Monument to the Tiny, Fragile, Human Body

This piece called “Monument to the Tiny, Fragile, Human Body” is a video depicting the surface of the human body at very close range. The imagery is shot from an aerial viewpoint, flying over terrain except the terrain is actually magnified imagery of human skin. The audio on the headphones is taken from leaked aerial footage of Apache helicopter attacks in Iraq.
With this piece I was interested in notions of boundaries. Skin is the place where our boundaries are constantly broken down and reformed. Military technology such as drones and aerial bombing is used to enforce or destroy national boundaries by targeting and destroying bodies.
The piece is designed to collapse distance and confuse scale. The film shows close-up shots of the body yet evokes wide-angle landscape vistas. Contrasting the omnipresent infrastructure of state, military power against the private intimacy of the bodies that are its targets. The micro and the macro collide; abjection occurs at the level of the destroyed and wounded body and at the level of destroyed societies and scattered populations.
The video was created on a computer. Computer generated imagery is interesting to me because of the way it has problematised the veracity of the photographic and filmic image in our culture. This ambiguity about what is real and what is virtual underlined the sense of distance and alienation inherent in drone warfare.