Tribute to Brandon Bryant

Info
3D Sculpture & Animated Video
 0:33 Loop
2019

Description
Brandon Bryant is an US-American whistleblower and former drone pilot. He made processes about the navigation and the killing of persons in the middle east public. The work references the ongoing situation of seemingly humane warfare and the possibility of findablility and surveillance of every person on the planet.

Exhibitions
Reflecting Records – Jot 12 Aspern, Vienna 19.6.-22.6.2019 

Tribute to Brandon Bryant
Brandon Bryant is an US-American Whistleblower and former pilot of wardrones. He dropped out of the US Drone program, after he suffered a nervous breakdown, when accidentally killing an innocent child. Bryant contradicts the statement, that states drone attacks are a precise, safe kind of warfare and made the methods of locating targets – with a system called "Gilgamesh" – public. Further, he revealed details about a cooperation between the US and Germany, which hosts a control base (Ramstein) that routes and reinforces the communication signals to the middle east.

The joystick seen in this momentum of the cruel game of war and for steering a wardrone is equipped with medals and badges to underline the surreality inherited in these activities. Simultanously the joystick represents a phallus, pointing at the perfidious ways of masculinity that prevail in military institutions.

The video is projected on a large screen, accompanied by subtle sounds of the medals colliding with the joystick and each other. An ambient layer of humming is underlayed, a sound like from the inside of a soundproof airplane. Around the joystick there is an environment of a video texture to be seen, showing leaked footage of a drone over Afghanistan. On the top of the joystick the recipient can read the word "safe", a function that brings the plane into a stable position and probably the only thing about it that this word can be used for in this debate.