Owen Mundy - The Drone War Did Not Take Place

I created "The Drone War Did Not Take Place" to track a Predator drone shipping container (purchased on Craigslist and retrofitted as a camping apparatus) as it was pushed through the city of San Diego. This was a collaboration with The Periscope Project (TPP) on version 2 of their "Drone Ready-Made: Fine Military Detritus" project in conjunction with the Drones at Home exhibition at The California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) from March 7 to September 14, 2012.

The projected path started at UC San Diego and continued past "the largest concentration of military facilities and defense industries in the world" (1) including several defense contractors and government agencies, to conclude at TPP's downtown location. By (re)mapping data from my Camp La Jolla Military Park project, the tracking interface reveals the connections between the physicality of TPP's laborious gesture, and the economic and political ties between the object they push and the institutions where everyone employed is implicated in the destructive impact of a permanent arms economy.