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Chilling art installation turns drone strike fatalities into a shopping bill

This is artist Jonathan Fletcher Moore’s Artificial Killing Machine. Unlike other artificial killing machines—machine guns, shotguns, rifles, swords, switchblades, kitchen knives, tanks, battlefield range ballistic missiles, short-range ballistic missiles, medium-range ballistic missiles, intermediate-range ballistic missiles, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and submarine-launched ballistic missiles, to name but a select few—it is an interactive art installation. “This time based work accesses a public database on U.S. military drone strikes,” Moore writes on his website. “When a drone strike occurs, the machine activates, and fires a children’s toy cap gun for every death that results.” Since drone warfare is cloaked in secrecy, Artificial Killing…

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Bycatch smartly distills drone warfare into a card game

This season of Homeland opened with a botched drone strike, and six episodes later teetered on a moment where a drone nearly became an instrument of revenge. Granted, Homeland is about one Jason-masked murder rampage from 24 territory, but the show usually mirrors one actual political concern per season somewhere among the crying and the sex. And if you keep up with real-world news, it can be hard to find drone strikes that aren’t botched; especially if you consider civilian deaths a dealbreaker. What exactly is the quota for dead bystanders? Is there a spreadsheet somewhere in the Pentagon that ticks down cost-benefit in corpses?  Bycatch, an upcoming collaboration between Subalekha Udayasankar…