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
Produced for the 2017 exhibition bkz. darağaç, Telepresence Operator interrogates the psychological and ethical complexities of remote warfare in the digital age, focusing on the detachment inherent in telepresence technologies. The work examines how physical and emotional distance, mediated through screens and interfaces, transforms human agency, responsibility, and the perception of violence. Through a combination of interview recordings, reconstructed operational documents, and site-specific installation, the project dissects the layered dissonance between action and consequence in drone warfare.
Central to the installation are video interviews with drone operators, whose testimonies reveal the cognitive and moral ambiguities of conducting warfare through remote interfaces. These narratives are juxtaposed with a reconstructed book composed of flight checklists and approach maps, material artifacts that foreground the procedural frameworks governing remote combat. Exhibited within a repurposed car paint workshop in İzmir’s Darağaç district, the work leverages the industrial space’s tactile environment—a site of manual labor and mechanical repair—to contrast the abstraction of digital warfare. The workshop’s physicality, marked by layers of paint and residue, becomes a metaphor for the obscured realities of conflict conducted through screens, where decisions to destroy are mediated by sterile interfaces and fragmented data.
The installation underscores the ontological indeterminacy of telepresence, a concept theorized by Kris Paulsen as the “uncanny confusion” generated by screens that simultaneously connect and alienate. In drone operations, the screen acts as a threshold between the operator’s immediate surroundings and the distant theater of war, collapsing spatial and temporal boundaries while amplifying ethical disorientation. Telepresence Operator polyphonically layers these contradictions: the clinical precision of flight protocols against the visceral trauma recounted in operator testimonies, the sterile glow of monitors against the workshop’s grime-streaked walls. This tension mirrors the broader paradox of contemporary warfare, where technological advancement enables unprecedented control over life and death, yet erodes the human capacity to fully grasp the repercussions of such actions.
By situating the work in a space dedicated to repair and transformation, the installation invites reflection on the irreparable consequences of remote violence. The car workshop, a locus of material intervention, underscores the absence of tangible accountability in drone warfare—a realm where destruction is enacted through keystrokes and joysticks, leaving no physical trace on the perpetrator’s environment. The exhibition’s spatial setting further amplifies this disconnection, with monitors suspended in the workshop’s cavernous interior, their flickering images echoing the ghostly presence of unmanned aircraft in distant skies.
Telepresence Operator does not resolve the ethical questions it raises but instead materializes the fractured consciousness of a world where war is both omnipresent and invisible. It challenges viewers to confront the seductive allure of technological detachment, asking how interfaces reshape morality when violence is reduced to pixels and protocols. In an era defined by remote control, the work serves as a stark reminder of the human costs obscured by the very screens that claim to reveal reality.
