If you thought drones were callous, how about the military lingo for referring to their victims?
US
drone operators often speak of the people they kill as “bug splats,”
because that’s kind of what people look like through grainy video
images: bugs being crushed.But people aren’t bugs, and that is the message behind the #NotABugSplat
campaign: an initiative by a collective of international and Pakistani
artists, who are targeting drone operators with a giant portrait of a
young girl staring at them from the ground.“When we first heard
how the term bug splat is used, that’s where we had the idea,” Saks
Afridi, an artist and member of the group, told VICE News."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 group said on their website, adding that the installation is
also designed to be picked up by satellite, "in order to make it a
permanent part of the landscape on online mapping sites."
Local residents helped set up the giant installation. Photos via Not A Bug Splat.
Inspired by similar work by French artist JR, who is involved with the initiative through his Inside Out Project, the group set up the huge installation in the Khyber Pukhtoonkhwa region of Pakistan, near the border with Afghanistan.
They are also hoping to set up more, in Pakistan as well as in other countries targeted by drone attacks.
The
use of drones has been the subject of much controversy, with little
sign of it getting reigned in. In the last decade, in Pakistan alone, up
to 3,718 were killed by drone strikes, including up to 202 children,
according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which has been monitoring the drone war.
By Alice Speri
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