Ryan Tippet (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 3–20 (6).
- 14.
See Anthony Downey, “The Algorithmic Apparatus of Neo-Colonialism: Or, Can We Hold” Operational Images” to Account?”, The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics Vol. 30, No. 61–62 (2021), 78–82. See also, Anthony Downey, “The Future of Death: Algorithmic Design, Predictive Analysis, and Drone Warfare”, in Jens Bjering, Anders Engberg-Pedersen, Solveig Gade, and Christine Strandmose Toft, eds. The Aesthetics of War: Art, Technology, and the Futures of Warfare, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, forthcoming 2024).
- 15.
For an insightful account of how military, industrial, and entertainment interests coalesce, see James Der Derian, Virtuous Warfare: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network (Boulder: Westview Press Inc., 2001). See also Paul Virilio, War and Cinema (London: Verso, 1989).
- 16.
For a review of Google’s involvement in drone technology, see Lee Fang, “Google Hired Gig Economy Workers to Improve Artificial Intelligence in Controversial Drone-Targeting Project,” Intercept, March 6, 2018, https://theintercept.com/2019/02/04/google-ai-project-maven-figure-eight/.
- 17.
See Anthony Downey, “There’s Always Someone Looking at You: Performative Research and the Techno-Aesthetics of Drone Surveillance,” in Heba Y. Amin: The General’s Stork, ed. Anthony Downey (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020), 8–30.
- 18.
Edward Said, “Facts, Facts, and More Facts,” in Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process (New York: Vintage, 1995), 26–31, 27.
- 19.
See Robert Bewley and David Kennedy, “Historical Aerial Imagery in Jordan and the Wider Middle East,” in Archaeology from Historical Aerial and Satellite Archives, ed. William Hanson and Ioana Oltean (New York: Springer, 2013).
- 20.
For a fuller account, see Jörg Albertz, “Albrecht Meydenbauer: Pioneer of Photogrammetric Documentation of the Cultural Heritage,” Proceedings 18 International Symposium CIPA (Potsdam, Germany, September 18–21, 2001).
- 21.
Writing in 1941, Frederick Stansbury Haydon observed that the French Balloon Corps, effectively the first air force in the world, did accompany Napoleon on his campaign to Egypt in 1798 but with mixed results. See Frederick Stansbury Haydon, Military Ballooning during the Early Civil War (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins Press, 2000), 13–15.
- 22.
See Anne Godlewska “Map, Text and Image. The Mentality of Enlightened Conquerors: A New Look at the Description de l’Egypte,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 20, no. 1 (1995): 5–28, 6 (emphasis added). See also, Anders Engberg-Pedersen, Empire of Chance: The Napoleonic Wars and the Disorder of Things (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2015), 147–156.
- 23.
Godlewska, “Map, Text and Image,” 18 (emphasis added).
- 24.
For a fuller account of these correspondences between Cartesianism and the modern technologies of warfare, see Antoine Bousquet, The Eye of War: Military Perception from the Telescope to the Drone (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), passim.
- 25.
Farocki used the phrase “operational images” to describe images made by machines for machines, the full implications of which he explored throughout his three-part film Eye/Machine I, II, III (2000–3).
- 26.
Anticipating “operational images” in all but name, Paul Virilio predicted the use of “vision machines” in the context of military robotics as an inevitable outcome of such technologies, driven as they are by conflict. See Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine, trans. Julie Rose (London: British Film Institute, 1994), 59.
- 27.
See Trevor Paglen, “Operational Images,” e-flux Journal, no. 59 (November 2014), http://worker01.e-flux.com/pdf/article_8990555.pdf.
- 28.
“The operational image emulates the look and feel of traditional images, but on closer inspection, this turns out to be a secondary function, almost a gesture or courtesy extended by the machines: The computer does not need the image.” Volker Pantenburg, “Working Images: Harun Farocki and the Operational Image,” in Image Operations: Visual Media and Political Conflict, ed. Jens Eder and Charlotte Klonk (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 49–62, 49.
- 29.
Edward Said, “Facts, Facts, and More Facts,” 27.
- 30.
For an in-depth discussion of the distinction between semi- and fully-automated weapons, see Paul Scharre, Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War (New York: WW Norton and Company, 2019).
- 31.
For a fuller discussion of what a counter-operational strategy could potentially entail in relation to the data sets used to train algorithms, see Trevor Paglen and Anthony Downey, “Algorithmic Anxieties,” Journal of Digital War vol. 1 (2020): 18–28. See also, Anthony Downey, ed., Trevor Paglen: Adversarial Hallucinations (Sternberg Press/MIT, 2024).
- 32.
See Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 42–43.
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Downey, A. (2023). The Algorithmic Apparatus of Neocolonialism: Counter-Operational Practices and the Future of Aerial Surveillance. In: Bratchford, G., Zuev, D. (eds) Vision and Verticality. Social Visualities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39884-1_9
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