Child's Portrait Puts a Face on Drone Strikes in Pakistan

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Aerial view of the art installation #NotABugSplat in Pakistan.

Image: Project NotABugSplat

By Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai2014-04-07 18:42:22 UTC

A drone pilot can sit in a room thousands of miles away from his targets, looking at the world through the prism of the flying robot's camera, which itself is hovering hundreds of feet away from the drone's potential victims. In those circumstances, war is dehumanized: the pilot can't see the face of his victims.

An artist collective from Pakistan, France and the United States wants to change that with a giant poster of a young child visible from the sky. The group installed it in an unnamed town in Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) province, close to the Northwest border with Afghanistan, an area regularly targeted by drone strikes.

See also: After 5 Rejections, Apple Accepts App That Tracks U.S. Drone Strikes

The idea is to raise awareness of civilian deaths caused by drone strikes and perhaps make a pilot think twice before pressing the button.

"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 artists wrote in the project's website.

The collective named the project #NotABugSplat after the way some drone operators refer to their victims: "bug splats." That's the military slang for drone victims, since "viewing the body through a grainy-green video image gives the sense of an insect being crushed," according to a 2012 Rolling Stone article.

Human rights organization Reprieve UK and the Foundation for Fundamental Rights also collaborated in the project.

Saks Afridi, a spokesman for the artist collective, told Mashable that the group would rather not disclose the identity of its members since some of them are in Pakistan.

"We’re a little apprehensive about giving all our names out for the time being," he said in an email.

The name of the child depicted in the poster is unknown, but according to the project's site, the Foundation for Fundamental Rights said she lost both her parents and two young siblings in a strike where she was wounded.

Afridi also declined to disclose the exact name of the town where the giant poster of the child was placed, but said they installed it in May with the help of the locals.

The artist collective hopes to do "a dozen more" installations like these in the future, according to Afridi.

Local children pose next to the giant poster laid down by the artist collective.

Image: Project NotABugSplat

It's unclear how many people have been killed in U.S. drone strikes around the world or Pakistan, as no official statistics have been released. But the Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates that since 2004, there have been between 2,296 and 3,718 people killed in Pakistan. Of those, between 416 and 957 are civilians, and between 168 and 202 are children.

This is not the first time activists have used unusual means to raise awareness about the drone war. In 2012, data artist Josh Begley created an iPhone app that maps known U.S. drone strikes and sends push notifications to users whenever a new one is reported. The app was rejected five times by Apple, but finally entered the App Store in February.

Begley later created a Twitter account called @DroneStream that tracks every reported strike.

Also using social media, London-based artist James Bridle created Dronestagram, an Instagram account that posts satellite pictures collected from Google Earth, showing the places hit by an American drones.

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Topics: activism, Drones, Pakistan, U.S., US & World, World