Invisible Violence: Drone Warfare and Landscape after 9/11

Abstract

The paper investigates representations of landscape in selected examples of contemporary artworks that were produced in the aftermath of and in direct response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent war on terror. Focused on the work of Hito Steyerl, Trevor Paglen, and Simon Norfolk, the paper seeks to examine how the development in military technology, primarily the increasing reliance on computerised vision, as manifested by the use of drones, has generated new ways in which landscape is perceived and represented, experienced and mediated. In the text, discussed artworks are shown to confront the mechanised vision of landscape with aesthetic concepts such as the sublime in order to account for the changes in human experience of space in the 21st century.