L.A. artist [Jonathan Fletcher Moore] sent us this fantastic tech-art piece on dehumanization and drone warfare. Talking too much about art is best left to the artists, so we’ll shut up and let you watch the video below the break.

The piece is essentially a bunch of old cap guns with servos that pull their triggers. A Raspberry Pi with an Internet connection fetches data on US drone strikes from www.dronestre.am and fires off a cap every time someone is killed. At the same time, the story version of the data is printed out in thermal paper that cascades onto the floor.

Viewers are encouraged to sit underneath all the cap guns and wait. Talk about creepy and suspenseful. And a tiny reflection of the everyday fears that people who live under drone-filled skies.

Bu t alongside a powerful statement, technical craftsmanship matters when you’re making art. Painting everything white makes it visually uniform, sterile, and a little bit spooky.

And we’ll admit that we think that nicely laced cabling just looks sexy. (We’ve taken other random opportunities to pimp it before, but go have a look at NASA’s guidelines (PDF) on the matter.)

OK, this project / art piece is far too refined for the term “hack”, but as [Jonathan] says himself: