This article was taken from the January 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
James Bridle wants to reveal the invisible. "Our world doesn't look dramatically different to how it did 20 years ago," says the London-based artist. "It's hard to point at the internet. But for me it's essential to do that because without it we have no understanding of how our world really works." In the MQ-1 Predator drone, Bridle, 34, finally found something he could point at. "The drone is an avatar of this whole network of the internet and us," he explains. "They're these large, highly connected physical objects, yet they're rarely seen." Bridle realised he didn't even have an idea of their size. "I literally went out into the car park of my studio and sketched out the outline," he says. This led to his Drone Shadows project, which had him drawing the looming, sinister scale-diagrams of the Predator at locations all over the world, including outside the White House. Other 1:1 outline projects include the Rainbow Plane 001 at Farnborough Airfield, which mimics how the different wavelength sensors used to create satellite imagery produce the appearance of a multicoloured trail behind the airborne craft.
With his latest work A Quiet Disposition, Bridle comments on the US military's Disposition Matrix, a secretive database used to generate kill lists. Bridle's program scours the web for names and places mentioned alongside drones, adds them to his own database and pulls out links between them. The result is vast and highly error-prone. Swiss figure-skating champion Patrick Meier appears prominently, for example -- the program confused him with a UAV researcher of the same name. "The idea is to demonstrate how flawed that data-driven approach to decision making can be," say Bridle.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
