What came before the chicken? What came before the drone equipped with a 4k GoPro? A drone with an infrared sensor-camera for anti-aircraft operations during WWII.
Online culture ( especially ) loves an aesthetic / a ‘core’, and it’s a great way to commodify things, too. By applying literal aesthetics to operative images and vice versa, this video examines
the processes of aestheticization and commodification regarding surveillance and military objects, and how the functions of these images ‘re-operationalize’ and potentially ease their way into our lives more seamlessly.
The latter part of the video reflects on the gaze of the machine-eye that creates and analyzes working images. It’s easy to get lost in the hazy skies of a meandering Reaper drone, so the final section - one juxtaposing the vision of a machine ( ChatGPT ) and what we see of the same footage - grounds and, perhaps, marks the space between the human and the operational.