Telepresence Operator
Installation: Video, Reconstructed Book From a Flight Checklist, Flight Approach Maps
2017
“Whether it matters if the person who pulls the trigger is thousands of miles away or in an aircraft directly overhead is widely debated: is killing people using drones easier or harder, more intimate or more abstract, less or more ethical?”
― Ann Rogers & John Hill, Unmanned: Drone Warfare and Global Security
Developed for the 2017 bkz. darağaç exhibition, Telepresence Operator is an investigation into the psychological and moral implications of remote warfare in the era of digital technology, specifically focusing on the detachment of telepresence technologies. The project inquires into how physical and emotional distance, as mediated by screens and interfaces, transforms human agency, responsibility, and perception of violence. By intermixing interview recordings, reconstructed operational documents, and site-specific installation, the project dissects the multilayered dissonance between action and consequence in drone warfare.
At the heart of the installation is a video interview with drone operators, whose testimony reveals the ethical and epistemological uncertainties of war waged through mediated interfaces. Their testimonies are juxtaposed with a reconstructed book comprised of flight checklists and approach charts, material artifacts that underscore procedural regimes inherent to remote warfare. Displayed in a reclaimed car paint shop in the Darağaç neighborhood of İzmir, the work exploits the haptic ambiance of the industrial workshop—a space of human toil and machine repair—to contrast the abstraction of virtual warfare. The materiality of the workshop, its accumulated paint and dirt, is transformed into a metaphor for the obscured realities of war conducted on screens, where the orders to annihilate are given via sanitized interfaces and partial information.
The installation emphasizes the ontological ambiguity of telepresence, a phenomenon that Kris Paulsen has theorized as the "uncanny confusion" wrought by screens that both unite and divide. In drone warfare, the screen serves as an interface between the local space of the operator and the distant battlefield, condensing spatial and temporal distance while augmenting ethical disorientation. Telepresence Operator polyphonically layers these contradictions: the clinical precision of flight procedure versus the visceral brutality of operator testimonies, the antiseptic sheen of screens versus the grime-stained walls of the workshop. This tension echoes the greater paradox of contemporary warfare, in which technological advancement gives unprecedented control over life and death, yet compromises the human capacity to fully comprehend the implications of such actions.
By situating the work in a realm of repair and metamorphosis, the installation provokes reflection upon the irreparable consequences of remote violence. The automobile repair shop, as a zone of physical intervention, accentuates the absence of bodily responsibility in drone warfare—a domain in which devastation is enacted through keyboard strokes and joysticks, without making a physical mark within the environment of the perpetrator. The physical context of the show adds to this feeling of disconnection, as monitors are suspended in the workshop's enormous space, their glowing screens a counterpoint to the otherworldly presence of unmanned drones in distant airspace.
Telepresence Operator doesn't resolve the ethical question it raises but instead inhabits the fractured consciousness of a world where war is both everywhere and nowhere. It forces us to reckon with the allure of technological distance, asking how interfaces reinvent ethics when violence is reduced to pixels and protocols. In an era defined by remote control, the work serves as a discomfiting reminder of the human cost obscured by the very screens that claim to reveal reality.
