Drone Shadow (Hermes 450/Watchkeeper WK450)
2012— ongoing
Temporary road marking tape, 1050 x 650 cm
Courtesy of the artist and NOME, Berlin
You can receive a free Drone Shadow Handbook at the Survival Kit 11 information desk.
The Drone Shadows is an ongoing series of public interventions in which a 1:1 scale shadow of a contemporary military drone is painted on a city’s streets. What’s usually distant and invisible is made present and apprehensible; a remote reality is transformed into something close at hand. As well as reminding us of the often-shadowy military uses of drones in the present, the figure of the drone stands in for all of our contemporary networked technologies, which are often hidden or hard to see but nonetheless impact—socially, politically, and often violently—on our everyday lives.
Artist’s Bio:
James Bridle (1980) is an artist, writer and theorist based in Athens and London. With a long-standing investigative interest in modern network infrastructure, government transparency, and technological surveillance, his artistic practice positions itself at the intersection of art, science, and political activism. In particular, he explores how the acceleration of technological advancement creates new ways to represent our physical world and affects our perception of the future by increasingly blurring the lines between the virtual and the real. His work incorporates software programming, social media, photography, installations, architectural rendering and maps.