A Gorgon Stare
Text and image series, Gandhara Art Gallery
(2018)
A series that explores the neo-colonial regimes of visuality and its militarization of terrain. The work traced the connection between satellite imagery and drone technology, using the examples of the US military’s video-capture technology called the Gorgon Stare that was used for drone warfare in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and satellite imagery used by the mega-development real estate project of Bahria Town in Pakistan. It explores how both these visions depend on systematic narrowing and obscuring, collapsing acts of seeing and killing into one another.
The work looks at glitches in the Gorgon Stare technology – which were explained by US military officials as gaps in the stitching of imagery that manifested as “a large black traingle” – to explore the limits of imperial vision. It imagines these glitches as a resistance in the ground, which materialize as blurs, ghosts and bad images.
