We are very pleased about the recent inclusion of two important texts in the Tactical Media Files main website and documentation resource by Jordan Crandall and Muriam Halleh Davis:
An RQ-4 Global Hawk sits on the runway before beginning a nighttime mission. The aircraft is unmanned, and is used to capture imagery from high altitudes. (Courtesy photo/John Schwab)
A major research document by artist Jordan Crandall titled “Ontologies of the Wayward Drone – A Salvage Operation” deals with the fatal strategies of drone desire (a.k.a. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) ). This extensive study into the intensifying use of remote controlled and increasingly autonomous flying drones was originally published at CTheory and is now included in the TMF resource with kind permission by the author.
The essay “The Invention of the Savage: Colonial Exhibitions and the Staging of the Arab Spring” by Muriam Haleh Davis was recently posted on the excellent Jadaliyya blog and marks for us the first use of the tag ‘postcolonial’ in our resource, an inclusion admittedly long overdue. The text examines the staging of the (street-)protests in Arab countries through the prism of a recent exhibition at the musée du Quai Branly in Paris, which explores the ‘ the construction of difference and the exhibition of the other’.
While it is inevitable that the astounding and continuing series of street protests and square occupations that have marked the past year have demanded so much of our attention, it is equally important to keep clear sight of other strategic distortions that affect our social realities.
During a recent clean-up of last remains of archive materials of the Next 5 Minutes festival series we furthermore stumbled upon a disk accidentally not yet transferred to the TMF resource, nor physically handed over to the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam – who hold our physical archive. It contained the video Safe Distance released by the KUDA.org collective from Novi Sad Serbia. A ‘present from the skies’ recovered from the NATO air campaign against Serbia during the Kosovo War in 1999.
The video shows the electronic cockpit of a US Air Force plane that crashed during the bombing campaign. Though still a ‘manned’ aerial vehicle, the absolute abstraction of the blind instruments view provides a chilling adjunct to Crandall’s detailed examination of the fatal drone desires.
TMF Editors