A few years ago, London-based artist James Bridle tried to imagine what it would feel like to stand next to a large combat drone. “I envisioned drones in tanks, à la [artist Damien] Hirst, the ability to touch the cold metal of it, to measure oneself against it,” he says. That’s how Bridle’s project began, in a parking lot in London, where he and a friend used chalk and string to sketch their first “drone shadow”—a perfect one-to-one representation of an MQ-1 Predator, the most widely used combat drone. Drones have been the U.S. government’s weapon of choice in the fight against terrorism for more than ten years—and not without controversy. Most recently, on Thursday, Human Rights Watch concluded that a December drone attack on a wedding procession in Yemen broke Obama’s own targeted killing policy—which requires “near-certainty” that no civilians will be harmed. Bridle’s aim is to remind us of how the dehumanization of military tools has affected society, and his “shadows” (published in this photo gallery) have begun to appear in cities around the world.

James Bridle / booktwo.org