Spatial operations:

Peter Sloterdijk and contemporary military atmospheres

Baden Pailthorpe

A thesis submitted to the University of New South Wales

in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree

Doctor of Philosophy

School of the Arts and Media

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

2015

ORIGINALITY STATEMENT ‘I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of material which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis. I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project's design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged.’ Signed ……………………………………………..............

Date ……………………………………………..............

i

Abstract

This creative practice Ph.D examines the nature of contemporary military atmospheres

through the work of Peter Sloterdijk. On the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the First

World War, this research starts from Sloterdijk’s claim that the modern ‘air-condition’ is

inherently linked to the atmospheric warfare of 1915. It critically analyses this and Sloterdijk’s

broader spatial theories of human ‘atmospheres’ in the context of contemporary militarism

through both theoretical and practical methods. The resulting proposition of this research is

that the defining characteristic of military atmospheres is not only their ‘aerial’ capacities, as

Sloterdijk suggests, but rather their surreal spatial practices – a basis for which is found

elsewhere in Sloterdijk and the writings of Roger Caillois, Rosalind Krauss, Roland Barthes,

Michel Serres and Jakob Von Uexküll, along with several artists, including Char Davies, Trevor

Paglen and Marcel Duchamp. This is presented through close interdisciplinary analysis of two

examples of contemporary ‘atmospheric’ military practices: unmanned drones and military

mythology. It demonstrates through two major creative works that both military mythology and

atmospheric weapons share a surreal operational logic that expand current categorisations of

these fields.

As a practice-based thesis submitted within the Ph.D program in the School of Arts and Media,

UNSW Australia, the demonstration of original contribution to knowledge lies in the production

of creative works. This written document supports, contextualises and extends this

contribution by giving the artworks a theoretical and contextual framework. The weighting of

the practice to the written document can be considered at a ratio of 60% creative work to 40%

thesis, although the success of this research ultimately rests on the reciprocity between theory

and practice.

ii

Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................................................ i

Contents .......................................................................................................................................................... ii

Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................................................... vi

A brief note on the documentation of the creative works ............................................................................. 1

Exhibitions ................................................................................................................................................... 2

Introduction .................................................................................................................................................... 3

Chapter 1: Peter Sloterdijk’s Spheres ...........................................................................................................12

1.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................................................13

1.2 Atmospheres .......................................................................................................................................14

1.3 Peter Sloterdijk’s Spheres ...................................................................................................................17

1.3 Peter Sloterdijk’s concept of atmosphere ..........................................................................................25

1.4 Military atmospheres: airquake ..........................................................................................................30

1.5 Drone atmospheres: foamquake ........................................................................................................35

1.6 A brief note on the sonic realm ..........................................................................................................40

1.7 Critical notes on Sloterdijk ..................................................................................................................41

Chapter 2: .....................................................................................................................................................46

Art and atmosphere ......................................................................................................................................46

2.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................................................47

2.2 Air de Paris: atmosphères de l’avant garde ........................................................................................48

2.3 Study for atmospheric cohabitation: HGU-55/P (2013) .....................................................................51

2.4 Drone Foam: MQ-9 Reaper I & II ........................................................................................................67

2.5 Motion Capture as Topological Photography .....................................................................................86

2.6 Trevor Paglen: Limit Telephotography ...............................................................................................98

2.7 Conclusion .........................................................................................................................................104

Chapter 3: ...................................................................................................................................................106

Spatial Operations ......................................................................................................................................106

3.1 Introduction ......................................................................................................................................107

3.2 Mythology & The Hero ......................................................................................................................108

3.3 Mimicry, heroics and mythology ......................................................................................................113

3.4 Pose, Prose & Flows ..........................................................................................................................128

3.5 Sculptural photographies, rhetorical topologies ..............................................................................135

4.0 Conclusions ...........................................................................................................................................160

References ..................................................................................................................................................166

iii

List of Figures

Figure 1. Sir John Everett Millais, Bubbles, (1886). .......................................................................................12

Figure 2. John Singer Sargent, Gassed (1919). Oil on Canvas, 231 × 611.1 cm. Collection of the Imperial

War Museum, UK. Art.IWM ART 1460. Public Domain................................................................................46

Figure 3. Marcel Duchamp, Air de Paris, (1919/1964), Verre et bois, 14.5 x 8.5 x 8.5 cm. ..........................48

Figure 4. Study for atmospheric cohabitation: HGU-55/P (2013), 4 channel 3D animation (production

stills). 2 min 13 sec. Rows top to bottom: images taken at 0 frames, 100 frames, 500 frames and 4000

frames. ..........................................................................................................................................................51

Figure 5. Screen shot of the scene in 3Ds Max at 0 frames (top down). It shows the cameras (blue) the

helmets (clay) and the circular camera path constraints (red). ....................................................................52

Figure 6. Screen shot of the scene in 3Ds Max at 500 frames (top down). ..................................................53

Figure 7. Screen shot of the scene in 3Ds Max at 1000 frames (top down). ................................................53

Figure 8. Screen shot of the scene in 3Ds Max at 4000 frames (top down). The white lines trace the

cameras' trajectory over the duration of the scene. ....................................................................................54

Figure 9. Screen shot of the scene in 3Ds Max at 4000 frames (top down). The white lines trace the

helmets' trajectory over the duration of the scene. .....................................................................................54

Figure 10. The Breathing apparatus and Head Mounted Display of Osmose. ..............................................58

Figure 11. Negative Pressure Ventilator – the ‘Iron Lung’. ..........................................................................58

Figure 12. Char Davies, Tree Pond from Osmose (1995). Courtesy of the artist. .........................................59

Figure 13. MQ-9 Reaper (Study) (2013). High Definition 3D animation, colour, stereo, 4 mins. .................67

Figure 14. MQ-9 Reaper I (2014). Production still. High Definition 3D animation, colour, stereo, 4 mins 39

sec. The Australian Parliament House Art Collection, Canberra, and the University of Queensland Art

Museum Collection, Brisbane. ......................................................................................................................69

Figure 15. Baden Pailthorpe, MQ-9 Reaper II (That Others May Die) (2014). High Definition two-channel

3D animation, colour, sound, 6 minutes. Installation view, On Return and What Remains, Artspace,

Sydney, 2014. Photo: Baden Pailthorpe .......................................................................................................71

Figure 16. USAF Drone Control Rooms, Creech Air force Base, Nevada. USAF image: Public Domain ........72

Figure 17. Inside USAF Drone Control Rooms, Creech Air force Base, Nevada.

USAF image: Public Domain ..........................................................................................................................72

Figure 18. MQ-9 Reaper I, 2014. Installation view, The Future’s Knot, the Lock-Up, Newcastle (2014)......73

Figure 19. MQ-9 Reaper I, (2014). Installation view, First Landing to Last Post: contemporary perspectives

on 100 years of service, Parliament House, Canberra (2015). ......................................................................78

Figure 20. Inside the drone: Baden Pailthorpe, MQ-9 Reaper II (That Others May Die) (2014). High

Definition two-channel 3D animation, colour, sound, 6 minutes. ................................................................79

Figure 21. The drone confronts its operator: Baden Pailthorpe, MQ-9 Reaper II (That Others May Die)

(2014). High Definition two-channel 3D animation, colour, sound, 6 minutes. ...........................................80

Figure 22. MQ-9 Reaper I, (2014) right. Installation view, Conflict: Contemporary Approaches to War, UQ

Art Museum, Brisbane (2014). ......................................................................................................................82

Figure 23. Man Ray, Ce qui manque à nous tous, 1927/1973, Clay, glass and wire, ....................................84

Figure 24. Activision Motion Capture Studio. ...............................................................................................86

Figure 25. Re-manning the unmanned: Baden Pailthorpe, MQ-9 Reaper II (That Others May Die) (2014).

High Definition two-channel 3D animation, colour, sound, 6 minutes. .......................................................88

Figure 26. Raytheon Multi-Spectral Targeting System (MTS), commonly known as the ‘Sensor Ball’ of a

UAV. ..............................................................................................................................................................92

iv

Figure 27. Salvador Dali delivered a lecture in a deep-sea diving suit at the International Surrealist

Exhibition (1936), the New Burlington Galleries in London, England. .........................................................92

Figure 28. Ed Atkins, Ribbons (2014) (production still.) Three-channel HD video. © 2014 Ed Atkins ..........96

Figure 29. Trevor Paglen, They Watch the Moon (2010). C-print, 36 x 48 inches. Courtesy of the artist. ..98

Figure 30. Trevor Paglen, Open Hangar, Cactus Flats, NV. .........................................................................102

Figure 31. Baden Pailthorpe, Spatial Operations (2015) (detail). Paper pulp, pva, cellulose powder.

Each approximately 24 cm(h) x 22 cm(w) x 30 cm(d), 210 pieces. .............................................................106

Figure 32. Ben Roberts-Smith. Source: Australian War Memorial: P09901.001 ........................................109

Figure 33. FOI image of Ben-Roberts-Smith (non-blurred face) in Afghanistan during his VC action. Image:

Department of Defence/public domain. .....................................................................................................113

Figure 34. Redacted FOI image of Ben-Roberts-Smith in Afghanistan during his VC action. Image:

Department of Defence/public domain. .....................................................................................................120

Figure 35. Ben Roberts-Smith on the cover of Australian Men’s Fitness Magazine (left) and during an

official Anzac Day ceremony in 2011 (right). Images: Australian Men’s Fitness Magazine; Brad

Hunter/Courier Mail. ..................................................................................................................................123

Figure 36. Luc Delahaye, Taliban (2002) C-print, 237 cm x 111 cm. © Luc Delahaye / Galerie Nathalie

Obadia, Paris. ..............................................................................................................................................128

Figure 37. Sir John Everett Millais, Ophelia (1851-1852). Oil on canvass. ..................................................132

Figure 38. Baden Pailthorpe, Spatial Operations (2014). Installation view, Newcastle Art Gallery, 2015.

210 paper helmets created from each book on the Australian Chief of Army's Reading List.

PVA, cellulose powder, paper pulp. 24.0 x 30.0 x 22.0cm (each), 210 pieces. Photo: Baden Pailthorpe ..135

Figure 39. Ben Roberts-Smith’s uniform and helmet on display at the Australian War Memorial, Canberra.

Photo: ABC news/Kathleen Dyett. ..............................................................................................................136

Figure 40. Spatial Operations process documentation: 2 part silicone fiberglass mold, Sydney (2014)....140

Figure 41. Spatial Operations process documentation: 16 of the 210 helmets air-drying, Sydney (2014).

....................................................................................................................................................................141

Figure 42. Spatial Operations, (2014). Text piece – The Australian Chief of Army’s Reading List (2012),

Installation view, Newcastle Art Gallery, Newcastle (2015). ......................................................................142

Figure 43. Spatial Operations (Students of War) (2014), performance documentation. Hors Pistes, Centre

Pompidou, Paris. .........................................................................................................................................144

Figure 44. Spatial Operations process documentation: .............................................................................145

Figure 45. Prototype Helmet for Spatial Operations, (2014). .....................................................................146

Figure 46. Spatial Operations process documentation: 3D laser scanning the helmet worn by Ben Roberts-

Smith VC MG at the Australian War Memorial, Canberra (2013)...............................................................146

Figure 47. Spatial Operations process documentation: close up of one of the shredders used (left) and

sculpting the paper pulp mix into the mold (right), Sydney, 2014. ............................................................147

Figure 48. Spatial Operations, (2014). Installation render for Newcastle Art Gallery, Newcastle. ............148

Figure 49. Spatial Operations, (2014). Installation view, Newcastle Art Gallery, Newcastle (2015). .........150

Figure 50. Spatial Operations, (2014). Installation view, Newcastle Art Gallery, Newcastle (2015). Cast

paper pulp, pva, cellulose powder. 24(h) x 22(w) x 30(d) cm, 210 pieces..................................................151

Figure 51. Spatial Operations process documentation: two-part mold, silicone and fiberglass ................152

Figure 52. Spatial Operations, (2014). Installation progress, Newcastle Art Gallery, Newcastle (2015). ..155

Figure 53. Spatial Operations, (2014). Installation view, Newcastle Art Gallery, Newcastle (2015). .........156

v

vi

Acknowledgements

This research was completed thanks to the support of a number of people. First of all I’d like

to acknowledge the generous advice and ongoing guidance from my supervisor Assoc. Prof.

Andrew Murphie, and my co-supervisor Dr. Brigid Costello. I’d also like to thank Dr. Bryoni

Trezise for her feedback at each of my annual reviews, my dear friend and colleague Damien

Butler, for endless conversations, workspace and advice, Ryan Johnston, Alex Torrens,

Warwick Heywood and the Art Section at the Australian War Memorial for their support

throughout my residency there, Sally Cunningham and the team at the Newcastle Art Gallery

for facilitating my exhibition Spatial Operations, and my gallerist Martin Browne for his ongoing

support and critical advice. The opportunity to both produce and exhibit the creative works that

make up this thesis was made possible through the support of a number of institutions,

including Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney; Artspace, Sydney; the Australian Parliament

House; Canberra; the Australian War Memorial, Canberra; the University of Queensland Art

Museum, Brisbane; The Newcastle Art Gallery and the Lock-up Artspace, Newcastle; the

Department of War Studies, King’s College, London; the Cité internationale des arts, Paris

and the Centre Pompidou, Paris. I’d also like to thank my parents Katherine and Bernard and

my sisters Alice and Laura for their lifelong support. Of course, none of this would have been

remotely possible without the enduring love, advice and support of my incomparable partner,

mon âme, Dr. Denise Thwaites, my life would suck without you!

vii

Life in the Army has been a crash course in the scale of the world, which is such that

he finds himself in a constant state of wonder as to how things come to be. Stadiums,

for example. Airports. The interstate highway system. Wars. He wants to know how it

is paid for, where do the billions come from? He imagines a shadowy, math-based

parallel world that exists not just beside but amid the physical world, a transparent

interlay of Matrix-style numbers through which flesh and blood humans move like fish

through kelp.

-Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk

1

A brief note on the documentation of the creative works

This creative practice Ph.D has a number of creative works, studies and processes that

are documented within the body of this thesis, online at

http://www.badenpailthorpe.com/phd.html and also on a USB attached to the last page

of this thesis in a yellow envelope. The video works are only available online and on the

attached USB. There are no particular instructions on how to view this material. The

reader may approach it in any way they like, although I do suggest at certain points in

the thesis that viewing a particular work would be contextually fruitful. This material

includes video, photography, interviews and other relevant information. Titles of my own

artworks in this thesis are marked in bold. Copies of these works are provided for the

purpose of examination only. It should be noted that since several of these works are

held in museum and other collections, normal copyright restrictions apply.

2

Exhibitions

The creative works produced for this PhD have been exhibited in a number of locations:

Solo Exhibitions/Performances:

2015 Spatial Operations, Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney, Australia.

2015 Spatial Operations, Newcastle Art Gallery, Newcastle, Australia.

2014 Spatial Operations (Students of War), Hors Pistes, Centre Pompidou, Paris,

France.

Group Exhibitions:

2015 ArtBar, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney.

2015 First Landing to Last Post: contemporary perspectives on 100 years of service,

Parliament House of Australia, Canberra.

2015 Guarding the Home Front, Casula Powerhouse, Sydney.

2015 MBC @ Art Central HK, Hong Kong.

2015 On Return and What Remains, CACSA, Adelaide. Curated by Mark Feary.

2014 On Return and What Remains, Artspace, Sydney. Curated by Mark Feary.

2014 NSW Visual Art Fellowship (emerging), Artspace, Sydney.

2014 FILE 2014, FIESP Cultural Center, Sao Paulo, Brazil.

2014 The Future's Knot, Critical Animals Festival, Newcastle. Curated by Peter

Johnson.

2014 MAF Video, Melbourne Art Fair. Curated by Kyle Weise and Simone Hine.

2014 Melbourne Art Fair, Martin Browne Contemporary.

2014 Conflict: Contemporary Responses to War, UQ Art Museum, Brisbane,

Australia. 2013 Sydney Contemporary, Martin Browne Contemporary, Carriage

Works, Sydney.

2013 Video Contemporary, Carriage Works, Sydney. Curated by Mark Feary.

3

Introduction

Since the middle of the last decade, the work of German cultural theorist and philosopher

Peter Sloterdijk has been slowly seeping into the English language. The relatively slow

pace of translation of his texts has provided an almost random selection of his ideas for

non-German speaking readers.1 These sporadic translations have perhaps influenced

the initial reception of his work. Somewhat fittingly, this pattern mirrors something in

Sloterdijk's dynamic writing style, which is compounded by the second-hand glimpses of

his work afforded by translators and scholars adept in both English and German. From

what we have seen of his work, not many fields have been left untouched by what is

often a relentless critique, including philosophy, history, religion, aesthetics, art and

architecture. Yet if one could sum up his oeuvre in a single question, it could be, as

Christian Borch has recently identified: where?2 Sloterdijk himself identifies with this

label, citing the spatial qualities of works by Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari as crucial

precursors to his topological approach to the 'cultural sciences.’3 With these references

and others, Sloterdijk has been piecing together a constellation of spatial tendencies

that, according to him, were brewing beneath the surface of established and revised

philosophies of being. When taken together, Sloterdijk might argue, the spatial

tendencies in human thought equate to a kind of topological yearning, slowly willing itself

into the metaphorical clearing of existence.

1 For example, Spheres I: Bubbles (1998) only appeared in 2011 in English.

2 Christian Borch, “Foam Architecture: Managing Co-Isolated Associations,” Economy and Society 37, no.

4 (2008): 551.

3 See: Bettina Funcke, review of Against Gravity: Bettina Funcke Talks with Peter Sloterdijk, by Peter

Sloterdijk, Bookforum, March 2005, http://www.bookforum.com/archive/feb_05/funcke.html.

4

One of Sloterdijk’s more provocative claims is that the modern ‘air condition’ –

our contemporary state of ‘being’ in the air – is explicitly linked to the German gas attacks

on French troops during World War One.4 Indeed, Sloterdijk locates the beginning of

modernity itself to this exact moment in 1915, where the targeting of the enemy in war

shifted from the body to the body’s environment. This claim forms the starting point for

my interest in the spatial operations of what Sloterdijk calls ‘military climatology’,5

‘atmoterrorism’6 ‘environmental war’,7 ‘special climatology’,8 ‘black meteorology’9 and

‘ecologized war’.10 For our purposes, it is useful to group these various terms under the

banners of ‘militarised atmospheres’ and more generally ‘military spatiality’ – labels that

describe in broad terms the complex spatial and relational characteristics that underpin

contemporary western military operations.11

As an artist, my interest in this area is from a spatial, non-linear and inter-

disciplinary point of view. As such, my instinct is to build on what Borch has succinctly

identified as Sloterdijk’s singular driving question, ‘where?’, by activating and testing key

aspects of Sloterdijk’s thought in relation to contemporary military spatiality through

creative practice in a number of ways. In his own words, Sloterdijk’s Spheres project is

an answer to what he identifies as the need for an entirely new vocabulary to understand

4 P. Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, trans. A. Patton and S. Corcoran, Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents Series

(Semiotexte/Smart Art, 2009), 10.

5 Ibid., 19.

6 Ibid., 23.

7 Ibid., 100.

8 Ibid., 47.

9 Ibid., 23.

10 Ibid., 20.

11 Rather than a reductive gesture, these terms serve to categorise and clarify what is often a loose and

unclear style of writing that Sloterdijk is known for. See Chapter 1.7. The particular differences in

different kinds of military atmospheres is discussed in detail at relevant points in this thesis.

5

our contemporary condition in spatial terms, "because all previous natural languages,

including theoretical discourse, were developed for a world of weight and solid

substances.”12 For Sloterdijk, the material focus of these pre-modern natural languages

are no longer capable of dealing with our increasingly artificial and modified states of

being in “a world of lightness and relations."13

Any new ‘vocabularies’ needed to articulate our contemporary ‘world of lightness

and relations’ might not be able to be separated from the spatial operations of art – a set

of spatial, relational and material operations that share much with the military’s own

spatial operations. It would come as no surprise then that Sloterdijk uses many examples

of art to explain his work, and he has a special fondness for Olafur Eliasson.14 Yet if

Sloterdijk uses examples of art that positively illustrate his theories, then what happens

when art is used to examine his own work? Would creating artworks that specifically

engage with, test and closely analyse his ideas help to clarify and yield new insights into

his work on military atmospheres?

This theoretical and creative research proceeds from a number of questions. If

Sloterdijk is indeed right in saying that the established languages of weight and solid

substances are incapable of articulating experience in a world of lightness and relations,

then how does this assertion apply to the contemporary spheres of military activity?

Perhaps the established languages of weight and substances that study the myriad

impacts of the military on society are similarly incapable of expressing the affects of a

contemporary military apparatus whose structure is increasingly atmospheric, invisible

and remote.

12 Bettina Funcke, “Against Gravity.”

13 Ibid.

14 Eliasson’s installation at the Tate Modern, London The Weather Project even features on the cover of

Sloterdijk’s Neither Sun Nor Death (2011).

6

Since this research is creative in nature, some key methods and a framework

that informs its creative process need to be established. My approach to writing about

my art practice has never sought to simply explain a given work of art after the fact.

Indeed, my practice could be described as theory-led. The parameters of ‘creative

research’ set out in Paul Carter’s Material Thinking (2004) inform this research’s position

that the exegesis cannot simply explain the work of art, nor the process that produced it.

Rather, the work of art and the exegesis should function in a state of dynamic reciprocity,

or a dyadic resonance, as Sloterdijk might put it.15 These media assemblages and

sculptural formations will nourish each other, converse, oscillate, vibrate and resonate.

As Carter argues:

“To conceive of the work of art as a detached datum is to internalise a scientific

paradigm of knowledge production. Wrong for science, it palpably fails to

acknowledge the point […] that the work of art begins as a social relation […] To

record it, then, is not to write about art but to write of creative research, to

document the making of a new social relation through a concomitant act of

production.”16

Rather than creating a work of art and then establishing the theoretical

architectures around it retroactively, my approach incorporates a kind of simultaneity,

whereby more traditional research practices of literature reviews, close textual analysis

and criticism of myriad sources are pursued in concert with creative enquiry. Critical,

15 P. Sloterdijk, Neither Sun Nor Death, trans. S. Corcoran, Foreign Agents Series (Semiotext(e), 2011),

153.

16 P. Carter, Material Thinking: The Theory and Practice of Creative Research (Melbourne University

Publishing, 2004), 10.

7

creative intensities here thrive, expand, regress and spawn unexpected generative

vectors.17

Research propositions

The central focus of this creative research is to explore and reconfigure the spatial

operations that inform two contemporary military practices: U.S. drones and Australian

military mythology. Sloterdijk has provocatively claimed that the beginning of modernity

can be traced to a specific military event: the German attack on French and Canadian

forces via the atmosphere at Ypres in 1915 – the airquake.18 Today, airborne or

‘atmospheric’ weapons such as drones play a prominent and controversial role in the

U.S. military’s myriad wars. Drones and other atmospheric surveillance and weapon

systems form a key part of U.S. power. So if, for Sloterdijk, the atmospheric attacks of

the First World War marked a turning point for society, what are the theoretical

implications of the atmospheric operations of contemporary militaries? To explore this

question, this research proposes and analyses two examples of contemporary military

‘atmospheric operations’ as focal points: U.S. military drones and Australian military

mythology. It proposes that these examples represent an expansion of Sloterdijk’s

airquake that are not only defined by their aerial characteristics, but also by their surreal

spatial operations. That is, these operations take place not just within an atmospheric or

‘aerial’ context – the air and low-orbit space. They also cultivate new kinds of space that

operate in-between established concepts of atmospheres – an articulation of what this

research will call droning.

17 See B. Pailthorpe, “Lingua Franca,” Ctrl-Z: New Media Philosophy 1, no. 1 (June 2012),

http://www.ctrl-z.net.au/journal/.

18 Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air.

8

Methodology and structure

This research is composed of both artworks and theories that are the result of several

years of experimentation, artist residencies, exhibitions, research and discussions. The

artworks produced as a result of this research could be classified as a kind of spatialized

philosophy, whereby theoretical reflections are actualised in space through the dynamic

and powerful languages of visual art in the specialised context of galleries and museums.

The works of art here both translate the relevant theories into space, but the theory then

also translates the works of art spatially back into a written form. Following this process,

the reader will be able to find a space in between these two grammars, each with their

own quirks and limitations, and contemplate those ideas that ultimately resist translation

from one form to the other. By bouncing back and forth between theory and practice, a

process of distillation occurs where intensities of thought slowly emerge from the leftover

residue of those untranslatable elements.19 It is these relational zones of concentration

between materials and concepts that this research attempts to harness in approaching

its focus on contemporary military atmospheres. The following paragraphs set out the

methodology of this attempt.

The first chapter of this thesis maps out the thematic and conceptual area of this

research’s operations. It briefly outlines Sloterdijk's broad theoretical trajectory across

Spheres I-III with a particular emphasis on the ‘atmospheric’ areas that are specifically

relevant for this research. It will then present the historic and conceptual framework

through which Sloterdijk constructs his image of atmospheres. Sloterdijk’s airquake is

thoroughly explained and contextualised through particular examples of military

atmospheres, such as Nazi death camps, U.S. prison gas chambers and drones. The

19 This idea borrows from Derrida’s ideas on the untranslatability of language. See: Jacques Derrida and

Jeffrey Mehlman, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” Yale French Studies, no. 48 (January 1, 1972): 90–

91, doi:10.2307/2929625.

9

final section of the first chapter will provide a summary of some major criticisms of

Sloterdijk’s writings, with a particular emphasis on style.

The second and third chapters work in concert with this research’s creative

works. Chapter 2 presents two major 3D animation works (and their underlying

experimental studies) that adopt some of Sloterdijk’s key methodological and thematic

practices to test these spatial theories spatially. These methodological and thematic

practices are outlined in Chapter 1. Through these creative works, Chapter 2 expands

Sloterdijk’s theory of the modernist airquake beyond what this research interprets as an

‘atmo-determinist’ account of atmospheric militarism through two major 3D animations

that explore the mysticism inherent in the US military’s drone network. These works and

accompanying theoretical discussions will show that the key defining elements of

contemporary military atmospheres are not only their aerial quality, but also their surreal

spatio-temporal practices. This is demonstrated by a detailed criticism of Sloterdijk’s key

spatial grammars through the work of theorists Roger Caillois, Gaston Bachelard, Carl

Raschke, Derek Gregory and the artists Char Davies, Trevor Paglen and Marcel

Duchamp. My own creative works are discussed in close proximity with these artworks

and texts that span the distinct atmospheric categories that are the focus of this research.

Together, these theorists, artists and the structure of ‘couplings’ in these chapters adopt

a fundamental philosophical positioning in Sloterdijk’s work, that of the figure of the pair

as an ontological apriori state. The term that Sloterdijk uses continually in this regard is

reciprocity, a co-subjectivity that infuses much of his atmospheric philosophy. This is as

much a methodological strategy as a conceptual one: since mimesis and doubling frame

much of the thought in Chapter 2 and 3, it is pertinent for this doctorate to adopt an

operational posture that mimics the spatial and technical practices that it will critique.

In Chapter 3, my creative research focuses on the spatial construction of

militarised atmospheres as they are designed and consumed by the civilian population.

In this, it returns to the sphere of mythology within the work of Sloterdijk, expanding his

10

reflections in light of texts by Jean-Luc Nancy, so as to highlight the particular spatial

operations that occur in the construction of the communal, mythological space. I will

pursue this line of enquiry through examples of both hero and enemy image construction

in Australia, exploring these in concert with the military strategies of drone warfare, the

photographic analyses of Roland Bathes and grid theories of Rosalind Krauss. In this

way, I will consider how contemporary military mythology constructs a haunting topology

to complement the surreal logic of contemporary combat.

Having explored these aspects, I will discuss how my major creative work Spatial

Operations (2014) builds upon the photographic and image based examples of

contemporary myth-creation by artists such as Luc Delahaye. However, it adopts a

different perspective by considering the institutional practices of national

commemoration and the curation of material culture in order to examine the spatial

operations of military mythology in Australia. The resulting work Spatial Operations

(2014) will be presented as an artificial monument to Australian military mythology that

thrives on a similar spatial detachment that enables the prosthetic operations of drones.

11

12

Chapter 1: Peter Sloterdijk’s Spheres

Figure 1. Sir John Everett Millais, Bubbles, (1886). Public domain.

13

1.1 Introduction

This chapter briefly outlines Sloterdijk's broad theoretical trajectory across Spheres I-III

with a particular emphasis on the ‘atmospheric’ areas that are specifically relevant for

this research. It contains six parts that lead us directly into the precise area of operation

for this thesis and its creative works: Sloterdijk’s Spheres; his understanding of

atmospheres; military atmospheres; drone atmospheres, sound spheres and finally,

criticisms of Sloterdijk’s approach.

These sections draw out the key images and operations of this research, with a

particular emphasis on the unstable frontiers between concepts of interior and exterior

space. Through this, I will demonstrate that Sloterdijk’s understanding of atmospheres is

grounded in his particular geometric interpretation of human history in Spheres, which

relies heavily on ‘spatial’ vocabularies and analyses, as the titles of his three books

suggest: Bubbles, Globes and Foam. A starting point for this research is Sloterdijk’s

belief that the bubble was burst by the atmospheric operations of modernity, and this has

created ongoing reverberations, the most important of which is, for this research, the

insecurity and compromised integrity of interior and exterior worlds. The key features of

this spatial fallout and the importance of co-subjectivity for Sloterdijk’s philosophy of

bubbles is outlined in this chapter, before discussing the bubble’s protective and

immunological qualities as articulated through architecture and Jakob Von Uexküll’s

concept of umwelt. Having established the way Sloterdijk conceptualises the atmosphere

through the figure of the bubble, the ‘bursting’ moment of World War One’s airquake is

discussed in detail, along with the development of other examples of weaponised

atmospheres, from gas chambers to U.S. military drones.

These analyses of atmospheres will be formative for the way in which this thesis

operates its central research propositions and will establish the parameters from which

14

it will disrupt and expand Sloterdijk’s notion of militarised atmospheres. Rather than

traditional research questions, this thesis proposes a set of ideas on the nature of

contemporary military atmospheres through creative practice. Whilst it is outside the

limited constraints of this thesis to analyse Sloterdijk’s comprehensive works in the depth

and detail of a more traditional philosophical project, a discussion of the key philosophical

elements that Sloterdijk draws upon is nonetheless essential to this research’s specific

focus on his concept of atmospheres – a relatively small yet crucially important

component of his vast area of operation.

1.2 Atmospheres

Before we delve into Sloterdijk’s particular deployment of the concept of atmospheres, it

is important to set out some defining parameters of this conceptually diffuse term. In

particular, this research depends upon a subtle yet important difference between

concepts of atmosphere and the ‘aerial’, a difference that will be set-up here. This

difference will be key to showing – in concert with this research’s artworks – how

militarised atmospheres are not only aerial, but also deeply surreal. Gernot Böhme

suggests the slippery ontological status of atmospheres, since they “are indeterminate

above all as regards their ontological status. We are not sure whether we should attribute

them to the objects or environments from which they proceed or to the subjects who

experience them”, warning that “[a]tmosphere can only become a concept, however, if

we succeed in accounting for the peculiar intermediary status of atmospheres between

subject and object.”20 Böhme refers to Walter Benjamin’s concept of the aura of an

original or authentic work of art as having some similarity with the way that the term

20 Gernot Böhme, “Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics,” Thesis Eleven 36, no.

1 (1993): 114.

15

atmosphere is used, not least in the field of aesthetics.21 Whereas Benjamin’s aura was

supposed to be undermined by the age of mechanical reproduction, Böhme points out

the irony of avant-garde artists such as Duchamp (whom I discuss in Chapter 2), that

sought to discard the aura of the work of art, but in doing so, applied his own aura to the

ready-made object.22 Since this research has examined the way Peter Sloterdijk has

discussed militarised atmospheres through new artworks, Böhme’s reference to

Benjamin and Duchamp is useful in establishing the aesthetic concerns of atmospheres.

Still, there is a pressing question of distinction between concepts of the aerial and

atmosphere that needs to be explored.

The work of Pete Adey is useful in setting up this subtle distinction. In Aerial Life

(2010), Adey positions what he calls aerial life as “submerged in the medium of the aerial”

and “understood as ecological, cybernetic, genetic, physiological, energetic, affective,

sensuous, quantitative and more.”23 He proposes through the figure of the aerial subject

a concept of aerality – which produces a “distinctive kind of mobile society” that has been

defined and imagined by the social and relational technologies, geographies, processes

and infrastructures of aviation – both civilian and military. Indeed, the figure of the

aeroplane as a visual image and a subject of discourse is seen by Adey as something

that should not always be privileged over the “morethan-representational” affects and

effects of aerial life, “to see how it is not only portrayed, but done and lived.”24 This

emphasis on the performance of aerial life by the aerial subject will become interesting

when applied to the context of the military drone operator in Chapter 2.

21 Ibid., 116.

22 Böhme, “Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics.”

23 P. Adey, Aerial Life: Spaces, Mobilities, Affects (Kindle Version), RGS-IBG Book Series (Wiley, 2010),

Location 687.

24 Ibid., Location 478.

16

An important link between Adey’s concept of aerial life and Sloterdijk’s philosophy

of atmospheres is his emphasis on the body as a site of vitality, of sensing, of both

affecting and being affected by its environment. Indeed, Adey aptly refers to Sloterdijk’s

‘modification’ of Heidegger’s ‘being-in-the-world’ to a ‘being-in-the-air’ as an inspiration.

Citing Sloterdijk’s Terror from the Air (2009), Adey argues that “it is therefore about aerial

subjects and their relation with space, a realization that ‘man is not only what he eats,

but what he breathes and that in which he is immersed.’”25 Like Sloterdijk, Adey defines

the aerial as being composed of a number of intersecting and relational processes that

engage both ground and air as an immersive force. He focuses on the birth of the aerial

subject through early Royal Air Force (RAF) pilot training, which produced a new kind of

human, “designed, preened, screened and developed into aerial subjects whose destiny

it would be to secure and defend the nation.”26 For Adey, this was part of a broader

practice of the State performing power, governing territory and airspace through

technologies and practices of aviation. Whilst Adey’s emphasis on air-mobility and aerial

subjects, such as pilots and travellers, does not fully account for the unique subjectivities

that are present in the American militaries drone network – it does give us a useful

framework from which we can develop a different but related concept of ‘drone

atmospheres’. The key difference is that of the aerial subject – in the context of military

drones, the aerial subject is no longer physically airborne, but grounded. Certainly, this

subject is still atmospheric, but in a very different way, indeed, in a very surreal and

affective way – a difference that will be explore in detail in Chapter 2. Suffice to say that

the drone operator’s fleshy body is no longer airborne, but his or her agency is projected

through what I will call an event prosthetic. For the purposes of this research, the term

atmosphere is at once more precise and diffuse in conceptual terms; an ambiguity that

Ben Anderson identifies as crucial to the understanding of affective experience as it

25 Ibid., Location 504.

26 Ibid., Location 819.

17

occurs beyond immediate subjectivity.27 Here, it provides a spatial framework that is

indeed composed of what Adey groups under the term aerality, but also accounts for the

spaces that this research is focused on, spaces that are not only ‘aerial’ or ‘airborne’ in

a standard sense, but deeply atmospheric, ambient and even ‘airy’, but not necessarily

in-the-air.

1.3 Peter Sloterdijk’s Spheres

Whereas Adey’s work on aerial life looks closely at the transformations of the 20th

Century through the processes and practices of the aerial subject, in Spheres I: Bubbles

(2011), Peter Sloterdijk sets out to recast human history in spatially situated terms. Much

of his approach is grounded in the complex relational spaces that are generated through

‘couplings’. The following pages unpack this theoretical device and its importance for

Sloterdijk’s particular use of the term ‘atmosphere.’28

In developing his atmospheric account of early human cultures, Sloterdijk argues

through the thought-image29 of the bubble, that the couple is always primary to the

individual. What Sloterdijk has called the Paar-Sein, (being-in-pair), precedes all

encounters. It is for Sloterdijk the absolute figure where ontology is firmly based in the

figure of the pair. The concept of ‘being-in’ is for Sloterdijk always already “being-with

27 Ben Anderson, “Affective Atmospheres,” Emotion, Space and Society 2, no. 2 (2009): 77–81.

28 Sloterdijk frequently uses terms such as ‘air-conditioning’, ‘space’, ‘containers’ and ‘climate’ in place

of ‘atmospheres’, a somewhat loose stylistic approach that can become problematic. This is addressed

in section 1.7 of this chapter.

29 Sloterdijk rejects the term ‘metaphor’ for his Spheres project, preferring the term ‘thought-image’.

See: Bettina Funcke, “Against Gravity.”

18

something in something”30, being-in is always contained. In this way, Sloterdijk suggests

that "[a]ll births are twin births; no one comes into the world unaccompanied or

unattached."31 The underlying force in this ontological pairing is reciprocity – a concept

that is crucial for the arguments throughout this research. This theoretical position is

clearly seen in his analysis of the Christian story of creation in Genesis in Spheres I:

Bubbles (2011). In particular, Sloterdijk draws out what he identifies as an emphasis on

technique, atmospheric design and artistic means of production in the story of the

creation of life through the clay vessel of Adam.

In Sloterdijk’s atmospheric interpretation of human history in Genesis, the

production of society started with a single breath, and this breath therefore contains a

technological capacity. For Sloterdijk, the Biblical account of the creation of mankind is

ultimately dependant on breath. He describes breath as “the epitome of a divine

technology [… for] without the completion of the clay body through breath, Adam would

forever have remained merely a bizarre work of earthen art.”32 Here the original breath

acts as a technique that animates God’s ceramic creation, a feat of divine

(man)ufacturing. For Sloterdijk, the inspirator, the inspired and the skilled craftsman lie

30 P. Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Microspherology, trans. W. Hoban, Foreign Agents (Semiotexte/Smart Art,

2011), 541.

31 Ibid., 413. It is important to note that there will be no theological analysis of Sloterdijk's reading of

Genesis in this thesis, even though it would be an interesting and ambitious undertaking. It is cited here

as an anchor from which this thesis can develop its interpretation of Sloterdijk's spatial philosophy.

Indeed, Sloterdijk himself begins to conclude Bubbles by qualifying his use of theological materials: “For

the present Spherology, these discourses are not interesting for their religious claims or their dogmatic

wilfulness; we are not visiting them as attractions from intellectual history. They are only of legitimate

concern to us to the extent that, until recently, they had a virtually unchallenged monopoly on

fundamental intimacy-logical reflection. Only Platonic erotology had been able, in contemporary

adaptations, to break the predominance of Christian theology in the field of the theory of intimate

connections.” P. Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Microspherology, trans. by W. Hoban, Foreign Agents

(Semiotexte/Smart Art, 2011), p. 544

32 Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, 36–7.

19

at the very core of Genesis’ narrative, and “the breathing in of life was a technical

procedure that had to be honoured as God’s exclusive patent throughout the entire

period of religious-metaphysical thought.”33 That Genesis enthusiastically emphasises

the ceramic composition of Adam and that he was crafted in the form of a container is

crucial to Sloterdijk’s take on the onto-spatial formulation of being-in. It hints at the

influence of contemporaneous human creative practices on the Christian story of

creation. In this way, a reciprocity between an individual and their socio-political ‘climate’

is found in cultural practices, and for Sloterdijk, this is a ‘coupling’. In the context of

Sloterdijk’s interpretation of Genesis, the creative practice of the ‘craftsman’ was

‘ceramically correct’ in that humans were conceived of as ‘containers’:

“men practiced their first ideas of being-hollow, of being-containers of being-

passages, by producing ceramic vases. From then on, humans were conceived

on the basis of the “vase” principle. To create humans was above all to make

vases. On this point, the god of the Bible only behaved ceramically correctly.”34

Here, the ‘containing’ potential of the human is fundamental. Sloterdijk continues

to describe that “[h]ollowness is the first instalment of the spiritual and the divine”, since,

“God, as we know, aims to create man in his image, but precisely, he is only in his image

from the fact that he is as hollow—because to be hollow is to be able to allow something

else to pass through.”35 It is through this hollowness, this being-container that what

Sloterdijk calls a ‘pneumatic feedback’ takes place. Not only does God blow life into

Adam, but in this same atmospheric gesture, he simultaneously creates himself:

33 Ibid., 38.

34 Sloterdijk, Neither Sun Nor Death, 152.

35 Ibid., 153.

20

“In blowing into a hollow, an oscillation is produced, and from this oscillation

language, intentionality and co-subjectively are born […] If you undertake a

critical reading of the story of Genesis, you will notice that only in appearance

does God exist prior to the creation of man, and that in reality he is born at the

same time as him...”36

The reciprocity between the Christian God and Adam forms one of the

cornerstones of Sloterdijk’s conception of ‘micro-sphereology’ in Spheres I: Bubbles

(2011) —that is —as an assemblage of couplings. It is this assemblage of couplings that

create the basis for a decentralised ‘network’ of reciprocal relations. In Neither Sun Nor

Death (2011), Sloterdijk explains the significance of this networked pairing for

reinterpreting the forces underlying human space formation in terms of media theory:

“the gain brought by this new approach is considerable” he argues, since “no longer is

there a primary or absolute centre endowed with a relation to the environment, but

mutually illuminating, permeable poles which hold themselves at a mutual distance and

evoke one another…” With this concept, Sloterdijk continues, “I want to open onto a

media theory that describes individuals as intermediate stations in communications

networks.”37

In addition to this emphasis on an expanded interpretation of what might usually

be called media theory, Sloterdijk emphasises the ‘atmospheric’ characteristics of

spheres. Throughout the introduction to Spheres I: Bubbles (2011), Sloterdijk positions

the sphere as the fundamental starting point from which the cultures, psychologies and

philosophies of ancient humanity should be approached. Spheres are, according to

Sloterdijk, the original conditioning force for human coexistence: “[s]pheres are air

conditioning systems in whose construction and calibration, for those living in real

36 Ibid.

37 Ibid., 152.

21

coexistence, it is out of the question to not participate.”38 For Sloterdijk, ‘air conditioning’

is the primary generative and relational process under which societies are produced:

“[t]he symbolic air conditioning of the shared space is the primal production of every

society. Indeed–humans create their own climate…”39

This emphasis on a shared or collective ontology is of course not unique to

Sloterdijk – but Sloterdijk’s emphasis on the atmospheric nature of this ontology is.

Michel Serres outlines the formulation of the individual in space as a voisinage or

neighbourly affair. Posing himself the question ‘where do you live?’, in Atlas (1994),

Serres responds:

“The living position themselves here or there, not at an abstract or geometric

point, nor at an embedded or mundane point in smooth space, but in the topology

of a pad or of a ball, in the topology of a box or of a house or of a bag, whose

enclosure provides them some private isolation and optimised distance; all the

circumstances of a neighbourhood. Surrounded by a membrane, the cell lives

less in itself and for itself than by itself. It is a universal biological theory that

without a membrane, there is no life.”40

The image of the membrane that Serres evokes here is useful in understanding

Sloterdijk’s theory of space formation as an immunised, protective enveloping (although

for Sloterdijk it is not quite a matter of being alone). Sloterdijk goes on in Spheres I:

38 Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Microspherology, 47 – 8.

39 Ibid., 47–8.

40 M. Serres, l’Atlas (Paris: Editions Julliard, 1994), 43. [My translation]. Original text: “Le vivant se pose ici

où là, non point sur un point, géométrique ou abstrait, noyé ou banal dans un espace lisse, mais dans la

topologie d’un pave ou d’une boule, d’une boîte ou d’une maison, d’un sac, dont l’enceinte lui procure

quelque isolement privatif, des distances optimisées, toutes les circonstances d’un voisinage. Entourée

d’une membrane, la cellule vit moins en soi et pour soi que chez soi. Sans membrane, pas de vie, théorème

universel en biologie.”

22

Bubbles (2011) to discuss several examples of dyadic, enveloping co-subjectivity,

including mother and child, foetus and placenta, Philemon and Baucis, psychoanalyst

and analysed, mystics and God, etc.41 The protective, nurturing connotations of the

couple, the pair, the organism and its placenta resonate throughout early spatial

accounts of humanity. Serres’ description of the living being finding itself in the topology

of a bubble, at optimal distance, surrounded by a neighbourly membrane, clearly alludes

to the being-contained, to the interiority of Sloterdijk’s ontology of co-subjectivity.

Sloterdijk’s concept of atmosphere is similarly bound up in the reciprocity and

spatial simultaneity of biologist Jakob Von Uexküll’s environmental theories, whose

observation that life is always life-in-an-environment suggests the crucial reciprocity

between organism and environment that Sloterdijk emphasises:

“We no longer regard animals as mere machines, but as subjects whose

essential activity consists of perceiving and acting. We thus unlock the gates that

lead to other realms, for all that a subject perceives becomes his perceptual world

and all that he does, his effector world. Perceptual and effector worlds together

form a closed unit, the Umwelt […] all animals, from the simplest to the most

complex, are fitted into their unique worlds with equal completeness.”42

This umweltian system facilitates an image of Sloterdijkian reciprocal space as a

topology, a continuum of actors, receptors, echoes and reflections, where interior and

exterior blend into new bubbles. In addition to Von Uexküll, Sloterdijk summons one of

Heidegger’s neologisms in support of his discussion of intimacy, to structurally link his

seven layers of “human-forming microcosms of interlocked interiority.” The term Inhood,

41 Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Microspherology, 269 – 471.

42 J. Von Uexküll, ‘A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men’, in Instinctive behaviour: the

development of a modern concept, ed. by C.H. Schiller and D.J. Kuenen (Methuen, 1957), pp. 6-11.

23

which according to Sloterdijk “surfaced like an apparition” in Heidegger’s Being and

Time,

“expresses, oddly enough, the fact that the subject or Dasein can only be there if

it is contained, surrounded, encompassed, disclosed, breathed-upon, resounded

through, attuned and addressed. Before a Dasein assumes the character of

being-in-the-world, it already has the constitution of being-in. Having admitted

this, it seems justified to demand that heterogeneous statements about intimate-

spheric closedness and openness be brought together in an overarching pattern.

The aim is thus a theory of existential spaciousness-or, differently put: a theory

of inter-intelligence or the stay in animation spheres [...] Being-in, then, should be

conceived as the togetherness of something with something in something. We

are therefore asking - we shall repeat the thesis - about what is known in current

terminology as a “media theory.” What are media theories but suggestions of

ways to explain the how and the whereby of the connection between different

existents in a shared ether?”43

The poetic tone of shared spatiality in this passage gestures towards a poetics of

atmosphere that infuses much of Spheres I: Bubbles (2011) – as we saw with Sloterdijk’s

interpretation of Genesis. Much of Sloterdijk’s writings can be described, as has been

cited earlier through Christian Borch and others, as an attempt to articulate and locate

transformations of human society in spatial terms. This process generates a strong

atmosphere of poetics that operates in deeply spatial terms.

This surreal or poetic atmosphere culminates towards the final pages of Spheres

I: Bubbles (2011), when Sloterdijk discusses the spatial enveloping of “the topological

43 Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Microspherology, 541–2.

24

surrealism of religion.”44 Citing Saint John of Damascus, Sloterdijk refers to his

reintroduction of the word perichoresis “to describe the strangely placeless yet self-

locating coexistence of the divine persons.” Its meaning in ancient Greek probably

resembled “dancing around something” or “being whirled around in a circle.”45 This term

conjures the image of a God whose centre is nowhere and whose circumference is

everywhere.46 Sloterdijk describes the reintroduction of this word as “one of the most

brilliant terminological creations in the Western history of ideas.”47

“[Perichoresis] represents no less than the challenging idea that the persons

cannot be localized in external spaces borrowed from physics, but that the place

in which they are located is itself created through their interrelationship [...] God’s

privilege, then, is to be in a place for which room is only made through

relationships between the inhabitants and the co-inhabitants within itself. This is

so difficult for trivial spatial thought to grasp that one would have to be someone

entirely entangled in love stories—but under no circumstances a modern-age

subject—to have an intimation of its meaning.”48

This term perichoresis represents a subtle yet crucial return in Sloterdijk’s

argument about the spatiality of co-subjectivity in Spheres I: Bubbles: a completely de-

physicalized concept of ‘person space’. This ‘loss of coordinates’ of ‘person space’ will

become very important for this research’s emphasis on the surreal spatial operations of

contemporary militarism, and in particular, the breaking down of the subject-environment

relationship. “With this” Sloterdijk goes on to suggest, “the meaning of In was freed from

44 Ibid., 603.

45 Ibid.

46 Ibid., 68.

47 Ibid., 603.

48 Ibid.

25

all forms of container-oriented thought once and for all”, something that, according to

Sloterdijk, “even modern sociologists, when they have attempted it, have not yet been

able to repeat.”49 Here we approach one of the core theoretical themes of this research:

that of mysticism50 – a theme that will be substantially developed in the following

chapters. We will see that the spatiality of these transcendent religious concepts is

deeply implicated in contemporary military spatial operations. Here we are now moving

away from ‘containers’ to ideas of interior and exterior worlds.

1.3 Peter Sloterdijk’s concept of atmosphere

Having outlined Sloterdijk’s particular understanding of space that emphasises

reciprocity and design, this section will address his analysis of architecture with a

particular emphasis on the unstable definitions of interior and exterior worlds that are

crucial for this research. In his essay Atmospheric Politics (2005), Sloterdijk highlights a

key moment in the evolution of architecture that is pertinent to historical reproductions of

atmospheres, and the referential relationship between organism and environment. The

first examples of greenhouses that English architects created in the first few decades of

the nineteenth century immunised exotic plants from the toxic latitudes of the English

climate. These early atmospheric laboratories were created to emulate the

environmental conditions of the plants’ native habitat – they were structural articulations

of relations and reciprocity. The invention of bent glass allowed for solar radiation to be

manipulated in such a way that greenhouses could artificially reproduce the vital

atmospheric conditions for the plants to flourish in alien surrounds. Sloterdijk points out

49 Ibid., 601.

50 This term is often used in concert with or instead of ‘surreal’, whilst they ultimately have a similar

meaning in the context of this thesis.

26

that the reciprocity between organism and milieu became apparent through this

architectural development, and indeed, that this constituted a shift of “paradigmatic

significance.” He continues:

“Such edifices took into account that organisms and climate zones reference

each other as it were a priori and that random uprooting of organisms to plant

them elsewhere could only occur if the climatic conditions were transposed along

with them.”51

This referential assemblage of organism-atmosphere resonates with Sloterdijk’s

account of the dyadic resonance in the Book of Genesis between God and Adam in

Spheres I: Bubbles (2011). That environment and organism atmospherically reference

each other suggests a simultaneity that underwrites the existence of both. Without plants,

there is no breathable atmosphere, and without an atmosphere, there are no plants.

Additionally (and crucially) each plant has its very own atmosphere. To again invoke

Serres, without a membrane, there is no life.

Whilst the artificial atmosphere of the greenhouse is an interesting moment in the

history of designer atmospheres and of architecture itself, it is for Sloterdijk a thought-

image that leads him to the discussion of the development of the ancient Greek city as

the first shared space, or artificial (political) environment:

“The Greek city was a greenhouse for people who agreed to be uprooted from

the modus vivendi of living in separation and instead be planted in the disarming

modus vivendi of living together. If the word polis always retains a certain

astonishing ring to it, it’s because those who first used it were never quite able to

51 P. Sloterdijk, “Atmospheric Politics,” in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy :

[exhibition], ZKM, Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, 20.03.-03-10.2005, ed. P. Weibel and B. Latour

(Mass., 2005), 944.

27

forget that the city as a form of life always stood out like a social wonder of the

world against the background of pre-urban conditions.”52

This atmospheric reciprocity has, for Sloterdijk, intensified over thousands of

years of human spatiality. From exotic plants and their specific referential articulation of

atmospheric reciprocity, to ancient Greece’s human greenhouse, Sloterdijk moves on to

cite Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project (1927-1940) as a key identifier of the creation of

what he calls the 'inner space of global capitalism'. In Benjamin's survey of glass-covered

Parisian alleyways, Sloterdijk finds the original example of capitalism's spatial tendencies

of exclusion. In these Parisian arcades, a form of “artificial world” was created, “a kind of

panopticon of truth, of pleasure”, and nothing short of the earliest “inner space of global

capitalism.”53 By describing the theory of neo-liberal globalisation as “tremendously

inclusive [yet] still exclusive”,54 Sloterdijk reinforces that:

“The inner space of global capitalism is a relatively modern construction, which

is not older than two hundred years. One can date this fairly accurately, which

Walter Benjamin did in his Passagenwerk [Arcades Project], to the moment the

Parisian architects started to cover the alleys between streets with glass roofs

and thereby created a kind of artificial world, a kind of panopticon of truth, of

pleasure. This is the start of psychedelic capitalism. And the entire contemporary

western civilisation more or less resides in the inner realm of such a psychedelic

installation.”55

52 Ibid., 946.

53 Sloterdijk, ‘Atmospheric Politics’, p. 948.

54 Ibid., 944.

55 Ibid.

28

This emphasis on the ‘psychedelic’ spatiality of these interior zones of

contemporary western civilisation conjures strong images of the desiring intensities that

propel us towards the underlying surrealism of contemporary military atmospheres. A

clear tendency in Sloterdijk’s conception of these atmospheres is the constant flow

between interior and exterior zones. These arcades create this inner artificial spatiality

through both material and relational techniques: the glass creates interior and exterior

chambers that allow for a sort of simultaneous occupation of both outside and inside to

occur. These arcades are a clear articulation of what Sloterdijk calls air-conditioning,

which he describes as “disconnecting a defined volume of space from the surrounding

air”,56 which, in the case of shopping arcades, sought to favourably condition the

experiential and relational space of shopping in early capitalism by demarcating special

zones through architectural means. Benjamin’s arcades were a precursor to the

contemporary practice of air design, which “aims at directly modifying the mood of

airspace users […] contributing to a heightened product acceptance and willingness to

buy.”57

From the technic reciprocity of the original breath and the referencing of

organisms to climate in greenhouses – both botanical and consumer-oriented, the

intensities of being-in-between interior and exterior worlds have been slowly amplified

over the millennia, producing convergent cultural interpretations of celestial and

terrestrial atmospheres.58 Whereas ancient cultures found solace in the mystical and

56 Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, 20.

57 Ibid., 94.

58As Christian Borch notes: “So, Sloterdijk argues, when Nietzsche announced the death of God, this was

in a sense an anachronistic assertion; it was another formula for the breakdown of the theological

cosmology [...] That is, the immunity granted by the theological cosmology has collapsed.” Borch,

“Foam Architecture: Managing Co-Isolated Associations,” 551.

29

psychic expanse of the cosmos, modernity has had to deal with the ‘bad news’ of

astrophysics:

“[Modernity] has revealed to us that the cosmos is the most terrible thing

imaginable. The universe is an absolute non-container. It never enters into

consideration as a living space, or at least will not for some millennia; for us, it

represents hell, an empty hell, a cold hell, a fiery hell. It is the element that is

hostile to life par excellence, a vacuum, thinner than anything else we could ever

represent on earth in terms of artificial vacuums, hotter or colder than anything

else in which life can flourish, an epitome of terror in inhospitableness.”59

According to Sloterdijk, modernity has, since then, attempted to technically

reproduce the cosmic immunities lost to the bad news of the true nature of the celestial

sphere:

“Now networks and insurance policies are meant to replace the celestial domes;

telecommunication has to re-enact the all-encompassing. The body of humanity

seeks to create a new immune constitution in an electronic medial skin. Because

the old all-encompassing and containing structure, the heavenly continens

firmament, is irretrievably lost, that which is no longer encompassed and no

longer contained, the former contentum, must now create its own satisfaction on

artificial continents under artificial skies and domes.”60

Yet Sloterdijk suggests that for modernity, some of the worst news was yet to

come. Whilst the ‘terror’ of astrophysics is perhaps overstated in the context of earthly

pursuits, some much more pressing atmospheric issues linger much closer to home. A

59 Sloterdijk, Neither Sun Nor Death, 213–14.

60 Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Microspherology, 25. [Translator’s Footnote: ‘The concept historical point of

interest lies in the fact that the modern word ‘continent’ refers to the connections between parts of the

ground, whereas the classical continens denotes the outermost layer of the heavens.’ p. 633. Bubbles.]

30

pioneering incubator of the modern atmosphere and its ontological reverberations is, of

course, the corrupted voisinage of war.

Sloterdijk’s concepts of artificial skies and domes occupy a particularly important

place in the field of military research. Indeed, for Sloterdijk the subtle violence of vapour

trails left by the modern military-industrial machine would go on to haunt modernity and

inform the future trajectory of not only warfare and state terror, but would also recast the

ontological rift between organism and milieu, the being-in and being-out of modernity.

1.4 Military atmospheres: airquake

The airquake of World War One occurred at 6:00 pm on April 22, 1915.61 At this precise

time on the Western Front, German forces released close to two hundred tonnes of

chlorine gas, forming a massive toxic cloud that was carried by prevailing winds towards

the French trenches at Ypres. The introduction of chemical warfare to the military arsenal

has been described by Sloterdijk as the moment when the 20th Century erupted

spectacularly. From that moment on, the targeting of enemy forces in war shifted from

bodies to attacks upon the very atmosphere that they depend on for survival. For

Sloterdijk, this represented both a turning point in the evolution of warfare, and indeed,

a drastic shift in understanding the relationship between humans and their environment

that would mark the beginning of the modernist era. “In the evening hours of that day, a

hand jumped on the clock of ages, marking the end of the vitalistic, late-Romantic

modernist phase and the beginning of atmoterrorist objectivity.”62 The effects of this

floating, synthetic mist were devastating on its victims, causing the destruction of soft

61 Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, 30.

62 Ibid., 30.

31

tissue, most notably lungs and eyes — atmospheric organs. Just as the bad news of

astrophysics would jolt modern humanity into the true, hostile reality of their celestial

container, this strategic triumph of designing an anti-climate, a negative air-placenta,

would similarly have resonant consequences for theories of space formation. The spatial

affects of expansive nationalism, geopolitics and military conquest are fundamental to

our contemporary being. As Sloterdijk puts it, the bubble is only noticed once it bursts.

Throughout the First World War, the environment that an enemy body depended

on for survival would increasingly be transformed into a hostile milieu. The most basic

human action that connects the body to its life sphere and underwrites its very existence,

breathing, here renders the victim an unwilling accomplice in their own destruction. The

pneumatic pact between organism and life-sphere is then casualty to an atmospheric

hijacking, where the organism propels itself towards death because of its own vital bio-

mechanism: breathing. This unbreakable air-contract hastens the death of the subject,

since “the gas terrorist’s assault on the air induces desperation in those attacked, who,

unable to refrain from breathing, are forced to participate in the obliteration of their own

life.”63 For Sloterdijk then, the airquake can be conceived as a kind of forcibly enabled

mass-suicide.

In order for the strategy of the airquake to be deployed effectively for use on the

battlefields of France and Germany, a specific effort was placed on the principle of

atmospheric design. Optimum particle concentration, gas-cloud formation, movement

and diffusion were to be achieved through a kind of designer atmosphere, or as Sloterdijk

puts it, a whole black meteorology.64 It is here that the modern atmosphere exceeds the

Biblical interpretation of the technic breath, a natural sphere to be manipulated,

designed, reconfigured and temporarily controlled for geospatial goals. The containing

63 Ibid., 23.

64 Ibid.

32

function of atmospheres and humans that Sloterdijk saw in Genesis has here been

corrupted, the atmosphere – a container of containers – has been ruptured.

For Sloterdijk, terror takes the form of an attack on the enemy’s vital conditions

for life, since “[t]errorism can only be understood when grasped as a form of exploration

of the environment from the perspective of its destructibility. It exploits the fact that

ordinary inhabitants have a user relationship to their container or environment, that they

instinctively and exclusively consume it as a silent condition of their existence.”65 Indeed,

a being-in-the-air necessitates an ongoing collaboration, a constant exchange between

individual and the atmosphere upon which they depend. In this way, the original feedback

loop that took place between Adam and his creator in Genesis is undertaken repeatedly

as we live. Through this ongoing exchange, we continually create ourselves and our

atmosphere repeatedly. Each breath is like the original breath. Once this pairing is

corrupted, rendered hostile through a designed intervention, the long filaments of terror

are summoned and suspended in that same sphere. The air becomes at once host and

hostile. For Sloterdijk, the atmospheric ‘contract’ between user and atmosphere was

hijacked and exploited during the airquake.

The efficacy of this hijacked atmospheric contract would go on to be exploited in

a number of ways post-1918. The German chemical industry pursued its interest in ‘pest

control’, despite the conditions of the Versailles Treaty, which prohibited the production

of chemical agents in Germany that could be weaponised.66 Through various

conferences and committees67 German chemists perfected the use of hydrogen cyanide

65 Ibid., 28.

66 Ibid., 30.

67 Sloterdijk cites in both Terror From The Air and Ecumes, Sphères III, a 1918 meeting of the German

Society for General and Applied Entomology in Munich during which Prof. Ferdinand Flury “gave a

programmatic lecture on 'Ordinary Pest Control Activities at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical

Chemistry and Electro-chemistry in Berlin Dahelm'” pp. 30-31 Terror From the Air. In an aside, Sloterdijk

notes that Prof. Flury was one of Fritz Haber's closest colleagues at the Institute in Dalhem, who

33

that preserved its extreme toxicity whilst rendering it perceptible through the use of a gas

irritant, methyl chloroformate. This new product, Zyklon A, was introduced to fumigate

agricultural and living areas that were infested with pests.68 Of course, the original issue

with the use of hydrogen cyanide is that it is imperceptible in the atmosphere by human

senses. As Sloterdijk describes, “developers thought it wise to add a highly perceptible

irritant component with a repellent effect to alert users to the substance’s presence.”69

The development of Zyklon A and the German chemical industry’s obsession with

decontamination introduced a new vocabulary of hygiene into the German language. As

is well documented, perceptions of sanitation, cleanliness and disinfection would of

course go on to be violently politicised in Nazi Germany.70 In 1924, a German pest control

company, Tesch & Stabenow (Testa), patented a new product called Zyklon B, which

had highly improved storage characteristics and, importantly, lacked the irritant that

rendered the hydrogen cyanide perceptible to humans.71 Testa developed mobile

extermination chambers in which textiles, rugs and clothing were placed for disinfection

using Zyklon B. Throughout the 1930s, Testa achieved a quasi-monopoly in the global

pest-control industry. As war broke out in 1939, Testa gave gas chamber demonstrations

to the Wehrmacht along with civilian groups. “Around 1942”, Sloterdijk states, “the Tesch

& Stabenow company published a brochure called The Little Testa Handbook On Zyklon

for their customer base, which at the time featured the Eastern Wehrmacht and Waffen

SS. The booklet gave clear instructions”, he continues, “for militarizing the ‘extermination

received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1918, and is also considered the 'father of chemical warfare'

for his work on chlorine gas in the First World War. P. Sloterdijk, Sphères: Tome 3, Ecumes, Sphérologie

Plurielle, trans. O. Mannoni, Pluriel. Philosophie (Paris: Maren Sell Editeurs, 2005), 98–109.

68 Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, 30.

69 Ibid.

70 J. Kalthoff and M. Werner, Die Händler Des Zyklon B: (VSA, 1998), 24.

71 Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, 35.

34

procedure’—including even the possible (re-)use of cyanide on human environments.”72

Indeed, it was only a matter of months before it became clear that certain human

environments would be incorporated into the abhorrent lexicon of ‘pest control.’

Interestingly, Sloterdijk highlights the importance of the year 1924 as not only the

year during which Testa was founded, but also the year during which “the atmoterrorist

theme of exterminating an organism by the acute destruction of its environment was

passed into law by a democratic body politic.”73 Here Sloterdijk is referring to state of

Nevada in the United States (US) which has the dubious honour of being the first State

to implement a civilian gas chamber for capital punishment. Inmates sentenced to death

were killed as a result of inhaling hydrogen cyanide gas that was produced by pouring

the chemicals into a vessel. This would then corrupt the chamber’s climate, causing

internal asphyxia in the victim. The ability of legislative power to design a contained toxic

atmosphere that was perceived to be both legally correct and ‘humane’ denotes the

pragmatism that underwrote these judicially sanctioned terror chambers. The confidence

felt in the pragmatism of their designer atmosphere was such that glass panels were

installed to allow witnesses to observe these atmospheric executions.

“In this way, a kind of ontological difference became spatially installed at a short

distance—with a deadly climate in the clearly defined, scrupulously sealed “cell”,

and a convivial climate in the “life world” area of executors and observers; being

(Sein) and being-able-to-be (Seinkönnen) on the outside, beings (Seiende) and

not-able-to-be (Nichtsteinkönnen) on the inside.”74

72 Ibid., 36.

73 Ibid., 39.

74 Ibid., 41.

35

These terror witnesses (Seinkönnen) had the privilege of safely watching the

destruction of another organism’s ability to be-in-the-air (Nichtsteinkönnen), and to

therefore be at all, whilst also witnessing the manufacturability of a legally bound, toxic

atmosphere. The death-camps of Nazi Germany provided similar positions from which

the murder of millions of Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies and other so-called ‘pests’ could

be viewed. “By working on the enemy’s environment”, Sloterdijk argues, “these new

processes, which consist in suppressing the basic prerequisites for life, yield the contours

of a specifically modern […] concept of terror.”75 That examples of military and penal

pursuits of lethal designer atmospheres can be found on both sides of the Atlantic

denotes the crucial place that forms of politically driven artificial atmospheres hold in 20th

and 21st century conceptions of military space, capability and control.

1.5 Drone atmospheres: foamquake

The phenomenon of judicially sanctioned, lethal atmospheres continues today with the

drone wars over Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and indeed domestic United States

territory.76 Just as the principle of ‘atmospheric contracts’ was discussed in terms of the

referential status of human/atmosphere in regard to Genesis and the airquake, drones

similarly operate within contractual obligations. Indeed, the misled pragmatism that

reassured the authors of Nevada’s lethal prison air-conditioning systems today manifests

itself in the U.S. Air Force’s legal guidelines for drone targeting, whereby “the principle

of humanity” that prevents “unnecessary suffering as a result of the use of force” must

75 Ibid., 15.

76 Drones are increasingly used by domestic agencies in the U.S. such as Homeland Security.

36

be followed.77 If Genesis sets out a ‘principle of humanity’ that concerns creation, drones

set out a ‘principle of humanity’ that concerns destruction. Interestingly, Nevada is

implicated again today in the ongoing pragmatist narrative of dark meteorology, playing

host to the main drone operating base in the U.S., where pilots and sensor operators

enter a vortex that collapses the distance between the battlefield and their Stateside

retinas into a mere 18 inches.78

In the context of drones, the so-called ‘principle of humanity’ is ‘upheld’ by a team

of legal advisors that are present in all drone combat operations, known as Judge

Advocate Generals (JAG).79 Derek Gregory recently outlined the increased involvement

of judge advocates in the so-called ‘kill chain’ of command used in drone targeting. The

risk of ‘collateral damage’ and subsequent public scrutiny, especially following the

WikiLeaks release of the now infamous Collateral Murder video80 showing in intimate

detail what an Apache Helicopter can do to a group of unarmed, unknowing civilians and

journalists from an airborne distance of several kilometres. As Gregory notes, killing in

combat is regulated by the laws of armed conflict, the Uniform Code of Military Justice

and the Rules of Engagement (RoE).81 The ability of drones to loiter over targets for

extended periods of time is a key factor in the development of a legally sanctioned target.

Gregory outlines this as follows:

77 US Air Force, T. Hagmaier, and The Judge Advocate General’s School, Air Force Operations & the Law:

A Guide for Air, Space, & Cyber Forces (Createspace Independent Pub, 2012), 248.

78 This measurement is often used in military jargon to describe the distance of drone operators from

the battlefield. See: Derek Gregory, “From a View to a Kill: Drones and Late Modern War,” Theory,

Culture & Society 28 (7–8) (2011): 188–215, doi:10.1177/0263276411423027.

79 This acronym was perhaps made famous by the American TV series of the same name.

80 “Collateral Murder - Wikileaks - Iraq - YouTube,” accessed April 30, 2015,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0.

81 Gregory, “From a View to a Kill: Drones and Late Modern War,” 198.

37

“For deliberate targeting, where targets are typically developed over 36-40 hours,

legal advisers review target folders containing imagery and other intelligence,

collateral damage estimates and the weaponeering solutions proposed to

mitigate those effects, and monitor the continued development of the target. For

dynamic targeting the procedure is compressed — a matter of minutes —

because the targets are time-sensitive, but a judge advocate is still required to

validate the target. In both cases legal advisers are stationed on the combat

operations floor of the CAOC [Combined Air and Space Operations Centre] to

scrutinize image streams, live communications and collateral damage estimates,

and to inform the commander of the legal parameters of any attack.”82

As the United States Air Force legal guidelines, Air Force Operations and the Law: A

Guide for Air, Space & Cyber Forces, set out:

“Legal advisors in the targeting process render independent legal advice to the

commander across the full spectrum of operational missions. In particular, judge

advocates provide legal counsel to the CFACC [Combined Forces Air

Component Commander] and each of the five CAOC divisions [...] It is important

to note that to render timely and accurate legal advice during the planning and

execution of air, space, and cyberspace operations, judge advocates require

access to the same information that is available to commanders and their staffs.

Further, as provided by AFI 13-1AOCV3, para. 8.4. judge advocates are a

mandated part of this process.”83

In any given Combat Air Patrol conducted by US Predator or Reaper drones, a

total of one hundred and eighty five personnel are required in various support, technical,

82 Ibid., 199.

83 US Air Force, Hagmaier, and The Judge Advocate General’s School, Air Force Operations & the Law: A

Guide for Air, Space, & Cyber Forces.

38

intelligence, legal and command capacities. Forty three of these military personnel are

based on US territory, often at Creech Air Force Base in the Nevada desert (including

the pilots), fifty nine are forward deployed in Afghanistan, for example, whilst eighty three

are involved in the processing, dissemination and exploitation of video information. The

United States Air Force (USAF) has already archived over four-hundred thousand hours

of video from its drone programs.84 Dan Gettinger has also recently emphasised the

importance of satellite technology in enabling the U.S. drone program.85 Bearing in mind

that this is what is needed to support one single drone operation, the contemporary

atmosphere has truly become a hyper-logistical mediatic web.

Gregory’s central argument is that the visual regimes constructed through the

machinic, relentless vision of drones and their sensors “are necessarily conditional —

spaces of constructed visibility are also always spaces of constructed invisibility—

because they are not technical but rather techno-cultural accomplishments.”86 Here

Sloterdijk’s sphereological account of designer atmospheres, the development of human

society, its cultures and technologies become clear, because the legal, technical and

geographic apparatus that composes the U.S. military’s global drone complex constitute

an extension of the theo-technical craftsmanship that underwrote—what Sloterdijk

labelled as—the early European ‘obsession’ with technical ability emerging from the

Biblical account of Genesis and the creation of mankind through breath. From the

ideological structures that underpinned the gas chambers of the Holocaust and the

judicial atmospheres of U.S. prisons, to its contemporary atmospheric weapons that now

haunt the skies above Afghanistan and elsewhere, the reach of Nations into the very

84 Gregory, “From a View to a Kill: Drones and Late Modern War,” 194. The amount of archived video

data is increasing exponentially in line with improvements in camera and sensor technology.

85 “Drone Geography: Mapping a System of Intelligence | Center for the Study of the Drone,” accessed

May 7, 2015, http://dronecenter.bard.edu/drone-geography/.

86 Gregory, “From a View to a Kill: Drones and Late Modern War,” 193.

39

fibre of the atmosphere reveals a crucial element that underpins human’s military

endeavours into the atmosphere: logistics. The drone network’s atmosphere can be

classified as an articulation of what Sloterdijk would call foam – an assemblage of

interdependent bubbles that function in connected isolation.87

The virtual networks that today envelop the mediated battle (air)spaces of the

War on Terror have their roots in the logistical networks established by the Modernist

armies of the First World War. The gas attacks that invoked Sloterdijk’s account of

modernity’s airquake involved an incredible logistical effort. For the German troops to

achieve their designer cloud’s optimum size of 6 kilometres wide and 900 meters deep,

a total of 5,730 chlorine-filled cylinders (between 20 kg – 60 kg) were needed.88 Indeed,

the echoes of this atmospheric war machine were felt for decades later through new

ways of conceptualising military strategy, exemplified by Norbert Weiner’s analysis of

missile and air defence systems in Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the

Animal and the Machine (1965), which begins with a meditation on the nature of clouds.89

Although Weiner’s clouds differ in nature from those of Sloterdijk’s airquake, through the

shifting strategies of military engagement, tactics of warfare, logistics, terror and

atmospheric manipulation have become fundamentally intertwined.

87 Sloterdijk, Sphères: Tome 3, Ecumes, Sphérologie Plurielle, 604 – 7. Although Sloterdijk reserves this

term for his discussions of ‘foam cities’ or apartment buildings, this image is particularly fertile in

relation to the networked assemblage of drones.

88 Martinetz, Der Gas-Krieg 1914-1918. Entwicklung, Einsatz Und Herstellung Chemisher Kampfstoffe.

Das Zusammenwirken von Militärisher Fürung, Wissenschaft Und Industrie (Bonn: Bernard & Graefe,

1996). Cited in: Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, p. 10.

89 N. Wiener, Cybernetics Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, M.I.T.

Paperback Series (Wiley, 1965).

40

1.6 A brief note on the sonic realm

In all of these operations, it is important to acknowledge the sonic realm. The sonic and

warfare have been intertwined since the earliest imaginable times. Steven Goodman's

recent survey of sound, warfare and the ecologies of fear they produce is an important

reference for this research, and may point to a critical hole in Sloterdijk's theory of

atmospheres and terror: the sonic. As Goodman points out, there are numerous historical

and contemporary examples of violent sonic strategies and attempts to weaponise the

atmosphere, from the Biblical story of the Walls of Jericho (Joshua 6:5), to the sonic

booms of Israeli warplanes over Gaza, Nazi Windkanons and the wailing U.S. Ghost

Army in WWII, to the contemporary sonic weapons in the arsenal of riot police.90 These

examples reference the same broad field from which Sloterdijk constructs his position.

For if Sloterdijk’s attachment to the airquake of Ypres rests upon its industrialised and

affective production of terror (by bursting our bubble), then what of the dread instilled in

the inner psychological spheres of soldiers whose environment was overwhelmed by the

bad vibes of sonic psyops and the kinetic rumbling of mechanized armies? Whilst this

research is specifically concerned with the conceptual spatiality of military atmospheres,

the sonic realm would similarly provide fertile ground for investigation, as has been

overwhelmingly shown in Goodman’s work. For now, at least, my focus will remain on

the more subtle systems of control that govern the unseen forces of militant

atmospheres, since the limited constraints of this thesis do not permit a thorough

discussion.

90 Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).

41

1.7 Critical notes on Sloterdijk

Having demarcated the particular area of interest in Sloterdijk’s spatial theories for this

research, it is essential to account for criticism of his work. As mentioned at the beginning

of this chapter, Sloterdijk’s use of language is generous, loose and indeed slippery. The

prolific nature of Sloterdijk’s output is also daunting, even for his most strident critics,

who are frequently reminded of this by Sloterdijk himself.91 The massive task of

translating Sloterdijk’s Spheres I-III into English is still, at the time of writing this thesis,

incomplete. Yet his main translator, Wieland Hoban, provides us with perhaps the most

strategically critical proximity to his work, and in particular, his loose and wandering

writing style. In The Language of Give and Take: Sloterdijk’s Stylistic Methods (2012),

Hoban suggests that Sloterdijk’s biggest weakness is his often “generous” writing style,

which can become “problematic”: “[s]tyle, by becoming self-sufficient, overrides the truth

of the substance, relying on ‘generously’ imprecise statements that serve to develop the

stylistic gesture; generosity denigrates into generalisation.”92 In perhaps the most pointed

criticism of this overindulgence of style over substance, Hoban provides an example that

is thematically pertinent to this research: Sloterdijk’s discussions of militant Islam in Rage

and Time (2013). Hoban argues that Sloterdijk’s “reflections on Islamic terrorism show,

in addition to an uncritical adoption of conservative clichés, a greater interest in

developing stylistic figures than keeping to the facts.”93 The example that Hoban gives

91 W Hoban, “The Language of Give and Take,” in Sloterdijk Now, ed. S. Elden, Theory Now (Polity, 2012),

114–32.

92 Ibid., 118.

93 Ibid., 121.

42

relates to Sloterdijk’s “quasi-literary” description of rage in the context of militant Islam

as a kind of ‘altruistic sadism’: “Rage that manifests itself in punishment or acts of injury

is connected to the belief that there is too little suffering in the world on a local or global

level […] The rage bearer sees in those people who are unjustly without suffering his

most plausible enemies.”94 Peeling this first layer back, Hoban suggests, we see that

Sloterdijk, “like many right-wing political commentators […] reduces the motivation

behind Islamic terrorism – especially the suicidal variety – to religious ideology and social

frustration.”95 To counter this factually light portrait of militant Islam, Hoban cites Robert

Pape’s empirical study, Dying to Win: the Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism that

accounted for every suicide attack around the globe conducted between 1980 and 2003.

Pape found that “there is little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic

fundamentalism, or any of the world’s religions. In fact, the leading instigators of suicide

attacks are the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a Marxist-Leninist group […] whose members

are adamantly opposed to religion.”96 Rather than a religious connection to suicide

attacks, the overwhelming trend in the data was a “specific secular and strategic goal: to

compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists

consider to be their homeland.”97 Whilst this last point certainly accounts for the political

motivations of particular terrorist groups, it also forms much of the articulations of

religious doctrine in particular geographies, zones of worship, sacred lands and territory.

The ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict is a case in point, where political action and religious

belief are often impossible to separate. Hoban goes on to analyse Sloterdijk’s arguments

against demographic and other empirical data around Islamist militants that Pape has

94 P. Sloterdijk, Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation, Insurrections: Critical Studies in Reli

Series (Columbia University Press, 2013), https://books.google.com.au/books?id=hH8MCxUJ2QIC.

95 Hoban, “The Language of Give and Take,” 122.

96 Hoban, “The Language of Give and Take.”

97 Ibid.

43

compiled to account for his criticism. It would be possible to mount a counter argument

to the data cited as being distorted by the atrocities of both sides of the Sri Lankan civil

war, for since 2003, the last year of data cited in Pape’s study, there has been a massive

outbreak of global conflict where suicide attacks are common. In particular, the Iraq War,

the War in Afghanistan the Syrian Civil War, the advance of ISIS throughout Northern

Iraq and Syria and Boko Haram in Somalia and other African states. Now that the Sri

Lankan Civil War has ended, it could be suggested – without descending into

conservative cliché – that these conflicts would account for most suicide attacks

worldwide.

Stuart Elden also offers critical accounts on Sloterdijk’s writing style. Whilst on

the surface, Sloterdijk’s writings can appear accessible, they can be “difficult to pin

down.” Elden continues: “He writes two main kinds of books – short, often polemical,

interventions; and much longer, wide-ranging and often digressive examinations of large

topics from a variety of angles […] Sloterdijk privileges the literary over the structural;

poesis over rigour.”98 Slavoj Žižek has described Sloterdijk as “definitely not an idiot”99,

whilst Wouter Kusters is cited by Elden as offering a useful spatial analogy for Sloterdijk’s

writings, likening them to the London Underground; “easy to enter, to find your way

through, and to exit again, but hard to conceive in groundwork or overall idea.”100 This

description mirrors the way in which I have approached his writings as an artist, jumping

in and out of different ‘stations’ on the surface, burrowing down through thematic tunnels

and resurfacing through an opening – coming up for air – as it were, to find my bearings

before redescending into another tunnel. This non-linear strategy has, I believe, proven

fruitful for this research. It also defines the way I approach the creation of artworks; not

98 S. Elden, Sloterdijk Now, Theory Now (Polity, 2012), 2 – 3.

99 S. Žižek, First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, Philosophy/politics (Verso, 2009), 131,

https://books.google.com.au/books?id=HRX4DSJuGtUC.

100 Elden, Sloterdijk Now.

44

through a predefined story board, but a process of exploration, experimentation and

discovery. For our purposes, these criticisms of Sloterdijk’s writings gives us useful

caution with which we can approach the areas of his work relevant for this research.

At the end of this process it will become clear that Sloterdijk’s Spheres can be

viewed through the elaborate spatial metaphors that he so enjoys. What is his

perspective on human society but a kind of Gods-eye-view, a philosophical surveillance

platform from which he surveys the topologies below? Certainly, the position from which

he speaks can be seen as an articulation of ‘aerial’ superiority, surveying vast swathes

of human practices before quickly zooming in on esoteric and niche examples of spatial

cultivation, without losing any ‘image quality’. Whilst his work is increasingly the subject

of philosophical inquiry and criticism in the Anglophone sphere, his work remains an

incredibly fertile space a point of departure for art practice. This research does not set

out to only evaluate the philosophical integrity or scholarly validity of his work, but rather

to use his extremely spatial approach to human politics, society and culture as a

contextual and methodological catalyst to investigate what I see as one of the most

spatially potent forces at work today: militarism. In doing so, this research will perhaps

add some clarity to the loose language and overly ambitious claims that Sloterdijk has

been criticised for by aforementioned critics. Ultimately, the creative works that make up

the core of this thesis should be conceptualised as a critical reading of Sloterdijk through

art practice, using the tools that I feel are most appropriate and insightful. After all, as an

artist, my tools are naturally closer to the exaggerated spatial claims in Sloterdijk’s work.

A methodology will become clear that in creating these works and this thesis, I adopt the

languages or processes of the systems that I seek to critically engage. So within the

Sloterdijkian System of Spatial Exaggeration, as we might call it, I take this style and

actualise it, stretch it, push it and twist it in order to reveal its threads, its limitations, its

breaking points and its new possibilities.

45

46

Chapter 2: Art and atmosphere

Figure 2. John Singer Sargent, Gassed (1919). Oil on Canvas, 231 × 611.1 cm. Collection of the Imperial War Museum, UK. Art.IWM ART 1460. Public Domain.

47

2.1 Introduction

The first chapter of this thesis mapped out the particular ‘atmospheric’ themes of

Sloterdijk’s work that I am interested in using to examine contemporary military

atmospheres. Through a thorough discussion of the first set of creative works, their

context and theories, this chapter will present and explain a number of creative works

that explore and reconfigure the spatial operations that inform contemporary military

practices.

This chapter begins by focusing on the processes of experimentation that created

the foundation works for this research, early ‘studies’ or ‘sketches’ that are not finished

or fully resolved, but that are nonetheless crucial to the theoretical and practical trajectory

of this doctorate. From these early experiments, this chapter will then present and explain

the first set of fully ‘operational’ creative works: the MQ-9 Reaper series (2013-14)

[Videos 2 - 4.1 in the support material]. The artworks presented and discussed in this

chapter belong to a strong yet diverse field of ‘atmospheric’ artists, including Marcel

Duchamp, Char Davies and Trevor Paglen.101 My own creative works are discussed in

relation to these artists, who were selected for their distinct technical and theoretical

approaches to the atmospheric, with a particularly strong emphasis on the various ways

that these artists disrupt established notions of interior and exterior worlds.

101 Whilst there are many artists working and who have worked in this loose field, the constraints of this

thesis allow only a few to be discussed in the detail that is required.

48

2.2 Air de Paris: atmosphères de l’avant garde

Figure 3. Marcel Duchamp, Air de Paris, (1919/1964), Verre et bois, 14.5 x 8.5 x 8.5 cm. Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris © Succession Marcel Duchamp / Adagp, Paris

Proceeding from our initial definition of ‘atmospheres’ in Chapter 1, one might consider

Marcel Duchamp’s Air de Paris (1919/1964) to be one of the earliest works of

‘atmospheric’ art. It mobilises several of the functions that Sloterdijk identifies in

militarised atmospheres, including immunology, but it speaks deeply to the changing

status of the air following the airquake of 1915. Given to Walter and Louise Arensberg

as a gift by Duchamp in 1919, the artist asked a pharmacist on rue Blomet in Le Havre

to empty a sealed vile of its contents and re-seal the vile containing only air. As one of

the first ready-mades, it was, apparently, a clever trick from the beginning: not containing

49

the air of Paris, as suggested by Duchamp,102 but in fact the air of a pharmacy in Le

Havre. As Calvin Tomkins notes in his biography of Duchamp, “since they had everything

else […] he was bringing them fifty cubic centimetres of Paris Air.”103

Whilst the literal connection to contemporary aesthetic treatments of the

atmosphere is clear in this artwork, the pharmaceutical context of its creation is arguably

more relevant to this research. For Sloterdijk, the history of designed atmospheres,

gasses and environments is intimately connected to the realm of medical science.

Indeed, one of the strongest themes throughout Sloterdijk’s Spheres I-III is his constant

reference to immunity, as I discussed in Chapter 1. Whilst Sloterdijk emphasises the

contextual importance of the ceramic container of Adam in his analysis of the Book of

Genesis, Duchamp’s choice of an atmospheric medical container is significant as an

example of the contemporaneous pharmaceutical state-of-the-art. Glass vials were at

the time the standard distribution method for medicine. With regard to Duchamp, perhaps

the sense of humour in giving the gift of air in response to the proverbial question, ‘what

do you give someone who has everything?’ is found in this underlying medical image; ‘is

not the only thing you can give someone who has every-thing, their own health?’ For

Sloterdijk, the political State performs a similar function as Duchamp’s glass container,

offering a protective (if fragile), therapeutic chamber. Indeed, in Sloterdijk’s In the World

Interior of Capital (2014), he argues that the state’s “right to exist no longer derives from

its Hobbesian functions, but rather from its services as a redistributor of chances in life

and access to comfort […] a communal therapist of its citizens.”104 This is because for

102 “The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) | Explore Modern Art | Multimedia | Video |

Marcel Duchamp on Paris Air,” accessed June 2, 2014,

http://www.sfmoma.org/explore/multimedia/videos/142.

103 C. Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography, A John Macrae Book (Henry Holt & Company, 1996), 223.

104 P. Sloterdijk and W. Hoban, In the World Interior of Capital: Towards a Philosophical Theory of

Globalization, Polity Press (Wiley, 2013), 185.

50

Sloterdijk, in the context of late capitalism, concepts of immunology and comfort are

closely linked to the ‘therapeutical’ tendencies of what he calls current “wars for

security”105 fought on behalf of citizens of the West. In both Sloterdijk’s account of the

airquake (1915) and Duchamp’s Air de Paris (1919/1964), we find a shifting integrity in

the quality and nature of the ‘air’. The historical event of gas warfare at Ypres, like

Duchamp’s Air de Paris, relied upon the logistical operations of mass-production and the

industrialisation of designer atmospheres. In some ways, Duchamp’s gesture can be

seen as a response to the massive yet fleeting cloud of chlorine gas that heralded for

Sloterdijk the beginning of the modern era. In Terror from the Air (2009), Sloterdijk

emphasises the logistical effort required to achieve the desired effect on the atmosphere

at Ypres. The avant-garde movement similarly relied upon the logistics of mass

production to question the role of the artist and the economies that surround the work of

art.106 Sloterdijk himself situates Duchamp’s atmo-readymade alongside the gas attacks

at Ypres and the gas chambers of the Holocaust, as a response to what he describes as

the air’s loss of innocence. He states: “[a]s of the 1915 German gas attacks and their

allied retaliations, the air totally lost its innocence; as of 1919, portions of it could be

gifted as “ready-mades”; and as of 1924 it could be used as a means of executing

delinquents.”107 In its own small way, the atmo-integrity of Air de Paris was itself

compromised (since it was, in fact, Air du Havre). Just as the integrity of the umweltian

pneumatic pact was compromised at Ypres. With Duchamp, the air becomes a

commodity – no longer an entitlement but an economic luxury. At Ypres, the air becomes

a weapon – no longer a given but a new source of anxiety. Rather than looking at the

airquake at Ypres through Duchamp, or vice versa, Sloterdijk suggests that they should

105 Ibid., 185.

106 Indeed, the major creative work for this research involves a significant logistical effort in the

production of 201 individual helmets.

107 Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, 109.

51

be seen as a part of the same cluster of events that signalled a radical shift in the given

status of air. For Sloterdijk, the role of the artist in signalling these shifts is clear: “[e]ven

the Mona Lisa smiled differently after Duchamp planted the beard on her.”108 Overall,

these different but related events speak to the instability of the way humans could

subsequently conceive of their own relational climates against the increasingly unstable

background of modernity.

2.3 Study for atmospheric cohabitation: HGU-55/P (2013)

Figure 4. Study for atmospheric cohabitation: HGU-55/P (2013), 4 channel 3D animation (production stills). 2 min 13 sec. Rows top to bottom: images taken at 0 frames, 100 frames, 500 frames and 4000 frames.

Please watch Video 1 at http://www.badenpailthorpe.com/phd.html or on the

attached USB

108 Ibid.

52

In order to give some stability to this unstable ‘background’, I needed to undertake an

experiment with Sloterdijk’s work through my own creative practice. Since Sloterdijk

suggests that Duchamp’s atmo-readymade was a reflection of the contemporaneous

state-of-the-art, as he suggests that Adam’s ceramic composition in Genesis was

similarly context appropriate, how can these ideas be recontextualised within

contemporary new media art practices? How does the virtual space of 3D animation

transform or clarify his ideas? As a study, this work is a device for research rather than

exhibition, as it was used to develop and explore Sloterdijk’s ideas within the spatiality

of a 3D animation. I will discuss its ‘findings’ in relation to 4 key aspects of the work:

symbols, process, (virtual) materials and movement.

Figure 5. Screen shot of the scene in 3Ds Max at 0 frames (top down). It shows the cameras (blue) the helmets (clay) and the circular camera path constraints (red).

53

Figure 6. Screen shot of the scene in 3Ds Max at 500 frames (top down).

Figure 7. Screen shot of the scene in 3Ds Max at 1000 frames (top down).

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Figure 8. Screen shot of the scene in 3Ds Max at 4000 frames (top down). The white lines trace the cameras' trajectory over the duration of the scene.

Figure 9. Screen shot of the scene in 3Ds Max at 4000 frames (top down). The white lines trace the helmets' trajectory over the duration of the scene.

55

With a stylistic reference to Duchamp’s Air de Paris (1919/1964), Study for

atmospheric cohabitation (HGU-55/P) (2013) proposes a visual study of Sloterdijk’s

reading of the Book of Genesis which emphasises the reciprocity and technique of the

breath of God into Adam’s hollow clay vessel (Figures 5 – 9 illustrate the movement of

both virtual cameras and the helmets in 3DsMax). It is an experiment that sought to test

the use of animation as a creative tool to analyse Sloterdijk’s work in virtual space. The

atmospheric gesture in Genesis, as Sloterdijk suggests, is not only the moment when

Adam is given life by the Christian God through the “divine technology” of the single

breath, but that the Christian God was simultaneously created in that same moment.109

The importance of Sloterdijk’s emphasis on co-subjectivity that was outlined in Chapter

1 is rearticulated through a new image of the divine technology of the twin helmets of

this work. Sloterdijk similarly places great weight on the ceramic craftsmanship inherent

in the story of Adam in the Book of Genesis, and its relevance to the then state-of-the-

art. This is at work in the atmospheric objects depicted in Study for atmospheric

cohabitation (HGU-55/P) (2013), which represent current state-of-the-art micro-

climates for the flying human, meteorological prosthetics that allow life to exist in

conditions hostile to it. The referencing of the Sloterdijkian state-of-the-art in this work is

not restricted to it symbolic depictions, but also in terms of process. The program in which

this work was created is a piece of software – 3Ds Max – that simulates and operates in

virtual 3D space. At the time of production, using this software was a new direction for

my practice, which had been until then largely concerned with commercially available

military simulations such as ARMA and the manipulation of existing cultural products.

The spatial qualities of this style of software, which includes complex simulations of

particle systems, clouds, smoke, water and other meteorological phenomena lends itself

109 Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Microspherology, 36–7.

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to the theme of atmospheres. 3Ds Max also uses accurate simulations to calculate the

behaviour of light as it interacts with objects and materials.

In the case of Study for atmospheric cohabitation (HGU-55/P) (2013), the

material of glass is used. There is a long list of the ‘atmospheric’ properties and uses of

glass that will be fleshed out in this chapter. Here, it references both Duchamp’s Air de

Paris (1919/1964) and the history of glass as the material of the laboratory, where

vacuums and various gasses were tested in glass vials, test tubes and flasks. The

German pest control industry, so implicated in the industrial, weaponised meteorology of

the Nazis, is similarly called upon in this choice of material. Glass is, of course, an

atmospheric material used to protect the living environments of many houses and

buildings today. It is a material that both manipulates atmospheric conditions (in the case

of corrective lenses) and protects against them (greenhouses). Yet it also has a rich

history in the decorative and religious arts, particularly the history of stain glass in

churches. Glass is also used in the fibre optics of the communications networks that

make up the Internet. By applying this material to a piece of atmospheric armour, the

inherent fragility of human life that underpins the original need for such equipment is

rendered apparent. The final property of glass that is most significant, conceptually at

least, to its use here is that it operates on an almost mythical, illusory material logic: that

glass is somewhere between a solid and a liquid. In Chapter 1, the architectural function

of glass in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project was discussed as a material vector that

propelled us towards the ambiguous and increasingly unstable definitions of interior and

exterior worlds.110 The interior desiring intensities of the developing consumer culture of

those early Parisian arcades have here been transformed into the vital intensities of

desiring life within a hostile environment. Taken together, these material characteristics

present us with an inventory of potential sites of critique and analysis that will be put to

110 Sloterdijk, “Atmospheric Politics,” 948.

57

work in the following discussions of my own creative works and those of Char Davies

and Trevor Paglen. As an experiment, this work Study for atmospheric cohabitation

(HGU-55/P) (2013) offers a starting point where the interplay between the material and

conceptual elements in my creative practice can begin to play out. It presents us with

the opportunity to begin to ask questions.

As Study for atmospheric cohabitation (HGU-55/P) (2013) begins to play, the

viewer sees close-up images of glass breathing tubes, hoses and pneumatic apparatus.

These slowly rotating images conjure a sense of orbit, whilst the lush image quality hints

at a romanticising or aestheticising of the objects depicted. There is an almost holy

ambiance about the levitating objects until they reveal their full content. In particular, the

movement in this work engages the term perichoresis, which Sloterdijk unearths towards

the final chapters of Spheres I: Bubbles (2011), a term of great importance for Sloterdijk

that invokes “dancing around something” or “being whirled around in a circle.”111 The

virtual cameras in this work each follow an orbital path that invokes this sense of

movement described by St John of Damascus. As the virtual camera in each scene

tracks outwards, the camera also rotates a full 360° over the length of the work. This

serves both as an aesthetic device that creates a feeling of weightlessness, but it also

adopts the spherical geometries of Sloterdijk’s spatial theories of human cultures as a

formal technique (Figures 5 – 9).

111 Ibid, p. 603.

58

Figure 10. The Breathing apparatus and Head Mounted Display of Osmose. Photo: Jacques Dufresne. Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 11. Negative Pressure Ventilator – the ‘Iron Lung’. Image: Centre for Disease Control and Prevention. Public Domain.

59

These spherical geometries are also at work in Char Davies’ Osmose (1995). Davies is

known as a pioneer of virtual environments and interactive artworks. Her seminal work

Osmose (1995) is an immersive interactive virtual-reality environment installation with

3D computer graphics and interactive 3D sound, a head-mounted display and real-time

motion tracking based on breathing and balance. For Davies, “Osmose is a space for

exploring the perceptual interplay between self and world, i.e., a place for facilitating

awareness of one's own self as consciousness embodied in enveloping space.”112

Figure 12. Char Davies, Tree Pond from Osmose (1995). Courtesy of the artist.

Study for atmospheric cohabitation (HGU-55/P) (2013) touches on the

geospatial qualities of virtual environments championed by artists such as Char Davies

in Osmose (1995), which is controlled by the user’s breath via a sensing apparatus.113

112 “Osmose,” accessed September 1, 2014, http://www.immersence.com/osmose/.

113 Char Davies, “Virtual Space,” in Space: In Science, Art and Society, ed. Francois Penz, Gregory Radick,

and Robert Howell (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 69–104.

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Sloterdijk’s emphasis on breath as divine technique is perhaps nowhere else as potently

or fully enabled, and it speaks to the dynamic power of immersive environments that is

crucial to this research’s investigation into the contemporary state of militarised

atmospheres. To reiterate, much of the power of breath as technique originates from the

reciprocity between the subject and the environment, between the body and its specific

space. In Davies’ works, the body is deployed as a controlling element, both a producer

and consumer of atmosphere, because the navigation of the work is controlled by the

user’s breathing. Sloterdijk does not discuss Davies’ works in Spheres, but one may

wonder what he would have made of these pneumatic works. It is tempting to imagine

Davies’ works as a radical inversion of the infamous Iron Lung, a coffin-like breathing

machine used for the treatment of Polio that operates on the principle of negative

pressure, encompassing the body leaving only the head protruding from its chamber

(Figure 11). At first glance, there are a number of rich avenues into Sloterdijk’s

atmospheric arguments in Spheres, such as the immunological function of conditioned

climates. We saw this in Sloterdijk’s analysis of Duchamp’s Air de Paris (1919/1964) for

example. Yet the contextual reciprocity between the artwork and its socio-political climate

is as important in Char Davies’ Osmose (1995) as it is in Duchamp’s Air de Paris

(1919/1964) and indeed, in Osmose, this reciprocity is literally embodied by the ‘user’ of

the work. If the Iron Lung was a medical articulation of the contemporaneous illness-

context that structurally inverted the human bio-mechanism of breathing to overcome the

Polio patients’ inability to breath in normal atmospheric conditions, Osmose was a virtual

articulation of the contemporaneous psychological-context of the 1990s that saw virtual

space as an avenue to overcome the fleshy limitations of the human body.114 In this way,

both have strong immunological tendencies.

Char Davies, Osmose (1995) can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54O4VP3tCoY

114 Donna Haraway, “The Cyborg Manifesto,” in The Cybercultures Reader, ed. David Bell and Barbara

Kennedy (London & New York: Routledge, 2000), 291–324.

61

Davies’ breath-controlled world is another kind of breathing machine, where only

the head is immersed, and the body protrudes. Formally, these examples of medical and

experiential pneumatic apparatuses seek to overcome the bodily realities of being

human: in the former, the pressure in the chamber relative to the outside environment

forces air into and out of the lungs of a patient, like a kind of exo-diaphram. In the latter,

the pneumatic mechanism of the subject, which also operates on the principle of negative

pressure relative to the outside atmosphere, is translated by a computer into spatial data

which drives changes in the subject’s position in the virtual world. In a sense, both of

these examples speak to the drive to overcome the constraints of material reality,

whether due to illness (Iron Lung), or due to more psychological yearnings for new

topologies (Osmose). Davies’ mystical approach to Osmose (1995) is grounded in

Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space (1964), which she quotes prominently: “…by

changing space, by leaving the space of one’s usual sensibilities, one enters into

communication with a space that is psychically innovating… For we do not change place,

we change our Nature.”115

Davies herself describes the work as an “immersive interactive virtual-reality

environment installation with 3D computer graphics and interactive 3D sound, a head-

mounted display and real-time motion tracking based on breathing and balance. Osmose

is a space for exploring the perceptual interplay between self and world, i.e., a place for

facilitating awareness of one's own self as consciousness embodied in enveloping

space.”116 Sloterdijk himself opens his Spheres trilogy with a nod to Bachelard: “[t]he

difficulty that had to be overcome […] was to avoid all geometrical evidence. In other

words, I had to start with a sort of intimacy of roundness […]”117 an intimacy that Davies

115 G. Bachelard, M.Z. Danielewski, and R. Kearney, The Poetics of Space (Penguin Group US, 2014),

http://books.google.com.au/books?id=tN3bAwAAQBAJ.

116 “Osmose.”

117 Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Microspherology, 8.

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conjures in her description of the space she creates in Osmose (1995): “Immersive

virtual space is thus a philosophical and a participatory medium, a unique convergence

in which the immaterial is confused with the bodily-felt, and the imaginary with the

strangely real.”118

As the subject loses their ontological points of reference in these spaces, Davies

summons the surrealist drive to unite the dreamlike subconscious and perceived

reality,119 creating a kind of interstitial entre milieu that speaks directly to the aesthetic,

technical and theoretical interests of this research. Davies uses techniques of

transparency and opacity to create an ambiguous depth of field, but also to blur the

boundary between interior and exterior in the same way that the glass ceilings of

Benjamin’s Arcades Project destabilised concepts of interior and exterior worlds. Gaston

Bachelard describes this spatial binary as a “blinding” dialectic, “…tinged with aggresivity

[…] "This side" and "beyond" are faint repetitions of the dialectics of inside and outside:

everything takes form, even infinity. We seek to determine being and, in so doing,

transcend all situations, to give a situation of all situations.”120

In this, Davies collapses the formal dialectic that theorists like Bachelard,

Sloterdijk, Serres, Caillois and Von Uexküll critique: the rigid construction of boundaries

in continuous topologies and flows of space. In Davies work, the false border between

inside and outside that impedes the natural flows of topology, space and atmosphere,

erected in an effort to seal off, protect and own, is overcome.

The natural resistance to these erected dialectics is explored by Roger Caillois,

as he describes the natural phenomenon of insect mimicry through the strange lens of

118 Davies, “Virtual Space.”

119 Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, 82 – 84.

120 Bachelard, Danielewski, and Kearney, The Poetics of Space, 212.

63

surrealism in his 1930s essay Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia. This provides us

with a useful model for the conceptual ‘collapsing’ between immersion and the virtual in

both Char Davies’ works, and my Study for atmospheric cohabitation (HGU-55/P)

(2013). In it, Caillois puts the case that mimetic insects do not use their ability to blend

into their surroundings as a survival strategy. Rather, this “reciprocal topology” or

“sculptural photography” as he elegantly describes it, is a “real temptation by space” and

a “luxury”:

“It is with represented space that the drama becomes specific, since the living

creature, the organism, is no longer the origin of the coordinates, but one point

among others; it is dispossessed of its privilege and literally no longer knows

where to place itself […] for example with the invariable response of

schizophrenics to the question: where are you? I know where I am, but I do not

feel as though I’m at the spot where I find myself. To these dispossessed souls,

space seems to be a devouring force. Space pursues them, encircles them,

digests them in a giant phagocytosis. It ends by replacing them. The body

separates itself from thought, the individual breaks the boundary of his skin and

occupies the other side of his senses. He tries to look at himself from any point

whatever in space. He feels himself becoming space, dark space where things

cannot be put. He is similar, not to something, but just similar.”121

That Caillois presents the mimetic capabilities of insects as an almost anti-

Darwinian “luxury” (an expensive luxury, since some mimetic insects are so adept at

becoming their environment that they are devoured by herbivores) unites him with the

work of Von Uexküll and the enveloping environmental theories of the Romantische

121 R. Caillois, The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader, ed. C. Frank and C. Naish (Duke University

Press, 2003), 99 – 100.

64

Naturphilosophie movement.122 Just as the boundary between subject and environment

breaks down in the mystical spatial logic of Caillois’ mimetic insects, the sensory

apparatus of the organism in its umwelt links the organism into – in the sense of

Sloterdijk’s use of Heidegger’s ‘Inhood’ as a media theory of inter-intelligence (cf.

Chapter 1) – itself as umwelt. 123 The organism is not demarcated against or from its

surroundings, it is both surroundings and organism at once. Once again, the interior and

exterior dialectic is destabilised and ultimately collapses. That is, the reciprocity both

between and within these components form a topology whose contours and points of

difference are not necessarily cloaked in mimesis. Their similarities do not lie within any

visual characteristics or abilities, but in the mystical spatial logics of sense, affect and

atmospheric stimuli.

The way that the individual organism loses themselves in or to their surroundings

can be related to the experience that Char Davies set out to emulate in Osmose (1995),

since both Caillois’ mimetic insects and Davies’ immersed subjects propose an assault

on the spatial certainty of the Cartesian subject, approaching the mystical disorientation

of Sloterdijk’s perichoresis, transformative states both bound by, and destructive of,

formally conditioned spaces. This spatial collapse is an articulation of an intensity of

reciprocity so strong that it ultimately negates itself, because to recall, in the work of

Sloterdijk we are dealing with a completely de-physicalized concept of ‘person space’.124

Because of this, Sloterdijk argues, the meaning of being ‘in’ was freed from “all forms of

container orientated thought once and for all.”125 That is, the compositional elements that

122 Ibid., 89.

123 Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Microspherology, 541–2.

124 Ibid., 601.

125 Ibid.

65

define a subject in its environment could only be considered in terms of their relational

connections, not their actual physical location.

In this context of conditioned and destructive relational spaces, the HGU-55/P

fighter pilot helmet itself can be theorised as a militarised micro-climate. As with the early

atmospheric conquests of the 20th Century, the hostile environment of high altitude flight

necessitates the life-support system of the pilot’s plane and breathing apparatus. Just

like a plant in an alien environment, this weaponised assemblage of human biology,

atmo-political geography and technical mastery creates what Sloterdijk could describe

as a micro-greenhouse. The HGU-55/P helmet represents what Michel Serres would

describe as a membrane, we might even call it a Sloterdijkian air-placenta: with the

oxygen hose serving as the umbilical cord in the machine-mother (plane) machinic-

foetus (pilot) relationship. The plane breathes the air on behalf of the pilot, which is in

turn connected to the pilot via the mediating function of the helmet. In its bringing together

of subject and technique, the pilot-plane reciprocal assemblage comes to resemble the

spatial operations of the topologies that have just been demonstrated, with Caillois,

Davies and so on.

Yet there is a more complex link to be drawn between the micro-climate of the

fighter pilot helmet, the plane and these spatial topologies through Sloterdijk’s account

of “negative gynaecology” in Spheres I: Bubbles (2011), which can be constructed

through his emphasis of spatial fertility and cultivation. Tracing the history of human

theories of interior and exterior space, Sloterdijk combines historical religious and cultural

focuses on the womb with the shift from nomadism to sedentarism brought on under the

Neolithic revolution.126 As communities of humans settled and began cultivating their

surroundings, the maternal and technique were increasingly equated: “[i]t was only the

early agricultural fixation on the soil that forced the epochal equation of the mother world

126 Ibid., 270.

66

and cultivated, fertile space.”127 The practice of cultivation is a spatial operation that takes

place within an umwelt, a literal ingestion of the elements and energies that make up the

topology of subject-environment. This cultivation, Sloterdijk argues, formed the basis for

future advanced societies: “[t]he Neolithic equation of mother and cultivated earth led to

the ten-thousand-year conservative revolution, which forms the substrate of the early

settled cultures, archaic states and regional advanced civilisations.”128 From cultivation

comes consumption and property, from property comes territory, politics and ownership.

From ownership comes law and power. Just as Sloterdijk’s interpretation of Neolithic

cultivation was a spatial operation, a warplane-pilot assemblage could also be

considered a cultivation of space by technique, and this technique can have a radical

maternal quality. Because in the contemporary context of expansionary nation-states,

the cultivation of space now takes place through the air.

Infusing these maternal spatial operations is a reciprocal dependency that

underpins the protective quality of military atmospheres. Here cultivation is articulated

both in the control of artificial climates, the cultivation of an atmosphere, but also in the

protective enveloping of the subject in atmospheres that are always already hostile to

human life. Yet are these contemporary technically cultivated atmospheres safe from

corruption? A recent fleet of next generation fighter jets, the F-22 Raptor, has reportedly

been suffocating its pilots, forcing several to make emergency landings, and one pilot

death.129 Is this a kind of machinic infanticide? At the same time, what is perhaps the

ultimate artificial human greenhouse, the International Space Station (ISS), is not even

127 Ibid.

128 Ibid., 270–1.

129 “Is the Air Force’s F-22 Fighter Jet Making Pilots Sick? - CBS News,” accessed November 12, 2013,

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57427432/is-the-air-forces-f-22-fighter-jet-making-pilots-

sick/.

67

immune from infection. In 2008, Russian cosmonauts brought infected USBs into space

with them, severely compromising the integrity of the sealed environment.130 Just as the

spatial frontiers for humans have expanded, so too have the risks of infection. The so-

called cloud - in fact a mostly subterranean and submerged archipelago of climate-

controlled communication capillaries – operates as much in the terrestrial zone as the

extra-terrestrial: the new media atmosphere now stretches from underneath Earth’s the

oceans all the way to space. In what follows, one of the most recognisable yet hidden

articulations of the contemporary military atmosphere will be closely analysed: drones.

Figure 13. MQ-9 Reaper (Study) (2013). High Definition 3D animation, colour, stereo, 4 mins.

2.4 Drone Foam: MQ-9 Reaper I & II

Please watch Please watch Videos 2 – 4.1 at

http://www.badenpailthorpe.com/phd.html or on the attached USB

130 “International Space Station Attacked by ‘virus Epidemics’ | Technology | The Guardian,” accessed

June 2, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/12/international-space-station-virus-

epidemics-malware.

68

The relationship between the mimetic, surreal and mystical spatial tendencies discussed

in light of Davies’ work shares the same operational logic as practices of secrecy,

invisibility and ultimate vision that define the U.S. military’s covert network of atmospheric

weapons, communications and surveillance platforms. Ultimately, Caillois’ technical

description of the operation of perception in Euclidian space, seen through the context

of surrealism and mimetic organisms, is the fulcrum in this argument’s arc. To recall,

Caillois argues that mimetic organisms can project themselves to be perceived

geometrically correctly from any point in space, like a kind of inverted topological

panopticon. These insects literally adopt their surrounding space physically. This clearly

approaches the realm of current military spatial practices, as the technical ability to

perceive of oneself from an exterior, elevated point of view echoes the regimes of vision

that drones and aerial surveillance offer. Through the proceeding artworks, I have

addressed questions that advance from this connection, namely: are drones and their

assemblage not also a “devouring force” that consume, collapse and fold space? The

following sections will present the case for the surreal nature of militarised atmospheres

through a reciprocal exchange between artworks and theory. What unites these

phenomena is an underlying spatial poetics, a diffuse and unstable military umwelt.

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Figure 14. MQ-9 Reaper I (2014). Production still. High Definition 3D animation, colour, stereo, 4 mins 39 sec. The Australian Parliament House Art Collection, Canberra, and the University of Queensland Art Museum Collection, Brisbane.

As we have seen in our discussions of Sloterdijkian co-subjectivity, the military

umwelt thrives on reciprocity both as a technical and conceptual procedure. Indeed,

much of the reciprocity that characterises the spatiality of contemporary militarism is

anchored to the operational and strategic advantage of remaining invisible. The drone is

the most infamous tip of an often invisible military structure spread across the surface of

the Earth, into its atmosphere and into low orbit space, comprising technical, legal,

logistical and cultural elements that form a machinic assemblage influenced by

incorporeal transformations. This assemblage, as Derek Gregory suggests, forms a

visual regime that is conditioned by a variety of technologically enabled and culturally

affected events, in a scopic military vision.131 This vision is comprised not only of the

optical technologies that make possible their impossible perspectives, but also of the

myriad social, political and geographical components that underpin it. Crucially, this

military vision operates from a concealed and privileged position. The work of artist and

131 Gregory, “From a View to a Kill: Drones and Late Modern War.”

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geographer Trevor Paglen demonstrates that the logics of secrecy that govern covert

military operations are always manifested in some way in the material world. That is, that

which is supposed to be or intended to be invisible is always determined by the imperfect

efficiency of the covert security apparatus: the world of the invisible is always anchored,

somewhere, sometime, in the visible, tangible, actual world.132 Because of this, it

presents us with the chance to unravel the surreal spatiality in which military

atmospheres thrive.

This research has produced three moving image works that focus on the drone,

in particular, the General Atomics ‘MQ-9 Reaper’ model that makes up a large part of

the U.S. military’s repertoire. The first work, MQ-9 Reaper (Study) (2013), tests the

material and spatial operations that underpin MQ-9 Reaper I (2014) and MQ-9 Reaper

II (That Others May Die) (2014) by using 3Ds Max software. All three have been

exhibited in various locations,133 whilst MQ-9 Reaper I (2014) is held in the collection of

the University of Queensland Art Museum, and somewhat fittingly, in the Australian

Parliament House Art Collection. These works intervene in the drone’s assemblage using

surrealist techniques of symbolist pastiche, collage, impossible arrangements and

dream-like sequences. They intentionally fetishize the object of the drone, its body,

surfaces communications equipment and weaponry in a gesture that echoes both the

defence industries’ own practices of seductive imagery and advertising,134 but also the

132 Trevor Paglen, “30c3 - Trevor Paglen - Six Landscapes - 131228 2300 - YouTube,” 2013,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j56s46e97Lo.

133 Conflict: Contemporary Responses to War, The University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane; On

Return and What Remains, ARTSPACE, Sydney; The Future’s Knot, Critical Animals, Newcastle; NSW

Visual Art Fellowship, ARTSPACE, Sydney.

134 For a thorough analysis of the military’s aesthetic operations in advertising, see: R. Bishop and J.

Phillips, Modernist Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Contemporary Military Technology: Technicities of

Perception, Edinburgh University Press Series (Edinburgh University Press, 2010).

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romanticised connotations and aesthetics of theorists and artists discussed in this

section, particularly Char Davies and Roger Caillois.

Figure 15. Baden Pailthorpe, MQ-9 Reaper II (That Others May Die) (2014). High Definition two-channel 3D animation, colour, sound, 6 minutes. Installation view, On Return and What Remains, Artspace, Sydney, 2014. Photo: Baden Pailthorpe

The MQ-9 Reaper series (2013 -14) repositions the disparate technical, cultural

and spatial elements of the drone network in a continuous virtual topology. In versions I

and II, a reconfigured American drone control room is deployed over an Afghan-

American landscape, refitted with technical, commercial and cultural elements from the

standard repertoire of late capitalism: advanced jet engines that facilitate global flows of

consumption and production, a luxury display unit with a large television, and a golf

driving range. On the opposite side of the container sits the military control centre. The

shipping container is a symbol of contemporary logistics par excellence – not only as a

tool of freight, but in the context of the drone network – it is a kind of architectural data

packet that I will argue collapses space and time. When a drone operator enters a control

room at Creech Air force Base, Nevada, they step into a portal.

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Figure 16. USAF Drone Control Rooms, Creech Air force Base, Nevada. USAF image: Public Domain

Figure 17. Inside USAF Drone Control Rooms, Creech Air force Base, Nevada. USAF image: Public Domain

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Figure 18. MQ-9 Reaper I, 2014. Installation view, The Future’s Knot, the Lock-Up, Newcastle (2014)

I use the term portal here literally, as these control rooms serve as thresholds

into distinct geo-political and legislative territories, since different legal and operational

logics of military command apply to the space within these containers. As Derek Gregory

notes, when you enter one, you are in Iraq, another, Afghanistan or elsewhere.135

Through this magic, Pete Adey’s, emphasis on the performativity of the aerial subject is

given a new twist when applied to the drone operator. If, for example, it is about “aerial

subjects and their relation with space, a realization that ‘man is not only what he eats,

but what he breathes and that in which he is immersed”,136 then the thing that the drone

operator is immersed in is this transformative sensing assemblage of the drone. In the

drone control room, he drone operator is paradoxically grounded and transported

through the air. Can we then call a drone operator an aerial subject if they remain on the

135 Gregory, “From a View to a Kill: Drones and Late Modern War.”

136 Adey, Aerial Life: Spaces, Mobilities, Affects (Kindle Version), Location 504.

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ground? The drone control room is certainly a controlled atmosphere on many levels. On

one level, the control room proxies another territory’s controlled airspace, the airspace

of the territory that hosts the drone itself, usually non-contested airspace that contains

no hostile air force (with the exception of bad weather). The domestic location of the

control room on U.S. territory is similarly non-contested. Its own airspace is conditioned

to a specific temperature to keep the banks of monitors and computers running at a

comfortable level. Ultimately, this contained atmosphere is one end of an assemblage

whose primary purpose is to sense bodies at a distance, a process enabled by

technologies deployed both on the ground, in the air and in space. This is how drone

space is ‘atmospheric’: it is composed of elements that Adey sums up in the term aerality

– but goes further than its ‘aerial’ components. There is the drone itself, a fairly slow and

basic airframe, upon which weapons and sensors are attached, whose live video feeds

are relayed via satellite to servers in Germany, and then on to military bases and control

centres on U.S. territory. This is combined and condensed in the drone’s control room,

and resolved through the drone operators. The ‘aerial subject’ in Adey’s work, when

applied to the example of drones is perhaps the drone assemblage itself, rather than

only the drone’s human operators, since the human subject is spread across the drone

assemblage.

Here, conventional boundaries between subject and environment break down

yet again, gesturing towards the mystical spatial logic of Caillois’ mimetic insects. Indeed,

the operations and logistical mysticism of the contemporary military umwelt arises as the

sensory apparatus of the organism (drone operator) is expanded, resulting in the

operator being absorbed into a military topology of sensors, stimuli (targets, surveillance,

landscape etc.), and in the words of Caillois, the operator “no longer knows where to

place themselves wherever.”137 A form of projection is at work between the drone

137 Caillois, The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader, 99–100.

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operator and the drone, alluding to a throwing or launching of agency through space and

time, a plasticity of intention and events that speaks to the topological panopticon of

Caillois’ mimetic insects: a kind of spatial oneness whose beginning and ending is

indistinguishable. In this way, I suggest that drones may be considered as event

prosthetics whose topology flows through a surreal conjuring of hostile spatial intensities.

In Figure 18, the viewer of MQ-9 Reaper I (2014) adopts a similar viewing posture to the

drone operators shown in figure 17, which suggests the formal proximity between the

body and the screen in both contexts of remotely piloted weapons systems and the

contexts of display of contemporary art. In this particular exhibition, the exhibition space

is a converted jail cell at Newcastle’s art space The Lock-Up (Figure 18).

One of the unique characteristics that this research identifies in drone

atmospheres is that of mimesis. The prosthetic nature of drones can be located in early

discussions of remote controlled technologies, which were considered as extensions of

human agency. This was as much a physical extension as a psychological one.

Describing early precursors to drones in his study Remote Control in Hostile

Environments (1964), John W. Clark suggests that “the machine may be thought of as

an alter ego for the man who operates it.” In effect, he continues, “his consciousness is

transferred to an invulnerable mechanical body with which he is able to manipulate tools

or equipment almost as though he were holding them in his own hands.”138 This proximity

between the man and the remotely controlled machine is based not on any physical or

geographic proximity, but rather a kind of mimetic closeness. For Clark, the term

telechiric was useful in describing this relationship – a neologism from the ancient Greek

words for distance (tele) and hand (kheir).139 In Drone Theory (2015), Grégoire

Chamayou applies Clark’s ideas of remote control to his analysis of the techniques and

138 John W. Clark, “Remote Control in Hostile Environments,” New Scientist 22, no. 389 (1964): 100.

139 “Theory of the Drone 1: Genealogies | Geographical Imaginations,” accessed May 14, 2015,

http://geographicalimaginations.com/2013/07/23/theory-of-the-drone-1-genealogies/.

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tactics of the drone.140 For us, it is this emphasis on a transferred consciousness, the

machinic alter ego of the controller that is important, due to its mirroring of Peter

Sloterdijk’s concept of foam in Spheres III. Foam is based on a principle of connected

isolation – a kind of multiplied, dispersed yet intensified expression of co-subjectivity.

This is the basis for conceiving the drone as an event-prosthetic. Here, crucially, it is

imitation, and not communication (as it is usually conceived) that underlies Sloterdijk’s

foam theory.141 Christian Borch’s analysis of Sloterdijk’s interest in de Tarde’s work is

helpful to understand how:

“de Tarde argues that imitation creates a social bond because the one who

imitates thereby approaches the one who is imitated. This is what happens

between cells in social foam. Due to the separating walls, there is no direct

exchange between the cells; yet a mutual influence exists through 'mimetic

infiltration', i.e. through contagious rays of imitation that tend to create a social

bond of similarity or assimilation between neighbouring cells.”142

140 G. Chamayou, Drone Theory (Penguin Books Limited, 2015). But Chamayou places a great emphasis on

the technical capabilities that define what he calls the “pragmatic co-presence” of drones, which is, for

Chamayou, based on communication, placing him in opposition to Sloterdijk – but keeping in mind

Sloterdijk does not discuss drones. (Chamayou, Drone Theory, 116 & 247 – 254.) According to Chamayou,

the remote capabilities that drones offer both aggregate redistribute our experience of distance spatially.

(Chamayou, Drone Theory, 116.) In an extended endnote, Chamayou goes to great lengths to unpack his

thinking on co-presence. At first glance, this seems to be a fruitful and direct link to Sloterdijk’s conceptual

device of co-subjectivity, but there are crucial differences between their ideas. Sloterdijk’s philosophical

approach to co-subjectivity across distance is based on the idea of mimesis found in Gabriel de Tarde’s

Laws of Imitation (1962), (Borch, “Foam Architecture: Managing Co-Isolated Associations,” 533.) whereas

Chamayou emphasises ‘co-presence’ and the perceptual capabilities of proximity that are constrained by

the ‘ranges’, intensities and number of ‘senses’ involved. (Chamayou, Drone Theory, 248.)

141 See footnote 129 for the distinction between communication and imitation.

142 Borch, “Foam Architecture: Managing Co-Isolated Associations,” 533.

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In this case, the drone/operator ‘neighbouring’ does not indicate physical

proximity, but rather, these ‘cells’ are neighbours in the sense of a proximity of exchange,

a decentralised being-together across complex generative arrangements of bi-unity, but

in connected isolation. When expressed in this way, the drone articulates Sloterdijk’s

foam theory, what could be called a drone foam. Grégoire Chamayou gestures towards

this arrangement as a specific kind of military topography, a particular way of thinking of

and organising space.143 Yet within Chamayou’s concept of co-presence, it is

paradoxically possible to have non-reciprocal relations, this being another key difference

to Sloterdijk’s theories of spheres, which depend ultimately on intensities and

permutations of reciprocity. What Chamayou means by a structure of co-presence is “a

relationship of either reciprocal or non-reciprocal inclusion of one entity within the range-

field of another.”144 The morphological structures of these relations then depends on

whether or not the relation is reciprocal.145

I suggest that the complex topologies of drones find much in common with

Sloterdijk’s theories of foam, and it is in my MQ-9 Reaper series of artworks that this

argument is tested. The relevance of Sloterdijk’s spatial theories to drones has been

demonstrated through the creation of these works in a number of ways. These

animations summon several objects, cultures, sequences, interactions and symbols in a

surreal, dream-like space. MQ-9 Reaper I (2014) has a foamy spatial ‘layering’ that

destroys the interior/exterior dialectic: it begins with a slowly rotating drone control

143 Chamayou, Drone Theory, 22.

144 Ibid., 250.

145 Ibid.

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container, floating over an ambiguous Afghan-American landscape, a non-place.146

Suddenly, the viewer is violently thrown into a spatial collapse, as the field of view is

sucked inside the drone as if the container control room is located on a topology of

sameness with the drone. Instantly the spatial certainty of the work is disrupted. We

observe the interior world of the drone, a machine of ultimate externality, whose

‘internals’ are displaced in time and space. The drone’s ‘inside’ is, in fact, somewhere

between the space within the communication networks, the psyche, education,

personality, habits, likes/dislikes of the human operator and the legal/geo-politically

constrained space of the container control room.147 It is at this point worth suggesting

that MQ-9 Reaper I (2014) (Video 3) be watched again, and perhaps watched several

times, so that the spatial refrain can be identified to the first-time viewer.

Figure 19. MQ-9 Reaper I, (2014). Installation view, First Landing to Last Post: contemporary perspectives on 100 years of service, Parliament House, Canberra (2015).

146 The image used as a background for MQ-9 Reaper I and MQ-9 Reaper II (That Others May Die) is a

spherical high dynamic range (HDR) image. The entire animation is lit from the light information in this

photograph, which was purchased from a photographic image library.

147 Derek Gregory identifies factors such as these in his expanded definition of ‘military vision’. See:

Gregory, “From a View to a Kill: Drones and Late Modern War.”

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Figure 20. Inside the drone: Baden Pailthorpe, MQ-9 Reaper II (That Others May Die) (2014). High Definition two-channel 3D animation, colour, sound, 6 minutes.

The psychedelic imagery that the internal perspective of the drone produces is

the result of the drone’s own geometry, recreated in this animation from a faithful model

of the MQ-9 Reaper drone. The software used to create this work, 3Ds Max, in turn

computes the interaction between the drone’s geometry, its glass material in this artwork

and its environment. The psychedelic result is less a product of my creative vision than

an aesthetic outcome of the deeply surreal spatial properties that already govern the

drone as a mystical military object. Drones cultivate space in a deeply surreal way, so

naturally, when their representations are determined by the same algorithms that

informed their design process, their true colours are shown. Interestingly, they conjure

an image of the ‘psychedelic capitalism’ that Sloterdijk discusses in relation to the early

Parisian Arcades discussed in Chapter 1.

It is important to reiterate that the perspective achieved in the video is an

impossible one. The virtual camera in this software penetrates the drone’s body, whose

inside might be better understood as the converted shipping container. There is an

emphasis on technique and manufacturing in Sloterdijk’s discussions of militarised

atmospheres, particularly the gas attacks of World War One, and the gas chambers of

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both NAZI and U.S. prisons.148 Here the impossible imagery speaks to those designers

of the pinnacle of the miniaturised negative air conditioning event, the drone airstrike –

whose historical roots can be seen in the airquake of 1915 and the gas chambers of

subsequent governments in both the U.S. and Nazi Germany. The huge logistical effort

that enabled the airquake of World War One has been concentrated into the

technological potency of contemporary warfare and the myriad micro airquakes that now

take place regularly through the American drone network across the globe. The atmo-

logistical posturing of the first industrial rupturing of the environment has been dispersed,

de-materialised and deployed into low-orbit space and across the surface of the earth.

Figure 21. The drone confronts its operator: Baden Pailthorpe, MQ-9 Reaper II (That Others May Die) (2014). High Definition two-channel 3D animation, colour, sound, 6 minutes.

Yet this dispersion is negated in both MQ-9 Reaper I (2014) and MQ-9 Reaper

II (That Others May Die) (2014), where the drone confronts both its operator and its own

ego, here represented by the glass drone. The machinic ego of the human drone

operator that John W. Clark identified so early in the history of remotely controlled

machines is here extended to include the drone’s own ego too.149 Glass is again used

here as a material articulation of the underlying fragility in Sloterdijk’s sphereology,

148 Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air.

149 Clark, “Remote Control in Hostile Environments,” 100.

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whose outward intensities are usually tempered by the fragility and instability of the

sphere itself, thus requiring what Sloterdijk continually refers to as a spatial immunology.

“Spheres are constantly disquieted by their inevitable instability: like happiness and

glass, they bear the risks native to everything that shatters easily… Spheres are

temporary “shelters” in which Da-sein in Heidegger’s looser meaning as “being-toward”

plays out the countless permutations of personal and historical destiny.”150 This work thus

pursues a number of hypotheses and questions: if the drone operator’s machinic ego is

momentarily contained in the drone, is this also a ‘temporary shelter’ defined by a

Heideggerian ‘being-toward’? If so, does this ‘being-toward’ then exceed the containing

properties of its own temporary shelter and produce its own spatial permutation, the

drone’s own ego?

Just as the drone’s shipping container control room collapses ‘standard’ concepts

of distance and space, so too does this work destabilise the distance between concepts

of the controlled and the controller. The machinic gaze of the military seeing machine is

inverted here, forced to contemplate its own reflection. The off-duty drone operator in

MQ-9 Reaper I & II, the corporate ‘civilian warrior’ trains, shadow-boxing an invisible

adversary (perhaps his machinic ego?), conditioning his body for the standards of

efficiency and fitness that are requisite to the contemporary corporate leader/drone

operator.151

150 Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Microspherology, 48.

151 The concept of the corporate warrior as an embodied containing of exterior and interior worlds is

developed considerably in Chapter 3.

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Figure 22. MQ-9 Reaper I, (2014) right. Installation view, Conflict: Contemporary Approaches to War, UQ Art Museum, Brisbane (2014).

As we emerge from the drone, we see its lush surface both reflecting and

absorbing its environment. Again, the organism is not demarcated against or from its

surroundings, it is both surroundings and organism at once. Drones devour space, they

are a platform of unrelenting vision from a place of near invisibility. The drone’s ego is

therefore, naturally, pure sky – a point of complete and privileged vision from the

completely absorbed topological subject.

Returning to Sloterdijk’s emphasis on pairing as the a priori ontological state that

precedes all being, these drone twins are vessels for human-machine ontological

pairings, whose original ceramic containers in Genesis have been superseded by

advanced composite materials, absorbent of hostile machine vision and radar, loyal to

their creators as Adam was to his Respirator in Genesis.152 The drone operator and the

drone are also born simultaneously in an expanded pneumatic gesture: “Adam and his

152 See Chapter 1.

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companion…remain in their exclusive partnership with God for as long as they manage

to allow nothing to grow inside themselves other than what was originally breathed into

them...Initially, there is nothing within them but the breathed, back-and-forth double

rejoicing of the pact against externality.”153

Yet as Carl Raschke notes, “the “pact” or original covenant is broken in the

garden, of course, by acting on the temptation by the serpent to seek the knowledge of

good and evil.” This rebellion of the original pair heralds the entrance of “sin” into the

world, but, as Raschke continues, “it is also the beginning of the expansion of the sense

of the world, the inward shattering of the bi-unanimity and the thrust of consciousness

outwards that marks the beginning of what in a philosophical sense can truly be called

“globalization.” Globalization is the “history” of this profound human discontent born of

freedom to exceed the limits of the innate sphereological binary and to encounter the

“externality” […]”154 Drones are a technical operation of globalisation in this sense, and

as such, they can be seen as a generative outcome of this ‘history’ that Sloterdijk refers

to as originating, metaphorically, in the disrupted containing intensities of the Garden of

Eden. At the same time, as Raschke notes, this outward thrust is tempered by a will to

protect, to minimize and immunize, to internalise this outer world.155 The spherical

expansion of capital and its associated immuno-mechanisms that internalise and protect

these outward currents is neatly exemplified in the foamy American drone network.

153 Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Microspherology, 49.

154 Carl Raschke, “‘Peter Sloterdijk as “First Philosopher” of Globalization,’” Journal for Cultural and

Religious Theory 12, no. 3 (Spring 2013): 14.

155 Ibid.

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Figure 23. Man Ray, Ce qui manque à nous tous, 1927/1973, Clay, glass and wire, 120 x 196 x 80 mm Tate Modern, London. © Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2002.

Raschke continues to support this argument, citing Sloterdijk’s Spheres II: Globes

(2014) where he articulates several symbolic and technical operations that sit with the

MQ-9 Reaper series artworks. Specifically, Raschke unpacks Sloterdijk’s use of the

philosophical term arché, which here, quoting Sloterdijk:

“discloses the most sphereologically radical notion of space, of which human

beings on the threshold of high culture were capable, namely, that the artificial,

insulated inner world (Innenwelt) under certain circumstances can become the

only possible surrounding world (Umwelt) for an inhabitant. Thus a novel project

comes into the world. It is the representation of self-concealment and self-

environing activity (Selbstumgebung) of a group confronted with an impossible

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external world. The arché is the autonomous, the absolute, the context-free

house, the building without neighbourhood. Within it is embodied in an exemplary

manner the negation of the surrounding world through the act of fabrication. It

provides for the surreal spatial schema of ‘autogeneous containment’ its first

technical realization; it is able to concern itself only with a technics of the

imaginary.”156

What are drones here but articulations of this technics of the imaginary? The

context-free house, the building without a neighbourhood? The containing intensities of

drones that operate across destabilised concepts of interior and exterior worlds have by

now been well presented, and their demonstrably ‘surreal spatial schema’ gives us much

to think about.

156 Ibid. Sloterdijk, Sphären, vol. 2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999), 251, cited in Raschke, his translation.

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Figure 24. Activision Motion Capture Studio.

2.5 Motion Capture as Topological Photography

These ‘surreal spatial schema’ are deployed in several ways in the creation of the MQ-9

Reaper artworks. There is a useful (if overly direct) linguistic link between the animation

I have used to make these art works and Sloterdijk’s analysis of the atmospheric

animation of Adam in Genesis. In both instances, animation is used as a spatial

technique that conjures bodies atmospherically.

The technical process used to animate the boxing off-duty drone operator figure

in my MQ-9 Reaper artworks is known as motion capture, or ‘mocap’ for short, where an

actor is fitted with LED markers at specific points on the body. The actor’s movements

are then recorded and triangulated in Cartesian xyz space in a specialised studio space.

This spatial tracking system is commonly used in 3D animations and Hollywood

productions, sharing a technique used in astrological surveys, navigation and military

targeting. It is, essentially, a kind of topological photography, where the contours of

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movement are mapped out in 3D space. Once this data is collected, it can be ‘plugged

in’ to any biped model in 3D animation software. Just as the spectres of deceased

photographic subjects haunt their viewers,157 the trace of the actor’s movements similarly

embed the virtual with a lingering ghostly agency, an enduring volume-index of the

recorded space-event.

Here the human 3D model is given life, breathed into, animated in the

Sloterdijkian sense – atmospherically – in a data driven spatial gesture by the original

actor, and then myself (when I apply the data to a host body). The otherwise empty

vessel of the 3D human model is activated in a remotely controlled gesture, a kind of

puppeteer behind the curtain of time that separates the originally recorded movement

and the subsequent transplant of this data in time and space – another event prosthetic.

If the original boxer is the controller of the unmanned man 3D character, the ‘mocap’

data itself becomes unmanned as soon as it is recorded, removed like a layer of skin, a

continual dynamic topology of surfaces lifted from the generative fleshy body as it

performs in space. At this moment, when the data is detached from the body, an almost

schizophrenic loss of coordinates is enabled, establishing free-floating, spaceless

movement. Of course, the data itself is coordinates, but peeled from the sensory field,

filtered away from the corporeal form that anchors it in the perceived world. It remains

spaceless until it is once again attached to a new host, in this case, a hospitable digital

body. There is an entire archive of human movement data stored across the Internet,158

ghostly coordinates without bodies waiting for willing hosts in the digital world to perform

for human eyes, a kind of ‘adoption service’ for orphaned movements, separated from

their parents at birth, a lost twin searching for its pair: ontology starts at the number two.

157 R. Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (Hill and Wang, 1981),

https://books.google.com.au/books?id=MIaangEACAAJ.

158 “Carnegie Mellon University - CMU Graphics Lab - Motion Capture Library,” accessed September 29,

2014, http://mocap.cs.cmu.edu/.

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The ‘mocap’ data used to animate the figure in the MQ-9 Reaper series was sourced

from such an archive.

Fittingly, drones themselves have created a different kind of archive of human

movement. Every drone mission involves the collection of many hours of video footage,

which is stored and used for the gathering of intelligence, and for the training of other

drone operators, legal advisors, officers and analysts. This archive records the

movements and interactions of targets, ‘military-aged males’ and anyone in their vicinity,

often recording the most banal everyday scenes as they build the so-called pattern of

life. Yet when the target’s behavioural pattern begins to show persistent anomalies,

suspicious ‘rhythm signatures’, the order is given to strike. Derek Gregory has described

this as a militarized rhythm analysis, even a weaponised time-geography.159

Figure 25. Re-manning the unmanned: Baden Pailthorpe, MQ-9 Reaper II (That Others May Die) (2014). High Definition two-channel 3D animation, colour, sound, 6 minutes.

Given the qualitative nature of this social rhythm analytics, there is a great deal

of risk in the misinterpretation of behaviours as threatening. Strikes are often ordered

hastily in time-sensitive cases.160 As such, this drone archive is ultimately one of humans

moving apart, blowing apart, moving away from being human, a library of kinetics, to use

the horrible operational euphemism for force favoured by the U.S. military. Drones

159 Gregory, “From a View to a Kill: Drones and Late Modern War.”

160 Ibid.

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permanently remove coordinates from their victims, who genuinely and definitively no

longer know where to place themselves after an attack that kills them. Like Caillois’

mimetic organisms they have been spatially displaced. In 2010, this archive of video

footage taken from USAF drones had accumulated to the extent that it would take 24

years to watch end to end, and by now, the duration of that archive would be many

multiples of an average human life – and growing.161 The volumes of life erased by the

drones are being replaced with ever-lengthening volumes of death in a data storage

sense.

If drones are event prosthetics that project human agency through space and

time, then the sensor ball that houses the drone’s sensory equipment may be considered

as a kind of immersive atmo-periscope. I followed this logic to its symbolic end in MQ-9

Reaper II (That Others May Die) (2014) as the drones are fitted with human heads

encased within the Reaper’s sensor ball (Figure 25). Can the human head be

reconceptualised a sensor ball pivoting across xyz coordinates on a bipedal transport

platform?

As the sensory data gathered by the drone’s sensor ball is perceived and

processed by its human operator in near real-time, the drone-operator assemblage

approaches the paired ontology that underwrites Sloterdijk’s spatial theories. These are

twins, paired across a foamy intimacy where proximity in a spatial and emotional sense

does not depend on communication, but imitation. The drone operator is like a

weaponised puppeteer, whose movements reverberate into actions in space. In this

sense, the drone is a vessel whose interior is filled with technologies of spatial

translation: translation of intention into actions, of politics into force (U.S. foreign policy),

of atmospheric spatial data into legal frameworks (Rules of Engagement), translation of

161 “Military Deluged in Drone Intelligence - NYTimes.com,” accessed September 29, 2014,

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/business/11drone.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.

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disparate space into continuous desiring topologies, translation of bodies into space, of

life into death.

Through these creative investigations of the spatial operations of drone warfare,

the resonance between the structure of the container and protective helmet featured in

earlier studies becomes apparent. At its most extreme limits, the drone could be

conceptualised as a strange helmet itself, where the human body of the operator steps

into the first stage of this topological helmet, the container – itself a protective layer with

mystical spatial properties – separated by time and space, a temporal padding. The

second layer of the helmet is the outer shell – the drone itself, equipped with (as so many

helmets, both military and civilian, are today) cameras, IR sensors, night vision and laser

target designators. This is a flying, weaponised helmet.162

An interesting case of the hostile helmet can be found through a key surrealist

figure, Salvador Dali. As a spatial ambassador from the depths of the surrealist ailleurs

(elsewhere), on the occasion of the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition at the New

Burlington Galleries in London, Salvador Dali decided to give a lecture in a deep sea

diving suit. Nobody thought to attach a supply of fresh air to the suit, so as he was giving

his lecture, he began to run out of air and needed to be rescued from the sealed

environment. Sloterdijk cites this event in Terror from the Air (2009) as an example that

points to the 20th Century’s “unfolding of atmospherical consciousness, which” along with

the gas attacks of WWI, “is central to the self-explication of culture in the 20th Century.”163

Sloterdijk summarises that:

162 Of course, helmets are not only needed to protect humans in hostile terrestrial and atmospheric

environments, but also hostile aquatic environments. The range within which humans can operate

without assistance is a slim slice of the umwelt indeed. Yet when these technologies are used in safe

environments, they can themselves create hostile environments.

163 Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, 77–8.

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“whoever ventures from his camp and into multi-milieu society must sure of his

‘diving gear’; that is of his physical and mental immune system. The accident

cannot be put down to dilettantism alone; it further exposes the systematic risks

of atmospheric explication and of the technical forcing of access to the other

elements – exactly in the way in which the risk of poisoning one's own troops in

gas warfare is inseparable from military atmoterrorism.”164

This potential for atmospheric blowback is similarly active in the contemporary multi-

milieu drone network. As a logical extension of the 20th Century’s increasing atmo-

awareness, we now experience an unfolding assemblage of networked media

atmospheres, where the machine’s protective gaze is increasingly inverted towards

internal, sovereign domestic territories, from external hostile zones of conflict such as

Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.

As ambassadors from the 21st Century’s networked unconscious, drones are now

deployed to search for the enemy within, an auto-immune response for the ever-

expanding and porous foam structure of contemporary space.165 With growing

automation, these sensors peer increasingly deeper into the inner zones of our territories

as they continue to manifest the anxious modernist drive of constant innovation,

improvement and research. This generative anxiety-drive is fundamental to Sloterdijk’s

atmospheric account of modernity. Once the outer zones have been exhausted, the

geometric logics of porous generative spheres turn increasingly inwards and intensify.

164 Ibid., 78.

165 US Customs and Border Protection operates several MQ-9 Reaper drones and Reaper variants. See

“Aircraft and Marine Vessels | U.S. Customs and Border Protection,” accessed October 8, 2014,

http://www.cbp.gov/border-security/air-sea/aircraft-and-marine-vessels.

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Figure 26. Raytheon Multi-Spectral Targeting System (MTS), commonly known as the ‘Sensor Ball’ of a UAV.

Figure 27. Salvador Dali delivered a lecture in a deep-sea diving suit at the International Surrealist Exhibition (1936), the New Burlington Galleries in London, England.

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He emphasises this as he analyses the productive quality of Dali’s failed

experiment against the background of modernity:

“the contraphobic experimentation of modernization can never really emancipate

itself from its own background of anxiety, since the latter could only appear were

anxiety per se to be admitted into existence – a hypothesis which the very nature

of things excludes.”166

As a result, Sloterdijk continues:

“[m]odernity conceived as the explicitation of the background givens thereby

remains trapped in a phobic circle, which itself generates more anxiety. Both

primary and secondary anxieties provide an ever renewed impulsion for

continuing the process; at every step of modernization, their urgency justifies the

use of further violence to break open latency and control the background – or to

use the current prescribed terminology: it demands fundamental research and

permanent innovation.”167

Drones are a contemporary explication of the continuing generative-anxiety

complex that underwrote modernity, not least because their developmental trajectory lies

across both the 19th and 20th Centuries.168 They are the product of constant research and

permanent innovation that is ultimately pursued from a state of anxiety – of defence. Yet

these anxious tendencies can also generate productive intensities like exploration. A key

166 Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, 78–9.

167 Ibid., 79.

168 From the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s use of balloon UAVs in 1848, to the UAVs of WWI and WWII.

See “Rise of the Reapers: A Brief History of Drones | Drone Wars UK,” accessed October 8, 2014,

http://dronewars.net/2014/10/06/rise-of-the-reapers-a-brief-history-of-drones/.

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connotation of Dali’s diving suit is that of discovery,169 of going into unknown and hostile

environments. This connotation is also strong in the surveillance structure of which

drones form a key component. In the context of surrealism and its reliance on

psychoanalysis, the exploration that Dali represented was of uncharted psychic internal

territories, rather than geographical space. For Sloterdijk, “Dali professed to practice a

kind of photorealism as applied to the internal, irrational images: the point was to render

the content of dreams and deliriums objective with the precision of an old master.”170

This description is useful in understanding my use of animation to explore the

mysticism of the American military umwelt in all of these works, an irrational photorealism

that attempts to explicate the background, to access the networked unconscious through

technical means. The MQ-9 Reaper series (2013-14) does this through an emphasised

high production value synonymous with Hollywood, and the impossible arrangement of

objects, spaces and symbols that 3D animation software allows.

This irrational photorealism is at work in the process of 3D animation used for my

artworks. And as a key technique in the production of media atmospheres in late

capitalism, the use of 3D animation in this research must be accounted for. Other digital

artists that employ deliberately high definition, photorealistic production techniques

include John Gerrard,171 Ed Atkins and Helen Martin.172 Although this ‘HD’ production

style does imply certain levels of technical proficiency and financial resources, there are

169 For a history of the deep sea diving bell, see: The British Cyclopaedia of the Arts, Sciences, History,

Geography, Literature, Natural History, and Biography ..., The British Cyclopaedia of the Arts, Sciences,

History, Geography, Literature, Natural History, and Biography (Wm. S. Orr and co., 1838), 433.

170 Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, p.76.

171 B. Pailthorpe, ed., John Gerrard: Exercise (Djibouti) (Melbourne: Screen Space, 2014). Rather than

animation and HD video, John Gerrard produces what he calls ‘simulations’ that run on game engines

such as Unity.

172 Whilst Helen Martin’s work does employ high quality 3D animation, it is stylistically more abstract

and ‘cartoonish’ than Ed Atkins, John Gerrard and myself.

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many avenues available to the independent artist to produce this quality of photorealism

at a relatively low-cost. Such practices are as much an act of deception and mimesis as

a spatial operation that follows the internal logic of capital: efficiency. For example, the

main character that features in my MQ-9 Reaper series is hairless, as is the character

in Ed Atkins’ recent animation Ribbons, (2014), shown in Figure 28. When rendering

animations, the more complex the geometry and materials are, the longer the render

times become.

In 3D animation, hair is a luxury: it takes up considerable resources to compute.

To clarify, an average frame in MQ-9 Reaper II (That Others May Die) (2014), took 10

minutes to render. This, when composited at 30 frames per second, calculates to 300

minutes for 1 second of footage. For an animation of 6 minutes at a resolution twice that

of HD, the workload is considerable. One way to mitigate this is to use networked ‘render

farms’ comprised of a main machine and several servers that render frames together.

This research regularly used a render farm of 5 machines, and sometimes for very heavy

scenes, an online render farm was used comprised of many hundreds of servers.

Another way to mitigate these long render times whilst maintaining image quality, is to

avoid features such as hair that add considerable geometry and therefore resources to

the production of the work. So, whilst an artwork produced in 3D animation may appear

to be dependent on studios full of animators and large render farms, it can also depend

on a logic of efficiency. The latter gives the appearance of a high production value, whilst

actually only needing relatively limited resources. Other strategies include adding

photographic effects in compositing software such as Adobe After Effects rather than in

the 3D animation itself. In sum, even in small-scale productions, there is a networked

logistics at the core of the work, just as there is in the contemporary military apparatus.

All of these methods are strategic: they either break down one task into many parts – a

collective logic – or they employ specific methods that deceive in some way, that pretend

to be a higher quality than they are. Some viewers not equipped with a technical

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knowledge of animation would perhaps identify certain elements of an artwork to be

conceptually driven, when in fact, they are economically driven. Of course, there are

certainly conceptual mechanics at play in economic choices, and this is crucial to explore

in the context of the broader drivers at work in this research.

Figure 28. Ed Atkins, Ribbons (2014) (production still.) Three-channel HD video. © 2014 Ed Atkins

Nothing can ever truly be void of economics, after all. Indeed, much of this

chapter has sought to demonstrate the complex interaction of geography, politics,

history, science, culture, nature and technology that produce the topologies of what this

research has called a military umwelt. Like the strange elsewhere implied by Dali’s then

state-of-the-art deep-sea diving suit, this military umwelt is a space lurking just below the

surface of the everyday – as we saw thanks to Trevor Paglen’s practice, and will see

much more in the following pages. It is a space within a space, cordoned off for most of

us – for those without requisite training, accreditation, technical or institutional proficiency

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– yet it is a space enabled by us and justified on behalf of us. Sloterdijk defines this space

that enables the military umwelt as the “World of Interior Capital”,173 which, he argues,

“should be understood as a socio-topological term that is here applied to the interior-

creating violence of contemporary traffic and communication media: it traces the horizon

of all money-dependant chances of access to places, people, commodities and data

[…]”174

It is in this light that, as a key technique in the production of media in late

capitalism, the use of 3D animation in this research is pertinent. Combined with the

special spatial qualities of an exhibition venue, 3D animation operates in a demarcated

zone or inner space that approaches the spatial concerns that these animations

themselves attempt to engage. By accessing a space just below the surface, 3D

animation serves as a kind of cultural control room from which remote realities can be

perceived, along with perspectives on surroundings surrounded by a contextual gallery

envelope.175

173 Sloterdijk uses this term for what is commonly known as ‘the West’ or the ‘Westernised sphere’:

Sloterdijk and Hoban, In the World Interior of Capital: Towards a Philosophical Theory of Globalization,

195.

174 Ibid., 198.

175 In Spheres III: Foam, Sloterdijk describes the Museum as an isolating space. Sloterdijk, Sphères: Tome

3, Ecumes, Sphérologie Plurielle, 297.

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Figure 29. Trevor Paglen, They Watch the Moon (2010). C-print, 36 x 48 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

2.6 Trevor Paglen: Limit Telephotography

Much of the military’s spatial operation thrives on the operational advantage of

concealment. The covert U.S. intelligence sphere has outward generative currents,

always expanding, consuming more, knowing more, sensing more, whilst at the same

time, concealing its presence. Trevor Paglen is an artist who seeks to render the hidden

and the deeply embedded secret space visible, to tease out threads in the complex

tapestry of covert networks. “As a geographer,” Paglen notes, “one of my analytic

assumptions is that all human undertakings, including secret programs, are spatial.”176

176 T. Paglen, R. Solnit, and Aperture Foundation, Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes

(Aperture, 2010), 145, http://books.google.com.au/books?id=Y4jXRwAACAAJ.

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The Achilles heel of the secret state is, of course, the very thing that enables its

operation: logistics. The work of Paul Virilio is well understood to have expanded our

notion of logistics in warfare, from the obvious movements of personnel, equipment and

supplies, to the flow of images that contribute to the logistics of perception.177 Trevor

Paglen has also contributed greatly to the fields of contemporary art and experimental

geography by focusing on the infrastructure that makes these logistics of hidden

perception possible: the covert scaffolding of the ever-expanding world of intelligence.

“Like the explorers of the eighteenth century, [Paglen] has begun to circle the globe –

now, however, concentrating on mapping the “black world” […]”178

In the ongoing series Limit Telephotography, Paglen pushes photographic

technologies to their absolute limits in an attempt to render invisible sites visible (Figure

29). He documents the government installations that are placed in locations throughout

the desert regions of the United States (Nevada, Arizona, Utah etc.) that aide their

concealment, locations whose topologies both natural and built mask a fundamental

truth: that they exist. These sites make up the infrastructure of the covert world: NSA

listening stations, secret Air Force bases, CIA ‘Black Sites’ etc., sites that utilise

advanced technologies of perception. Paglen too employs technologies that extend our

ability to perceive, yet in this case Paglen takes optical technologies that are intended

for astrological surveys and turns them towards the terrestrial. In this, he explores the

absolute limits of the visible and attempts to traverse the threshold of the invisible:

“In all of my work, I am interested in the limits of the visible world, in the nature of

evidence, and the fuzzy and contradictory relationships between vision, imaging,

177 P. Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, Radical Thinkers (Verso, 1989).

178 U. Riese, T. Paglen, and T. Wagner, Trevor Paglen: A Compendium of Secrets, Kerber Art (Kerber,

2010), p. 8.

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knowing, belief and truth. I embrace the epistemological and visual contradictions

in my work and am most compelled by images that both make claims to

represent, and at the same time dialectically undermine, the very claims they

seem to put forth.”179

There are several ‘geographies’ or topologies at work in the Limit

Telephotography series that are relevant for this research. In Chapter 1, details of the

legal, cultural and technological topology that enables the US drone network were

discussed.180 These topologies are fundamental to the operational logic of secrecy that

governs the covert world that Paglen seeks to uncover, where complex networks of front

companies, fake identities, corporate reports, postal boxes and forged signatures enable

a kind of spatial parallelism in which the logistics of the secret can ‘hide in plain sight’.

This ‘parallelism’ is reminiscent of Sloterdijk’s emphasis on the ‘containing’ properties at

work in his analysis of atmospheres, from Genesis to the ruptured containing of the

airquake. There is similarly an undeniable atmospheric quality to this space within a

space that Paglen seeks to uncover, and indeed, an almost schizophrenic loss of

coordinates at work (to again summon Caillois and his spatial mysticism: he feels himself

becoming space, dark space where things cannot be put. He is similar, not to something,

but just similar). The banality of this mimicry should not distract from the elegant

complexity of the system that enables it. Like Caillois’ sculptural photography, this covert

apparatus is an umwelt which operates as a kind of topological panopticon, aware of its

appearance from any point of externality, since it operates interstitially across the

external and internal dialectic. Paglen himself has described his intentions in the spatial

terms that this research has enthusiastically proposed, those of material but also

historical plasticity:

179 Paglen, Solnit, and Foundation, Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes, p.151.

180 See Chapter 1

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“I’ve been thinking about photographic materials in a much more “sculptural”

way—thinking about how imaging and printing processes can help form the

critical “text” of a photograph. I’ve recently been taking the materiality of

photography much more seriously, thinking about different processes, the

lifetimes of various media, and different printing processes as they relate to socio-

historical processes. I’ve been working with everything from albumen prints to the

satellite feeds of Predator drones. The point, for me, is to propose and develop

forms of post-representationalist photography and imaging wherein both the

materiality of a work and its “relations of photography” are intrinsic to what that

work is […] I think about the images in [Invisible, (2010)] as making claims on

both sides of the murky boundaries separating fact and fiction, empiricism and

imagination, and literature and science, while insisting on underlying sociological,

cultural and political facts.”181 [Emphasis added]

While Char Davies’ Osmose (1995) undermined the spatial coordinates of

interior/exterior, Paglen’s work seeks to break down the coordinates of the bureaucratic

mimesis that conceals the United States’ covert nervous system. Yet in this process, the

technologies that enable Paglen’s practice succumb to the atmospheric conditions of the

Earth and the nature of the space that he reveals. Forces such as temperature and

humidity become compositional elements in his work, as the scale of the separation

between photographer and subject is so great that atmospheric conditions become

material. He states:

“When photographing at extreme distances, conventions guiding more traditional

forms of landscape photography have little use. Typical variables such as depth

of field, composition, aperture, color balance, and exposure had to be

181 Paglen, Solnit, and Foundation, Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes, p.151.

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reconceived in order to develop a visual language suited to the methods and

conditions under which

Figure 30. Trevor Paglen, Open Hangar, Cactus Flats, NV. Distance ~ 18 miles, 10:04 a.m. (2007) C-Print 30 x 36 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

these photographs were taken. At extreme distances, there is essentially no such

thing as depth of field. Moreover, compositional possibilities are extremely limited

because there is often only one location on public land from which I have a line

of sight to my subject. In much of this work, atmospheric conditions and

temperature differentials between air and land dictate the possible composition,

color, and exposure choices. Convection waves become compositional

elements; the fact that the various parts of the color spectrum do not move

uniformly through miles of heat and haze (and that is dramatically altered over

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the course of a day, time of year, humidity, temperature and so forth) becomes a

basis for exposure and color decisions.”182

These usually invisible forces of political restrictions have a profound influence

on the materiality of the photographs that Paglen takes (Figure 30). His work provides

an apt model for the aims of my creative research in two ways. Firstly, through radical

uses of existing technologies, painstaking empirical research, extreme bureaucratic

operations and even the personal investment in developing friendships with amateur

astronomers and intelligence enthusiasts, he is able to reveal hidden structures. And

secondly, the invisible forces that make up the covert U.S. state have profound cultural

and political influence on our surroundings, yet they can only be rendered visible,

demarcated from their surroundings, through these radical uses of existing technologies.

These are a social technics as much as a technological operation, a combination of both

HUMINT and SIGINT.183 These radical uses of technology are generative in their own

right, since in the process of uncovering the obscured, the very process used in this

uncovering becomes materialised in different ways. As Paglen himself suggests, “the

blurry photographs from my Limit Telephotography series are less like George Shadbot’s

top-down views of London or the United States Geological Survey’s aerial photography

collections, and more like a strange conjunction of nineteenth-century landscape and

spirit photography.”184 If anything, the works conjure a kind of mystical topology that this

research has identified as a recurring characteristic of the contemporary military sphere.

182 Ibid., 145.

183 Human Intelligence (HUMINT), Signal Intelligence (SIGINT)

184 Paglen, Solnit, and Foundation, Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes, p.151.

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2.7 Conclusion

It has become clear that when we talk of ‘military atmospheres’, we are not only dealing

with the ‘aerial’ or climatic, but profoundly complex spatial operations that function in

ways that far exceed Sloterdijk’s interpretation of modernity’s airquake. The work of Char

Davies, Trevor Paglen and Marcel Duchamp provide three points from which an area of

operation has been demarcated for my own creative practice. These artists mark three

distinct yet interwoven technical and theoretical approaches to the atmospheric, its

politics and cultures, from the pharmaceutical and medicinal, the virtual and

emancipatory, to the covert and oppressive. This chapter has also shown how Peter

Sloterdijk’s spatial theories are actualised in the works of these artists. It has also

demonstrated how these spatial theories are crucial to our definition of the military

umwelt. Yet turning to the ideas of Caillois, Bachelard and some others, this chapter has

demonstrated that the spatial operation of the military atmosphere is reminiscent of the

continuous surreal topology of Caillois’ mimetic insects and Bachelard’s poetics of space.

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106

Chapter 3: Spatial Operations

Figure 31. Baden Pailthorpe, Spatial Operations (2015) (detail). Paper pulp, pva, cellulose powder. Each approximately 24 cm(h) x 22 cm(w) x 30 cm(d), 210 pieces.

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3.1 Introduction

Until now, the spatial operations that enable militarised atmospheres have been

considered mostly in relation to events and technologies directly applied within combat:

gas warfare, fighter pilot’s helmets, drones and their networked assemblages. However,

what of those spatial operations that take place within domestic, non-combative

militarised atmospheres? Do the domestic operations of Defence Force intelligence,

public relations and practices of commemoration have their own spatial logic? If so, how

do they respond to the surreal topologies of drone warfare, as discussed in Chapter 2?

In this chapter, my creative research focuses on the spatial construction of

militarised atmospheres as they are designed and consumed by the civilian population.

In this, it returns to the sphere of mythology within the work of Sloterdijk, expanding his

reflections in light of texts by Jean-Luc Nancy, so as to highlight the particular spatial

operations that occur in the construction of this communal, mythological space. I will

pursue this line of enquiry through examples of both hero and enemy image construction

in Australia, exploring these in concert with the military strategies of drone warfare, the

photographic analyses of Roland Bathes and the grid theories of Rosalind Krauss. In this

I will consider how contemporary military mythology constructs a haunting topology that

complements the surreal logic of contemporary combat.

Having explored these aspects, I will discuss how my major creative work Spatial

Operations (2014) builds upon the photographic and image based examples of

contemporary myth-creation by artists such as Luc Delahaye. However, it adopts a

different perspective by considering the institutional practices of national

commemoration and the curation of material culture, to examine the spatial operations

of military mythology in Australia. The resulting work Spatial Operations (2014) will be

presented as an artificial monument to Australian military mythology that thrives on a

similar spatial detachment that enables the prosthetic operations of drones.

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3.2 Mythology & The Hero

Throughout Spheres I – III, Peter Sloterdijk makes frequent reference to different forms

of mythology in order to illustrate his particular spatial interpretation of human practices.

Whilst it would be impossible to list them all here, this thesis has made good use of his

analysis of the Christian myth of creation in Genesis, for example. However, a more

explicit understanding of the operation of myth can be found in the work of French theorist

Jean-Luc Nancy, who considers myth in terms of its capacities to create communal

formations. Ian James describes Nancy’s understanding of myth as “the manner in which

sense, as the shared stuff of finite existence, is organized into a signifying discourse or

narrative, a series of figures or fictions upon which specific communal formations and

practices can be based.”185 It is Nancy’s emphasis on the communal tendencies of myth

that will frame our interpretation of military mythology in this chapter. Of course, in the

narrative of military mythology, one of the central figures is that of the hero. The following

is an excerpt from the Australian War Memorial’s (AWM) official record of Australia’s

most recognised war hero, Ben Roberts-Smith VC MG. It is included in full here so as to

not disrupt the authoritative voice of the state’s official narrative:

185 I. James, The Fragmentary Demand: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford

University Press, 2006), 196 – 197.

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Figure 32. Ben Roberts-Smith. Source: Australian War Memorial: P09901.001

“Corporal Benjamin Roberts-Smith was born in Perth, Western Australia, in 1978.

He joined the Australian Regular Army in 1996 and was posted to the 3rd

Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, with whom he conducted two operational

tours of East Timor. In 2003 he was posted to the Special Air Service, and was

on his first operational tour of Afghanistan in 2006 when he was awarded the

Medal for Gallantry for his actions as a patrol scout and sniper during Operation

Slipper.

During his fifth tour of Afghanistan, on 11 June 2010 Roberts-Smith was involved

in an operation to hunt for a senior Taliban commander in the Kandahar province.

Here he took part in an assault against an enemy fortification, exposing his own

position in order to draw fire away from members of his patrol who were pinned

down. Fighting at close range, he stormed two enemy machine-gun posts and

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silenced them. For this action Roberts-Smith was awarded a Victoria Cross.186

His citation in the Commonwealth of Australia Gazette noted that 'his selfless

actions in circumstances of great peril served to enable his patrol to break into

the enemy's defences and to regain the initiative... resulting in a tactical victory’.

Following his sixth tour of Afghanistan in 2012 Roberts-Smith was further

recognised with a Commendation for Distinguished Service for exceptional

leadership, courage, mentoring, and reconnaissance in the 'most difficult and

dangerous of circumstances'.187

The heroic figure of Ben Roberts-Smith has intensified as Australia approached

the centenary of the Gallipoli landings on ANZAC day 2015 – which is for many,

Australia’s own myth of genesis. We can further understand the spatiality and intensity

of Ben Roberts-Smith in mythological terms through a comparative analysis of Sloterdijk

and Nancy’s writings on the recitations and architecture of early human gatherings.

In The Inoperative Community (1991), Jean-Luc Nancy describes early human

gatherings around fire in terms of storytelling. He states:

“We know the scene: there is a gathering, and someone is telling a story. We do

not yet know whether these people gathered together form an assembly, if they

are a horde or a tribe. But we call them brothers and sisters because they are

gathered together and because they are listening to the same story. We do not

186 In the United Kingdom and Australia, the Victoria Cross is the highest military honour, and takes

precedence over all other orders, decorations and medals. It has only been awarded 15 times since the

Second World War. The gunmetal used in the medals is sourced from canons captured during the Siege

of Sevastopol.

187 “Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith | Australian War Memorial,” accessed April 9, 2015,

https://www.awm.gov.au/people/P10022612/.

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yet know whether the one speaking is from among them or if he is an outsider.

We say that he is one of them, but different from them because he has the gift,

or simply the right – or else it is his duty – to tell the story.”188

In Spheres II: Globes (2014), Sloterdijk gives a thermal account for the evolution

of architecture and walled-spaces through the writings of Roman architect Vitruvius, who

claims: “that untamed fire is the starting point of human gatherings, and that the

cultivation of fire was the stimulus for the architectural practice of humans.”189 In following

pages, Sloterdijk suggests that the vital point in Vitruvius’ speculations is obvious:

“building follows a centripetal force that first causes humans to come together [around

the focal point of fire], and then results in the necessity of accommodating those who

have gathered.”190 Whilst Sloterdijk goes on to link the importance of “pampering” and

comfort in the production of houses, we can find rich parallels in the notion of security

that is so often linked in Sloterdijk’s work to human space formation and the communal

power of mythology in Nancy. After all, what is security but an intensity of comfort?

For us, the thermal quality that Sloterdijk references and the ‘gifted’ storyteller in

Nancy can be found in the figure of the hero, Ben Roberts-Smith. As a revered citizen,

this hero possesses what could be called a ‘thermal’ quality in the way he disseminates

his narrative which creates ‘human gatherings’ around him. The comfort necessitated by

these gatherings is here found in the security that this hero provides: the comfort in the

knowledge that there are those willing to protect the state from external threats. In this

188 J.L. Nancy, The Inoperative Community, Inoperative Community (University of Minnesota Press,

1991), 44.

189 P. Sloterdijk and W. Hoban, Globes: Spheres Volume II: Macrospherology, Semiotext (E) (MIT Press,

2014), 217.

190 Ibid., 219. Emphasis added.

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way, he unites the importance of shelter in Sloterdijk’s account of mythology with the

narrative importance of mythology in Nancy.

In the context of capitalism, this comfort offered by mythology can be monetised

in the form of motivational speaking packages, where contemporary tribes (companies)

can expose their warriors (workers) to the myth intensities of the hero, in the hope that

some of his qualities will be transferred to them. We know from the testimonials that the

glow of this fire is indeed warm: for Andrew Phillips, Chief Executive Officer of JARVIS,

“[t]here is no question that Ben's story will go down as potentially the greatest in the

modern era.”191 At the heart of this phenomena is the creation of ‘militarised’ civilian

communities that facilitate an increasing crossover of military values into the corporate

sphere: leadership, discipline, team work and courage become essential ingredients for

victory on the corporate battlefield. In the MQ-9 Reaper artworks discussed in chapter

2, the shadow-boxing figure of the corporate warrior is central to the interior/exterior and

civilian/military bridge that drone operators embody: fighting wars in distant lands from

interior, domestic territories.

The mythology around Ben Roberts-Smith creates a similar spatial collapse, for

each time he recounts his war stories he is there again, and he takes his audience with

him: “You succeeded in making us feel like we were there”192, as one respondent

remarked. This is one example of how the communal power of mythology operates in

terms that Nancy describes in The Inoperative Community (1991). The satisfaction in

these testimonials and their social function can also be seen in Sloterdijk’s thermal

analysis of Vitruvius, where news of the comfort afforded by the fire would spread and

generate the socio-thermal foundations for the first huts. He states: “The first humans to

191 “Testimonials ‐ Ben Roberts Smith,” accessed February 25, 2015,

http://www.benrobertssmith.com.au/advantage/testimonials/.

192 Ibid.

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enjoy that warmth called the next over, then communicated with them in gestures and

primitive words about the benefits of the new found, wondrous central force.”193 What is

this ancient form of communication but an early incarnation of the online testimonial? In

our context, the testimonials offered by the audiences of Ben Roberts-Smith serve the

same function: to spread the good news of the generous comfort afforded by the thermal

intensities radiating from the hero, and to build a shared community around this central

force. Sloterdijk makes this point clearly: these thermal intensities go on to generate the

early architectures of human society, and ultimately statehood. Through both Sloterdijk

and Nancy, the power of myth to create a shared space is clear. It is this shared spatial

operation of mythology that will frame the rest of this chapter’s discussions.

3.3 Mimicry, heroics and mythology

Figure 33. FOI image of Ben-Roberts-Smith (non-blurred face) in Afghanistan during his VC action. Image: Department of Defence/public domain.

193 Sloterdijk and Hoban, Globes: Spheres Volume II: Macrospherology, 221.

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Whereas mythology functions on the creation and distribution of narratives in a shared

space, the state cultivates the image of the hero in photographic terms. I will show that

the Australian government’s control over the image of the hero has an immunological

function, as described in Sloterdijk’s writings on bubbles. We will also see that the state

operates a form of ‘negative photography’ that will be discussed through a radical

analysis of Caillois’ surreal spatial account of mimetic insects.

Until recently, the ‘image’ of Ben Roberts-Smith194 was hidden from view. This is

because in the Australian military, Special Operations soldiers have protected identity

status – they are in effect the human agents of the invisible infrastructure that is the focus

of Trevor Paglen’s work Limit Telephotography. The Australian Department of Defence

often requests media outlets to withhold the publication of SAS soldier’s names, for

example, when receiving military honours and awards.195 Until his Victoria Cross citation

for actions in Afghanistan, the identity of Ben Roberts-Smith as a Special Operations

soldier was officially protected by federal law. In this way, I argue that his photographic

image was always already redacted – it sits in between the interior and exterior worlds

that have been discussed throughout this thesis. This practice is used in order to protect

the secret nature of Special Operations activities. In reality, this legislation creates a kind

of Sloterdijkian ‘bubble’ or protective spherical topology around the soldier – a legal

image geometry that becomes impenetrable to the media. Through this image-law,

Special Operations soldiers are, in a legal and institutional way, indistinguishable from

their surroundings, since they are encased within a closed perceptual and legislative

world. Where Caillois’ mimetic insects sought an operational advantage in becoming one

194 Throughout this section, I will analyse the symbolic figure of Ben Roberts-Smith as a hero through his

position in official military conventions, not as an individual in his own right.

195 “Media Release - Department of Defence,” accessed February 11, 2015,

http://www.defence.gov.au/media/departmentaltpl.cfm?CurrentId=8692.

115

with their milieu (if not to avoid predators then to approach a state of singularity),196 the

state relies on a different but still related process of invisibility when it projects units into

demarcated exterior zones of training and operations. Whereas the mimetic organisms

in Caillois’ writings were invisible thanks to a morphological photographic process of

becoming-environment, invisibility in the case of Special Operations soldiers takes place

within and along the topologies of a legislatively constrained photographic media world.

The common ground between these two examples is their photographic

operations: Caillois speaks of a sculptural photography that relies on an externalised or

shared intelligence between the organism and milieu that knows how the body of the

mimetic organism will be perceived from any point. In the case of the Special Operations

soldier, the state disrupts this knowledge because its externalised spatial intelligence

can predict how the body of the soldier will be perceived photographically from any point

in the media world. Both rely on strategy; they both gain operational advantage in spatial,

photographic terms by being obscured. In Caillois, the photographic takes on form, in

the case of the Special Operations soldier, this photographic form is negated. We may

thus think of the legislation that protects soldiers’ identities as a kind of inverted sculptural

photography that we see in Caillois’ work – an armour of invisibility. In both cases, this

practice creates advantageous and unstable spatial conditions within which identifying

the subject from its environment is difficult.

The main geo-political context where this image protection is required is in what

could be called exterior ‘worlds’, such as the war in Afghanistan (where the ‘interior’ is

the usual borders of the state itself). Image protection is part of the way the state, as it is

usually conceived, protects a smaller but intensified projection of itself into a foreign

zone, such as Afghanistan, in the form of military bases, camps and patrols. This

projected ‘mini state’ is made up of individuals who have themselves undergone a

196 Caillois, The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader, 99 – 100.

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process of intensification – military training. These intensive sites and practices, when

combined with logistical structures and legal protections, cultivate symbolic bodies such

as Roberts-Smith, who as soldiers, project state policy onto and into exterior spaces in

attempts to render them interior. The function of this militarised sphere is always

expansionary, relational and generative: its role is to destabilise, cultivate and finally

transform chosen exterior spaces (like Afghanistan) into interior spaces (perhaps pro-

Western proxy governments).

This is an extension of what Sloterdijk identifies as the spatio-immunological

function of the original Greek City in Spheres I: Bubbles (2011). For Sloterdijk, the Greek

City was the first human designer atmosphere, whose walls encased an artificial inside

against the metaphorical and natural exterior.197 These ‘containers’ served a quasi-

immunological function. They were architectural projections of the body’s own natural

defence against the foreign exterior. The converted shipping containers in the U.S. that

drones are controlled from were discussed in these immunological terms in the preceding

chapter, with a particular emphasis on the nature of temporary shelter and ‘being-

towardness’ of bubbles.198

In a literal sense, the identities of SAS soldiers share in these militarised

articulations of immune systems as enforced through the state’s legal technics. In U.S.-

led contemporary military operations, coalitions of states cultivate actual space through

military operations (such as establishing bases and patrolling territories), but they also

cultivate legislative zones around individual agents of the state (such as Special

Operations soldiers – as we have seen). Here, this takes the form of an artificial wall

around the body of the soldier, a demarcated zone where the ‘interior’ (the soldier’s true

identity) is protected against an exterior, one aspect of which takes the form of an

197 Sloterdijk, “Atmospheric Politics,” 946.

198 Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Microspherology, 48.

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anticipated event (the public revealing of that identity, both to the public and to the

enemy). Through legislative practices such as these, the state organism can project itself

outside of its official ‘walls’ with a sort of plasticity. These morphological practices and

permutations of the ‘body politic’ add a new dimension to the surreal spatial operations

discussed in relation to U.S. drones in Chapter 2. Whereas the machinic drone operates

at a safe distance from its invisible human operator, the Special Operations soldier is

deployed with a technics that also uses a platform of invisibility to gain proximity to its

targets. Both the drone and the Special Operations soldier are examples of units

deployed on behalf of the state into zones exterior to the state to protect the spatio-

political interests of the state. They both project the state’s capability into exterior zones

from platforms of invisibility, but in different ways.

The overall structural similarity of the drone network and the Special Operations

soldier-state assemblage is where most of the cross-over between these examples is

anchored: with the Special Operations soldier assemblage, the state acts as the drone

control room/container would act in the drone network, but instead of controlling a drone,

they are controlling a soldier. The machinic ego of the drone operator discussed in

Chapter 2 is here replaced by the human ego of the state, the soldier ‘contains’ the ego

of the state in his human vessel. In this sense, the prosthetic function of the Special

Operations solider starts to emerge.

Both the drone and the Special Operations soldier operate in photographic terms

but again, in different but related ways – the drone uses video feeds and other image

based-sensors, whilst the Special Operations soldier is photographically obscured, but it

is also primarily a fleshy photographic platform, upon which body cameras, helmet-

mounted GoPros, weapon-mounted optical technologies, sights and scopes distribute

and receive images to and from military commanders and other units. At its most

intensified version, the Special Operations soldier approaches a kind of machinic-

photographic assemblage that privileges vision and other perceptual bandwidths like

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drones do: both the vision that it consumes through its sensors and the heavily masked

image that it produces. Both seek an operational advantage across the instability of

interior and exterior worlds in establishing ultimate vision from a platform of invisibility.

Could we now say that the Special Operations soldier is a fleshy articulation of embodied

‘droning’ whilst the drone itself is an articulation of disembodied ‘droning’?

Whereas the drone can be thought of as an intensified photographic platform, I

argue that the state’s legislative protection of the image of Special Operations soldiers

is a form of ‘negative photography’. When Sloterdijk describes the airquake as a form of

‘negative air-conditioning’, he is applying a structural and relational inversion to the usual

practice of air-conditioning – that is, where it is usually deployed to achieve a level of

comfort by modifying an environment with the aim of improving the living conditions of

the user. The airquake did the exact opposite: it rendered the living conditions impossible

by critically modifying the environment the user depends on for life. In a similar way, the

photographic practices of the state in regards to Special Operations soldiers operate in

structurally and relationally inverted terms: the practices of redaction and censorship are

still photographic but through a process of negation.

In some cases, critical elements of the state (such as journalists) use legislation

to release the protected photographic image of the hero. For example, photographs from

Ben Roberts-Smith’s citation in Afghanistan were only released by the Department of

Defence after a freedom of information application by The Australian newspaper.199 The

images were released in the public interest, but they were heavily redacted on national

security grounds. The legislation states that: “section 33 of the FOI Act exempts material

from release if its disclosure would, or could reasonably be expected to, cause damage

199 “Grim Reality of VC Ben Roberts-Smith’s Guts and Glory Obscured by Military Censors | The

Australian,” accessed February 12, 2015, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/foi/grim-reality-of-

vcs-guts-and-glory-obscured-by-military-censors/story-fn8r0e18-

1226075945494?nk=b9b7bb7a7f113a60840aecf346bec198.

119

to the security or defence of the Commonwealth.”200 To continue the photographic

analysis of Ben Roberts-Smith and the state’s control of his image, the state here deploys

a legislative clause in terms synonymous with autoimmunity – but in a photographic way.

Caillois suggested that the photographic and morphological practices of mimetic insects

were not only for defensive purposes, but that they also served a more subtle and

irrational (in the scientific sense) need to be fully absorbed into the environment.201 If we

consider the FOI Act as an overactive autoimmune system, it can be presented as a

misguided defensive mechanism of the democratic ‘body’, a built-in system of checks

and balances to enable, for those who support it, transparency. At a linguistic level, a

satisfying aesthetic link could already be drawn here between the democratic imperative

of ‘transparency’ and the symbolic transparency of Caillois’ surreal mimesis, the

psychedelic transparency and spatial instability of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project

and the transcendent transparency of Char Davies ephemeral virtual worlds. But we can

push this idea further still.

The state body reacts to this over active immune system as articulated in the FOI

by strategically demarcating a compounding ‘interior zone’ inside the legislation itself:

the national security clause. The idea of ‘normal’ auto-immunity here is the state

protecting its own body and that of Ben Roberts-Smith through the national security

clause, what we are calling a ‘zone’ – the FOI Act. The form that this zone takes in the

case of Ben Roberts-Smith’s photographic image allows for considerable conceptual

development in the surreal, immuno-spatial terms that are the focus for us here.

200 Theresa Stinson, “Australian Government/Department of Defence Freedom of Information Decision

Letter,” June 2, 2011, http://www.defence.gov.au/foi/docs/disclosures/258_1011_decisionletter.pdf.

201 Caillois, The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader.

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Figure 34. Redacted FOI image of Ben-Roberts-Smith in Afghanistan during his VC action. Image: Department of Defence/public domain.

My argument that the state’s legal control of Special Operations soldier’s images

is a form of negative photography is clearly evidenced in the above image (Figure 34) –

yet in the context of FOI redaction, it takes on a certain twist. Now that Ben Roberts-

Smith has become a national hero, the redaction shifts from the body of the hero to the

body of his victim – with the goal of protecting the hero. Here we are dealing with a

complex arrangement of different but interrelated bodies (the state ‘body’, the body of

the hero, the body of the enemy – a foreign body, and the way the state projects its ‘body’

into foreign territories through soldiers) across which this concept of immunity operates.

In this situation where the state ‘body’ is projected into a foreign zone, the body of the

hero adopts a role that is similar to a T-cell in standard concepts of immunity as it

operates in the human body, attacking foreign, non-self or ‘exterior’ organisms and

tissues. Here, this T-cell patrols the newly cultivated territory of the state in which the

relational status of foreign and domestic entities and concepts of interior and exterior are

continually destabilised and uncertain. The background is one of anxiety.

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According to the Department of Defence, the black plane in Figure 34 obscures

something that would otherwise harm “the security or defence of the Commonwealth.”

Most probably the corpse of a Taliban fighter killed by Roberts-Smith or one of his

colleagues, the black rectangle is arguably more violent than the contents of the un-

redacted image. What speaks more to the control of the state than the ominous black

void of redaction? It is a non-space where the incriminating or suspicious segments of

the image are disappeared, just as suspicious subjects were extraordinarily rendered

under the CIA’s post 9/11 interrogation program to so-called black sites – sites that

Paglen’s practice has revealed in Chapter 2. Here, the black site manifests itself in the

frame of the image, a demarcated zone where the public gaze is forbidden. In his

discussions of the airquake, Sloterdijk emphasises that one of the core outcomes of the

attack on the environment was that its usual place as a ‘background’ was rendered

explicit.202 That is, the symbolic ‘invisibility’ of the atmosphere (conceived as a

background) was rendered ‘visible’ or conceptually tangible through its being

weaponised. The usually invisible background of the image is, in the case of Figure 34,

rendered explicit through the image-operations of the military’s censors. By summoning

the hitherto unmarked background of the image forwards in this way, these military

censors are in fact engaging with the radical practice of modernist non-pictorial

representation that Sloterdijk locates in Malevich’s Black Square (1913).203 Whereas the

unmarked ‘atmospheric background’ was rendered explicit through an attack at Ypres,

in Figure 34, the unmarked ‘pictorial background’ is rendered explicit through a gesture

of defence, an immunological operation that secures the image of the hero and the state

simultaneously.

202 Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, 9 – 25.

203 Ibid., 80.

122

Presuming it is indeed a corpse that has been redacted, then this body has twice

been disappeared: first, through death, and secondly, through the erasure of the very

death itself. Alive, this enemy body is a site of threat, a site of violent potential. Yet in this

expanded context of immunity, the enemy body continues as a site of threat even after

it is initially ‘neutralised’: the image of the dead enemy body is, for the Commonwealth,

still a site of symbolic hostility. Yet the un-redacted image is a threat not only to the

Commonwealth, but also to the articulation of the Commonwealth as it is contained in

and projected by the heroic body of Roberts-Smith himself. Thus, the Commonwealth’s

public relations strategy is bound up with the operational logic of mythology through the

Sloterdijkian principle of ‘coupling’. In this instance, the commonwealth and the Special

Operations hero are one across a complex arrangement of bi-unity. In the image

saturated world of late capitalism, the business practice of branding is deployed

seamlessly into the operations of the state and creates a protective image-enclosure

around its agents. So far, we have seen through Sloterdijk and Caillois that this image-

enclosure has both an immunological and surreal operational logic – the key proposition

of this research.

Just as current military spatial practices dealt with in Chapter 2 have the ability to

fold, collapse and transform space, I argue that military mythology similarly operates in

topological terms: whereas once the space around Ben Roberts-Smith was protected,

jammed and diverted through this immunologically motivated negative photography, the

operational logics of mythology have since radically intensified the visibility of this figure.

From the depths of secrecy to the heights of fame (Figure 35), the spatial operations at

work in this example are both complex and intense. Before exploring the operational

logics of his celebrity status, there remains some key theoretical photographic

explorations to be done.

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Figure 35. Ben Roberts-Smith on the cover of Australian Men’s Fitness Magazine (left) and during an official Anzac Day ceremony in 2011 (right). Images: Australian Men’s Fitness Magazine; Brad Hunter/Courier Mail.

In chapter 2, Trevor Paglen’s Limit Telephotography was offered as an example

in which the state’s geographical practices of obscuring sensitive military and intelligence

infrastructure are revealed. We saw that the state cannot escape the material reality of

their secret infrastructures having to be anchored somewhere, sometime in the visible,

material world. For Paglen, the internal paradox in the material logic of secrecy ultimately

allows for small loop holes to be uncovered. You can hide it as well as you want, he

might say, but if you look closely enough for long enough, it will be found – if often at the

limits of human perception. In the case of Ben Roberts-Smith and the redacted images

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from his VC citation, not only does the state actively obscure the true image of the hero,

but they do so via ‘photographic’ means – only without cameras.204

At first glance, this is a radical inversion of the now standard practice of the body-

mounted camera. Here instead, we have a photographic body created not quite with a

camera, but composed through legislative censors and image editing software, rather

than light and photographic sensors. Whereas Paglen’s work sought to overcome the

geographical constraints enforced by the state through the limits of photographic

technology, here the state operates within the photographic using a technics of

legislation and editing. Here, the legislative capabilities of the state to de-stabilise interior

and exterior worlds are articulated formally as a kind of dark minimalism reminiscent of

early 20th Century conceptual art, such as Malevich’s Black Square (1913).

Pushing this conceptual argument further still, it is possible to link the phenomena

of singularity that Caillois articulated through mimetic insects and the devouring force of

space experienced in schizophrenics with the practice of image redaction. By obscuring

special demarcated image regions of the photograph, the state creates special zones of

image-geography within which legal forces converge spatially to fold the subject and its

surroundings into itself. It’s as if that zone of the image has been inverted and we glimpse

its verso, its dark opposite. Here a kind of portal is opened where signs, symbols and

vision is rendered into neutrality: similar, not to something, just similar. To reiterate

Caillois’ thoughts on this spatially devoured body:

“To these dispossessed souls, space seems to be a devouring force. Space

pursues them, encircles them, digests them in a giant phagocytosis. It ends by

replacing them. The body separates itself from thought, the individual breaks the

boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses. He tries to look

204 Although I am discussing the idea of negative photography here and in subsequent pages, my

discussion still relies on a theoretical framework that is anchored in the photographic.

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at himself from any point whatever in space. He feels himself becoming space,

dark space where things cannot be put. He is similar, not to something, but just

similar.”205

At this point it is clear that this passage provides an account for the process of

death in spatial, photographic terms. So in Figure 34, if the hidden figure in the redacted

image has been twice ‘disappeared’, we could argue that the victim’s death occurred not

once but twice. Once in the ‘standard’ way, and once through the surreal operations of

censorship. Here both deaths are the outcome of the immunological operations that the

state deploys to protect itself, the application of physical force in the first instance, and

the application of legal photographic force in the second. As a spatial function of military

operations, death conceived here as a negative photo-spatial process of metaphysical

redaction situates us in the rich theories of death, spectres, haunting and photography.

For if there is a haunting in the mystical nature of the military’s spatial operations, what

else could it be but the ultimate collapse of subject into environment – the ultimate folding

of interior and exterior worlds?

By turning towards some of the more ghoulish theories of the photographic, we

can begin to reveal these mystical spectres as they percolate through the unstable

spaces of this research. In the introductory reflections of Camera Lucida (1980), Roland

Barthes discusses the photographic body in terms of trauma. For Barthes, when posing

for a photograph the subject undergoes an almost morphological transformation, a

becoming-photographic, assuming and projecting another image-body of themselves to

the camera:

“I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance

into an image. This transformation is an active one: I feel that the Photograph

205 Caillois, The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader, 99 – 100.

126

creates my body or mortifies it […] I am neither subject nor object but a subject

who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death

(of parenthesis) I am truly becoming a spectre.”206

For Margaret Iverson, this almost plastic, transformative and performative

description of the psychic operations of photographic posing approaches the spatial

breakdown between subject and environment that we have discussed through Caillois.

“Here is perhaps an example of an aural punctum finding a chink in the armour of the

imaginary. If assuming the pose involves the negation of myself as unique subject, then

this “micro-version of death” is paradoxically revivifying.”207 In the context of the redacted

photograph of Ben Roberts-Smith, the negation of the unique subject of the presumed

Taliban body through censorship is similarly revivifying. The ominous black void arguably

represents the corpse in a more graphic and essentially confronting way than the corpse

itself ever could. So if death has indeed occurred twice to this corpse in Figure 34, the

second time paradoxically goes some way to undoing the first death in symbolic terms.

If there is a geometry of death, it is surely this horizontal bar, this eternal sensory

barricade. So if we push Barthes to a radical point, this Taliban corpse literally becomes

‘photographic’ but in negative terms. In a new sense, death here is the ultimate and final

‘pose’ of the subject-becoming-environment, a stillness forever embalmed in the

compressed algorithms of the jpeg.

The original tools of rigidity required for subjects of early photographic portraiture

are here replaced with the eternal stillness offered by the ultimate spatial outcome of

military operations: death. Through Iversen, Barthes and Caillois, it is clear that the

technical and the cultural process of photographic imaging, including the negative

photography of censorship and redaction, approaches the surrealism of contemporary

206 Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, 14.

207 M. Iversen, Beyond Pleasure: Freud, Lacan, Barthes (Penn State Press, n.d.), 126.

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military spatiality discussed in Chapter 2. We have a spatial instability that is inherently

bound up in the same mechanisms of the drone network that folded, consumed and

devoured space.

The drone is ultimately an intensified photographic platform – one that relies so

heavily on the image – with an intensity of capability that extends death into the field, an

evolution of Barthes’ becoming-photographic so distilled that the subjects of this violent

drone photography can never really ‘feel’ themselves becoming-photographic. The

photographic event of drone targets is so intense there is only an instantaneous glimpse

of the ‘photographic moment’ as is both reveals itself and destroys its capacity to be

perceived (when the subject is killed). Here we actually have two incarnations of the

‘photographic’: the light and heat emitted from the warhead of a Hellfire missile extends

an imaging process that I have described here in the more complex spatial and

theoretical treatment of the photographic subject through Barthes and Caillois. The

usually (though not always) instant death of a drone strike is truly an extreme

amplification of Barthes’ photographic parenthesis, an intensity so close to a kind of

surreal spatial singularity we find in Caillois that it almost doesn’t happen – its speed is

so fast that it almost disappears before it appears, like an overextended gesture of spatial

folding. Perhaps this was what Barthes meant by ‘micro-death’ – a death so intense that

its ‘scale’ is paradoxically tiny – like a kind of cosmic density that astrophysicists use to

describe the negative intensity of black holes – an intensity so profound that light itself

collapses. Here, the drone and the negative photographic practices of military mythology

are dialects of the same surreal spatial language: they both destabilise, disrupt, fold and

divert topological flows spatially and intensively.

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3.4 Pose, Prose & Flows

These immunological flows of the body politic can operate photographically and through

literary prose. The following paragraphs will continue to demonstrate the spatial

operations of military mythology by turning to a number of literary and ‘romantic’

examples of conjuring and destabilising interior and exterior space. In particular, the

poetic prose of a first-hand account of the thermal process of death from a former U.S.

drone operator, the visual prose in the war photography of Luc Delahaye and the painting

of Ophelia from Shakespeare’s Hamlet by Sir John Everett Millais will be closely

analysed to reveal their operational similarities. After carefully working through these

examples, the case for an expanded interpretation of ‘the photographic’ will be

presented, leading to this chapter’s major artwork Spatial Operations (2014).

Figure 36. Luc Delahaye, Taliban (2002) C-print, 237 cm x 111 cm. © Luc Delahaye / Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris.

Imagine turning over the black void of the redacted Taliban fighter in the previous

photograph of Ben Roberts-Smith (Figure 34). In a sense, this is what war photographer

Luc Delahaye has done in Figure 36. Simply titled Taliban (2002), this is a work that

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operates within the surreal economy of images, photographic war trophies and the fetish

of both death and violence in contemporary media. Indeed, this image decorates the

drone operator’s display unit in my work MQ-9 Reaper I (2014), a gesture of

intertextuality that weaves spatially throughout this research.

There are obvious differences in visual style, photographic skill and composition

between this photograph and the redacted image of Ben Roberts-Smith – indeed, it is

this very difference provides us with a rich opportunity for analysis. Delahaye’s image is

classified as a work of art, whereas the image of Roberts-Smith is officially authorless –

an interesting tautology. The latter’s creator is presumably a member of the SAS with

protected identity status (for only SAS members would have been involved in the

operation where the photograph was taken). The figure in Taliban (2002) is poetically

composed, bootlessly slumbering amongst the landscape of Afghanistan. He is also

nameless, his identity is not so much protected as forgotten or unimportant. The generic

title Taliban simply assigns a geo-political category to this figure. Formally, the subject

lingers on the point of becoming-landscape, a process of biological decomposition that

tends towards an inversion of Barthes account of becoming-photographic subject, a kind

of de-subjectifying that we saw in Caillois’ mimetic insects. Yet this photograph

intervenes in the flow of the process of decomposition, forever arresting this moment

through the photographic technique of ‘embalming’ the subject.

The surreal operation of the photographic here is revealed further through

Delahaye himself, as he declares an operational urge to reduce his presence in the

production of the photograph. He explains: “More than anything I wish to disappear."208

Just as the state uses secret surveillance infrastructures and legislation to conceal the

visual and material footprint of its practices, and the mimetic urges of Caillois’ insects

208 “Artnet.com Magazine Features -- The Real Thing,” accessed April 17, 2015,

http://www.artnet.com/magazine/features/sullivan/sullivan4-10-03.asp.

130

sought an operational advantage through various practices of disappearing, Delahaye

himself also adopts this strategy in the pursuit of some kind of ‘situational-purity’ of the

documentary image, a photographic event unaltered by the presence of the

photographer: “All my efforts have been to be as neutral as possible, and to take in as

much as possible, and allow an image to return to the mystery of reality.”209 Here,

Delahaye expresses a desire to be rendered invisible by assigning his agency to the

process of imaging itself – perhaps a kind of transcendent yearning of autonomousness

that is free from the perceptual and relational constraints of the human sphere. In Figure

34, the soldier-photographer that photographed Ben Roberts-Smith was always already

invisible – but not because of a desire to disappear; the desire to disappear belonged to

the state that had legislated it so.

It is interesting that Delahaye wishes to reach this quasi-mystical state of

invisibility that the Special Operations soldier already occupies through legislative

operations. One can only be rendered invisible in the photographic sense by either

focusing on being invisible yourself, or by muting the gaze of your subject. That is, the

emphasis is either on the photographed or the photographer. In both Taliban (2002) and

Figure 34, the subject’s gaze has been neutralised through the process of death (a

process conceptually linked to photography, as we have seen). So in both examples, the

photographer is indeed disappeared, as is their subject. Perhaps this is a relational

inversion of the simultaneous act of creation in Genesis – where the photographer and

subject both disappear reciprocally at the photographic moment?

From these photographic practices of negation, let us now turn to representations

of the varied processes of disappearing as articulated in the realm of literature and

painting. The transformative intensity that has been demonstrated in the various spatial

operations of military mythology can be amplified by situating them in a broader historical

209 Ibid. My emphasis.

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context of creative production. The prose-like, ‘painterly’ and romantic quality of

Delahaye’s Taliban (2002) situates this work within a stylistic and compositional ‘mimetic

zone’ of Millais’ Ophelia (1851-1852). This work depicts the death of Ophelia in

Shakespeare’s Hamlet – an event that actually occurs outside of the play’s acted scenes.

This exterior event is only referred to in a speech given by Queen Gertrude:

Her clothes spread wide,

And, mermaid-like, a while they bore her up;

Which time, she chanted snatches of old lauds;

As one incapable of her own distress

Or like a creature native and indu’d

Unto that element: but long it could not be,

Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,

Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay

To muddy death.210

Whereas Delahaye’s Taliban (2002) was cut from what he calls the “mystery of

reality”,211 Millais’s painting is constructed from the mystery of the imaginary. It is his

imagined version of the scene described by Queen Gertrude, projected onto canvas

through the medium of oil paint. Just as Ophelia is absorbed into her muddy death, the

Taliban fighter in Delahaye’s photograph is captured in a process of mimetic ‘similarity’,

of becoming-landscape. Their deaths are not captured as a moment, but rendered in

visual prose post-mortem. Is the human imaginary here a kind of internal droning – an

intensified internal ‘photographic’ platform?

210 W. Shakespeare, Hamlet, Collection of British Authors (Huge Print Press, 1843), 95,

https://books.google.com.au/books?id=BA9GAAAAcAAJ.

211 “Artnet.com Magazine Features -- The Real Thing.”

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Figure 37. Sir John Everett Millais, Ophelia (1851-1852). Oil on canvass. Dimensions: Support: 762 x 1118 mm frame: 1105 x 1458 x 145 mm. © Tate, London.

If it is, in Ophelia (1881 - 1852), Millais deploys it as a kind of cognitive

photography, composing the scene from images he holds in his memory of experiences

of the world, tempered with the ‘exposure settings’ that may be found in the vivid

description of Ophelia’s death. Delahaye, on the other hand, employs the visual

language of photography but taps into the collective, external memory held within the

history of art, clearly summoning techniques of romanticism and poetic composition that

are found in many examples of Renaissance and religious painting. The difference in

production between these works is easily overcome by their stylistic and tonal similarities

– they are suspended in the same surreal medium of mimesis. This thick liquid-like

process transcends the historical distance between these works, like a drone and its

control apparatus collapse, devour and fold space. If Millais was to paint from the vivid

prose of a drone operator describing a death he inflicted, rather than Queen Gertrude’s

delicate soliloquy, would it approach a similar surreal poetics of space?

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I argue that the spatial poetics of technically mediated drone vision is not

dissimilar to these beautifully tragic examples. This is clearly exemplified in an interview

with GQ magazine, where a now infamous American Drone Operator turned whistle-

blower, Airman First Class Brandon Bryant, describes with deeply poetic resonance the

mediated process of observing death through the drone-operator assemblage’s military

vision:

“The smoke clears, and there’s pieces of the two guys around the crater. And

there’s this guy over here, and he’s missing his right leg above his knee. He’s

holding it, and he’s rolling around, and the blood is squirting out of his leg, and

it’s hitting the ground, and it’s hot. His blood is hot. But when it hits the ground, it

starts to cool off; the pool cools fast. It took him a long time to die. I just watched

him. I watched him become the same color as the ground he was lying on.”212

Although the discursive style and technical differences between Queen Gertrude

and Brandon Bryant’s accounts are clear, there is nonetheless a striking similarity

between these two passages. Indeed, there is a strong correlation between this imagery

and the visual style of Delahaye and Millais. In Camera Lucida (1980), Barthes describes

light as a “carnal medium” and as “a skin I share with anyone that has been

photographed.”213 In a similar way, the visual atmosphere of these discursive practices

that both mediate, record and project these death events is ‘carnal’. Further, just as a

discursive intensity or focus is clearly present in both Delahaye’s Taliban (2002) and the

redacted image of Ben Roberts-Smith (Figure 34), it is also fundamental to both Brandon

Bryant’s carnal description of his drone victim becoming-landscape and Queen

Gertrude’s prose concerning Ophelia becoming-river. The gaze in Bryant’s recollection

212 “Confessions of an American Drone Operator,” accessed February 17, 2015,

http://www.gq.com/news-politics/big-issues/201311/drone-uav-pilot-assassination.

213 Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, 80–81.

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of his victim bleeding out is omnipresent; it is implicit, but never mentioned directly. But

it doesn’t need to be. We feel so close to the event because of the way he describes the

scene, his high quality ‘discursive resolution’ approaches a clarity synonymous with the

cutting edge optical capacities of military vision, the war photography of Delahaye, the

poetry of Shakespeare and the legislative image-practices of the state that control the

image of the hero.214 In a sense, his unintended prose is made possible through this

ultimate military vision, a vision which unlocks perceptual bandwidths not usually

available to the biological constraints of the human eye. Whereas Millais summoned the

depths of his creative imaginary for Ophelia, Bryant stood on the shoulders of infrared

vision, peering into the deeply surreal perspective that atmospheric weapons such as

drones offer.

The fundamental link between these examples and my interest in the spatial

operations of military mythology is to do with absence. The death of Ophelia haunts

Hamlet through a spatial and discursive absence. It is relayed third hand by Queen

Gertrude and never depicted in the play itself. It is only rendered as an image by Millais’

painting. In Delahaye’s Taliban (2002), the event of the death of the subject is not

witnessed, but what is depicted is the fact that it has occurred. In a similar way to Millais’

Ophelia (1851 -1852), Delahaye portrays a process of subject-becoming-landscape that

we saw with Caillois’ surreal mimetic insects, a process of becoming-absence. The drone

operator’s vivid but detached narrative of observing death through the mediated platform

of the drone was clinical in its tone and meter, placing it in similar range to Queen

Gertrude’s third-hand description of Ophelia’s death in Hamlet. In all of these cases,

there is a strong sense of haunting at work because of the space left by these collective

absences. In the case of the image of Ben Roberts-Smith (figure 34), there victim has

been removed. The censorship practices of the state were already discussed as one of

214 Although the visual ‘quality’ of drone video feeds is generally low, here ‘resolution’ is applied to the

broader concept of military vision.

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the key spatial operations of military mythology. If military mythology operates spatially,

then the coordinates of the hero in relation to his anti-hero are obscured by the process

of censorship. The erasure of victims in the official narrative of this hero creates a strong

absence that is filled with a spectral haunting in both photographic and conceptual terms.

3.5 Sculptural photographies, rhetorical topologies

Figure 38. Baden Pailthorpe, Spatial Operations (2014). Installation view, Newcastle Art Gallery, 2015. 210 paper helmets created from each book on the Australian Chief of Army's Reading List. PVA, cellulose powder, paper pulp. 24.0 x 30.0 x 22.0cm (each), 210 pieces. Photo: Baden Pailthorpe

Please see the exhibition documentation and Video 5 at

http://www.badenpailthorpe.com/phd.html or on the attached USB

It is this haunting that we will now consider in material and spatial terms. The final

creative work for this doctorate addresses the institutional practices of national

commemoration and the curation of material culture, to examine the spatial operations

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of military mythology in Australia. The resulting work Spatial Operations (2014) will be

presented as an artificial monument to Australian military mythology that thrives on the

spatial detachment or absence that we have just explored.

At its simplest conception, this work, Spatial Operations (2014), gives form to

the invisible mechanics of mythology surrounding two ‘myth-operations’ that I uncovered

during my research at the Australian War Memorial (AWM): the 210 texts that make up

the Australian Chief of Army’s Reading List (2012) and the body armour donated to the

AWM by Australia’s most recognised war hero, Ben Roberts-Smith VC MG. Together

this reading list and the war hero’s glorified armour represent the complimentary

operations of military mythology: an ideal of body and an ideal of mind. It is the spatial

instability between these two operations that interests me. The following paragraphs will

explain the work’s institutional context, process and final installation, whilst analysing its

implications for this research and its relationship to the preceding chapters.

Figure 39. Ben Roberts-Smith’s uniform and helmet on display at the Australian War Memorial, Canberra. Photo: ABC news/Kathleen Dyett.

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Institutional Context

In 2013, I was invited to undertake the first ever artist residency at the Australian

War Memorial in Canberra. Usually the AWM deploys artists to document and interpret

war zones under the Official War Art Scheme. My residency did the exact opposite: I was

tasked with looking at the interior space of the AWM; the institutional practices, archives

and collection that account for Australia’s official commemorative operations. Over the

three months I spent at the AWM, ‘embedded’ inside the institution itself, I was able to

observe many of the practices that have now informed key elements of this thesis. For

example, military objects are produced in their millions, yet museums of war such as the

AWM only collect certain kinds of objects. They have to have provenance. That is, they

have to be attached to a significant event, personal history or action. This is one of the

first steps in the mechanics of mythology: curation.

Here, practices such as curating start to fit very neatly into Sloterdijk’s idea of

atmospheres: ‘curation’ is synonymous with Sloterdijk’s emphasis on atmospheric

design, whilst ‘provenance’ shares much with his expanded use of the term ‘atmosphere’

– where both provenance and atmosphere have a strong ‘containing’ function (objects

containing-myth, atmosphere containing-climate). This can be seen in Sloterdijk’s

discussion of Genesis that was analysed in Chapter 1, where he locates the spatial

intensity of Adam’s original earthen container. For Sloterdijk, the creative practice within

Genesis reveals the fundamental atmospheric operation “of being-hollow, of being-

containers of being-passages” in the original work of divine art.215 When an object has a

certain provenance, it contains an intensity of history, and because of this it emits a

certain ‘atmosphere’. There is a kind of affective trace at work in this idea of provenance

– a trace not dissimilar to photography’s relationship to its referent, which we explored in

relation to death in the previous section through Barthes. Those intensities of reciprocity

215 Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Microspherology, 38.

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between the photographic subject and the photographer can be located in similar terms

within the characteristics of military provenance. Just as the Christian God

simultaneously created himself at the moment he created Adam, the photographer

creates herself as she photographs her subject. This reciprocity operates in military

mythology just as in Christian mythology. The mythological power contained within

objects deemed to have provenance is created when that provenance is recognised in

the object by the curator.

Such objects are selected by the AWM because they host a connection to a past

event – they are vessels to a previous moment. They ‘contain’ the potential for a

connection to that past event – an intensity of proximity that operates in temporal and

spatial terms. Like drones, these vessels offer a potential spatial collapse that erases the

distance between the viewer and the object’s genesis, but in a different way. Here

‘distance’ is conceived in temporal terms, and as a result, a spatial and material account

of the operation of histories can emerge, just as we saw in Grégoire Chamayou’s concept

of ‘co-presence’ in Drone Theory (2015) discussed in Chapter 2.216 The artefacts at the

AWM offer a spatio-temporal proximity to the past like a drone provides a spatio-temporal

proximity to its targets. In this way, is the detached spatial operation of mythology through

objects not also a deeply surreal operation?

At the AWM, these mythological operations flow through and are contained by a

logistical network of both objects and bodies. Following his citation for actions in

Afghanistan, Ben Roberts-Smith VC MG donated his body armour and military uniform

to the AWM. As a result of the mythology around this soldier that we explored earlier in

this chapter, these otherwise unremarkable objects are now treated with reverence. They

216 Chamayou, Drone Theory, 250.

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offer the viewer a proximity with the ultra-mythologised performance-event of this soldier,

a series of gestures and movements so intense they became nationally significant.

His body armour contained his performance, so it is believed to be infused with a

trace of whatever took place on that day. These objects contain the myth-event of Ben

Roberts-Smith, they are vessels, mediums to the genesis of this particular military

mythology. Because of this, the way in which the material reality of Ben Roberts-Smith’s

armour is regarded is now forever transformed: his Kevlar helmet suddenly becomes

fragile, an object to be handled with utmost care. In moments like this the power of

mythology approaches a form of magic that renders solid objects into a state of fragility

that define the temporary nature of Sloterdijk’s bubbles,217 whilst the collection policy

becomes a choreography that is performed through the careful and disciplined gestures

of the AWM’s conservators.

Now the mythological haunting of this armour necessitates a new performance

in those curators approved to handle it. Special gloves are worn to create a barrier

between the purity of the myth-object and the tiny secretions of the curator’s impure

hands. Here a sacred and medical dimension combines with the performative handling

of the helmet to produce an operational vocabulary for the institutional practices of

mythology. In atmospheric terms, mythology is here a kind of topological storm, an

intensity of atmosphere (provenance) that is so concentrated in the object that it

becomes core to the symbolic functioning of the underlying military mythology of the

state.

217 Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Microspherology, 48.

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Figure 40. Spatial Operations process documentation: 2 part silicone fiberglass mold, Sydney (2014).

This is the flip-side of the atmospheres of elite military training: a set of tactics,

strategies and practices that govern commemorative operations, performed in

demarcated remembrance zones and protected exhibition spaces by highly-trained

officials. When we enter these spaces we immediately feel it: the atmosphere is different,

it is special. Just like when you feel the electricity in the air before a summer afternoon

storm, we anticipate the affective power of spaces designed to contain powerful

atmospheres. We adjust our mood and our behaviour accordingly. We become

instinctively disciplined and respectful because mythology is ultimately, like art (and

climate), a deeply aesthetic, haunting, affective and embodied experience.

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Figure 41. Spatial Operations process documentation: 16 of the 210 helmets air-drying, Sydney (2014). In parallel, I suggest that the containing intensities of Ben Roberts-Smith’s armour

operate within another military practice: the Chief of Army’s Reading List.218 This list of

210 texts contains military mythology in a similar way – alone, these texts represent

singular historical and political accounts of military matters, but together, under the

authority of the Chief of Army and the institution of the military, they represent nothing

less than the ideal military mind. So if the operation of mythology takes place through

objects, bodies and the containing intensities around and within them, then what spatial

form would the invisible intellectual ideal bound up in the Chief of Army’s Reading List

take? Would this tailored knowledge of military history, philosophy, tactics, strategy and

politics not form a kind of knowledge armour?

218 Available at: http://www.army.gov.au/Our-future/Publications/Chief-of-Army-Reading-List

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Figure 42. Spatial Operations, (2014). Text piece – The Australian Chief of Army’s Reading List (2012), Installation view, Newcastle Art Gallery, Newcastle (2015). In Sloterdijkian terms, what geometry would these mythological, philosophical

and historical tendencies adopt were they to be ‘released’ from their literary containers

into a new form? For me, the hidden form contained within this list of texts found a

metaphor in part of the armour that Ben Roberts-Smith VC MG had donated: his helmet.

What else could the knowledge contained in these texts be but a kind of behavioural,

cognitive, literary armour? An armour that operates through the embodied performance

of that knowledge in spatial operations?

Spatial Operations (2014) combines these two national ideals, the body of the

hero, and the collective mind of the military. But ultimately, as we have seen with other

examples in this thesis, it is the containing space created in between these two poles

that provides us with the most fertile conceptual ground to work in. Having identified the

specific operations of mythology that I wanted to investigate, the question remained:

could I fabricate a new object with a ‘ready-made’ provenance? Following Sloterdijk’s

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emphasis on the concept of design in all things atmospheric, could I manufacture a

mythological military climate within the ‘containing intensities’ of an artwork?

Process

The answer to these questions could only be approached through a logistically

appropriate process. Creating the individual helmets was technically simple, but the

scale of the work made it extremely challenging to complete. There were a number of

ways to create 210 helmets from these books, but ultimately, as in the process of 3D

animation in Chapter 2, it was the most efficient strategy that prevailed – and it was,

paradoxically, extremely low-tech: papier-mâché.219 Interestingly, this process yielded

unexpected material results. Just as major monuments that commemorate the surreal

operations of the military are usually grounded in the strongest of materials like granite

and concrete, these paper objects paradoxically resembled these same materials. In the

early stages of the project, I undertook complex 3D laser scans of Ben Roberts-Smith’s

helmet, but unfortunately, these scans did not provide a useful model for my purposes

(Figure 46). Perhaps the intensities of provenance that I was attempting to emulate

required a technical and material proximity to the helmet that laser

219 In January 2014, I organised a performance at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, for the festival Hors Pistes

where two French soldiers read and then shredded excerpts from a text on the French Army’s reading

list: Bruno Mignot, Regard d'un militaire sur la société française (2007). See Figure 43.

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Figure 43. Spatial Operations (Students of War) (2014), performance documentation. Hors Pistes,

Centre Pompidou, Paris.

scanning could not provide. Instead, I had moulds created from an exact copy of the

helmet Roberts-Smith was wearing during his VC citation. After much experimentation, I

developed a papier-mâché technique and chemical composition that was efficient

enough to complete each of the 210 helmets by hand. Because of the large scale and

laborious nature of the project, I was forced to adopt many of the performative intensities

that are summoned through this military mythology, such as discipline. Further echoing

the practices of military training, each of these helmets was put through the same mould,

yet each has its own unique quality – a simple yet satisfying cliché that was present in

the work.

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Figure 44. Spatial Operations process documentation: installation at Newcastle Art Gallery, Newcastle (2015).

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Figure 45. Prototype Helmet for Spatial Operations, (2014).

Figure 46. Spatial Operations process documentation: 3D laser scanning the helmet worn by Ben Roberts-Smith VC MG at the Australian War Memorial, Canberra (2013).

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Figure 47. Spatial Operations process documentation: close up of one of the shredders used (left) and sculpting the paper pulp mix into the mold (right), Sydney, 2014.

This body of work constitutes an act of mimicry: since these objects are

simulations of the donated helmet worn by Ben Roberts-Smith VC MG during his 5th tour

of Afghanistan, recomposed using the material of the 210 texts on the Chief of Army’s

Reading List. These are truly carnal media, second skins as Barthes described the

phenomena of the photographic subject. The material used was indeed fundamentally

photographic: produced from photosynthesising organisms, broken down and made into

paper – the other essential photographic support. From here, these sheets grown from

international soils and varied climates were imprinted with the thoughts of military

historians, strategists, philosophers and novelists, and finally collated into the

knowledge-assemblage-operation of the Land Warfare Studies Centre for the Australian

Chief of Army. The very thing that these armies fight for – territory – was already and

magically bound up within these texts.

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Figure 48. Spatial Operations, (2014). Installation render for Newcastle Art Gallery, Newcastle.

For the material ancestry of the underlying plant matter infuses these pages with a

physical trace of land reminiscent of photography’s indexical and carnal relationship to

its referent. This is a rhetorical terroir – an actual morphological articulation of the

topology of mythology. This list is earthenware, made of the earth in order to diffuse the

very techniques and strategies of its conquest. This topological folding is of the same

order as the folding of space that drones enable. Here we can again link back to the

opening pages of this thesis which dealt with earthen myth and divine material trace –

namely the Christian myth of human creation. Sloterdijk’s analysis of the Book of Genesis

described Adam as the original container whose earthen vessel provided the frame for

the original ‘pneumatic pact’ between mankind and its creator. This pact, like the

legislative conditions that underpin the heroes of Australian military mythology discussed

earlier, creates a topology upon which the myth functions.

Yet as we saw in the previous section, the spatial operations of military

mythology also function through a strategy of detachment and concealment. This creates

a void or absence that is, in turn, filled with a kind of haunting. This absence is deployed

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and repeated in each individual helmet that makes up Spatial Operations (2014). In this

way, it is an artificial monument in that it is mostly negative space: the actual forms in

this work are on one level the bare minimum needed to contain a space or to even be

forms at all. They simply suggest a space, nudge towards it, lingering on a kind of formal

threshold. Indeed, the biggest absence in the work is the human form, namely the head

that would usually be contained and protected by these helmets. In a sense, the hero

has been redacted from this monument, he is only present in an atmospheric sense,

haunting the artwork like Ophelia in Hamlet. The repetition of this absence, the continual

recital by each and every helmet forms an empty chorus that speaks to the surreal

practices of negation and detachment that we have seen throughout this exploration of

military atmospheres. The topology or surface of these objects frame space in a limited

way, but as such, they paradoxically contain more space. In one sense, this silent choir

represents a sculptural requiem for those lost souls who no longer know where to place

themselves wherever – but at the same time, it gives them the coordinates upon which

they can begin to relocate themselves amongst the surreal topologies of military

mythology. Whereas the state practices a form of negative photography in its spatial

operations of mythology, this false monument to mythology practices a form of negative

spatiality – it redacts the body of the hero in favour of the haunting presence of its

absence. It memorialises forgetting.220

220 As an aside, the number of kills that Ben Roberts-Smith is rumoured to have achieved is very close to

the number of helmets in this work – an interesting parallel to consider in the context of this work as a

monument to absence.

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Figure 49. Spatial Operations, (2014). Installation view, Newcastle Art Gallery, Newcastle (2015).

Installation

The formal installation of these paper helmets and the reading list itself (Figure 42)

summons one of the organisational topologies that the military is historically known for:

the grid. This formation speaks to the bibliographical referencing system that is bound

up within the source material and central concept of the work: the reading list. This new

library is structured according to the numerical sequence of each book on the list, top-

to-bottom and left-to-right. The grid is also representative of the institutional and

perceptual ‘field’ of the military and the organisational structures of its bureaucracy. In

theoretical terms, the spatial quality of the grid has a crucial place in western art history,

and in particular the period of modernism. As in photography, the grid acts to frame the

world, to demarcate zones of exclusion and inclusion. For Rosalind Krauss, the grid in

modern art stands in opposition to the topological flows of the natural world:

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“There are two ways in which the grid functions to declare the modernity of

modern art. One is spatial; the other is temporal. In the spatial sense, the grid

states the autonomy of the realm of art. Flattened, geometricized, ordered, it is

antinatural, antimimetic, antireal. It is what art looks like when it turns its back on

nature.”221

Figure 50. Spatial Operations, (2014). Installation view, Newcastle Art Gallery, Newcastle (2015). Cast paper pulp, pva, cellulose powder. 24(h) x 22(w) x 30(d) cm, 210 pieces.

Whilst Krauss argues forcefully for the anti-mimetic quality of the grid, in Spatial

Operations (2014), the grid forms a lattice upon which mimicry flourishes. This is in part

due to the almost photographic process of making the work. Just like the smothering

quality of light on the photographic subject described by Barthes in Camera Lucida

(1980), the process of mould making that underpins these sculptures similarly creates

221 Rosalind Krauss, “Grids,” October Vol. 9 (1979): 50.

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an exact negative of the subject by way of complete immersion. Here, the light of

photography is replaced by the smothering liquid of silicon, a slow and viscous material

that, like light in photography, takes an exact copy of its referent, filling every gap, crevice

and detail. Whereas the settings of aperture and shutter speed effect the level of detail

and shadow in a photograph, this process of moulding produces perfect sculptural

exposure – an exact copy – inverted. This is a technique to create absence.

Figure 51. Spatial Operations process documentation: two-part mold, silicone and fiberglass Sydney, 2014.

The sculptural mimicry and perceptual awareness that Caillois describes in

Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia (1931) is present within the material intelligence

of the silicon: its consistency allows for a magical and complete knowledge of the object

that it touches (Figure 50). This is a form of mimesis that literally adopts the objects form

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in spatially negative terms. It straddles the unstable boundaries between interior and

exterior worlds. This mimesis is also at work in the liquid-like quality of mythology. When

Ben Roberts-Smith donated his helmet to the AWM, it was suddenly treated with

incomparable care: an object that is the outcome of hundreds of years of material science

and engineering, the pinnacle of contemporary armour, this Kevlar helmet now becomes

fragile, the material reality of this object having been inverted by the weight of its

attachment to mythology. This mimesis is articulated not in the physical properties of the

helmet itself, but in the perceptual world of its curators. The mythology flows through the

precise actions of trained AWM conservators, through the choreographic expression of

their collection policy. Here, the mythology is the negative, the topological mould that

simulates the original in a transformative way. This military myth also functions as a

bridge between the external world of the banal, standard object of the mass-produced

helmet, and the interior world of the museum through the now revered artefact. Whilst

hundreds of thousands of exact helmets circulate in military warehouses, equipment

storage facilities and barracks, this particular helmet, his helmet, has made the transition

from the scientific to the sacred. It will never be worn again.

For Krauss, the grid provides a crucial way to reject these often contradictory

characteristics of mythology – the modernist clash between the secular (science) and

the sacred (myth). Krauss argues that “the function of the myth is to allow both views to

be held in some kind of para-logical suspension”, where the values of spiritualism and

science can both be held simultaneously in the “unconscious of modernism […] as

something repressed.”222 Krauss refers to Claude Levi-Strauss’s use of structuralist

mode of analysis that uses the grid to ‘spatialize the story’, “they are able to display the

222 Ibid., 55.

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features of the contradiction and to show how these underlie the attempts of a specific

mythical tale to paper over the opposition with narrative.”223

This account of the twin powers of the grid, to both reveal and supress the

unresolved paradox of modernity mirrors the operational logics that underpin the

surveillance apparatus discussed in Chapter 2, where the underlying contradiction of the

invisibility of the secret state is its having to be anchored, somewhere, in the material,

visible world. Similarly, the helmets in Spatial Operations (2014) both conceal and

reveal at the same time. They render visible the invisible form of the knowledge-armour

bound up within the content of the texts on the Chief of Army’s reading list, whilst

concealing the actual content that allows for this form to take place. They supress the

original reading of these texts and replace it with a singular alternative: these texts are

rendered illegible, de-composed and re-composed, but another reading is possible: the

newly released topology of their mythological form (the helmet). The grid here spatializes

the military myth of the hero, his ideal body and mind, and simultaneously exposes its

paradox (the fragility of paper armour - the science) and reinforces its strength (the power

of paper armour – the sacred).

This perpetual echo between the sacred and the scientific constitutes what Krauss

refers to as the “schizophrenic” quality of the grid.224 The parallels to Caillois’ description

of space as a devouring force reminiscent of the schizophrenic sensation of a

catastrophic loss of coordinates are clear. The schizophrenia that Krauss refers to is

similarly spatial. It accounts for the contradictory spatial readings of the grid to both repel

and attract directive forces of the work of art, the centrifugal and centripetal readings of

the grid. The former is, logically, that the grid extends to infinity outwards and that the

223 Ibid.

224 Ibid., 64.

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work of art crops a small part of a much larger fabric. The grid is, in the centripetal

reading:

“a re-presentation of everything that separates the work of art from the world,

from ambient space and from other objects. The grid is an introjection of the

boundaries of the world into the interior of the work; it is a mapping of the space

inside the frame onto itself. It is a mode of repetition, the content of which is the

conventional nature of art itself.”225

Figure 52. Spatial Operations, (2014). Installation progress, Newcastle Art Gallery, Newcastle (2015).

225 Ibid., 63.

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In Spatial Operations (2014), the work rests in the constant shifting between these two

opposing forces of the sacred and the scientific. Through Krauss, we can now see that

the Sloterdijkian reciprocity at work within the mythology and the object that contains it

can be at least partially located in modernist theories of art. This reciprocity is an

articulation of the intensities produced through the constant exchange between the

opposing poles of the scientific and the sacred. So is the schizophrenic tendency that

both Krauss and Caillois identify not simply another articulation of Sloterdijk’s

philosophical emphasis on co-subjectivity?

Figure 53. Spatial Operations, (2014). Installation view, Newcastle Art Gallery, Newcastle (2015).

If all births are twin births, as Sloterdijk claims,226 what if all of these diverse theoretical

accounts of spatial operations are simply an attempt to locate our other half? Caillois’

226 Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Microspherology, 413.

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insects search for salvation in the warm embrace of spatial singularity, Krauss’ grid seeks

the soothing equilibrium between the opposing forces of science and the sacred, whilst

military mythology itself seeks the state in search for its divine embodiment in a singular,

perfect, heroic body. If there is a concept of droning perhaps it can be distilled to this

simple attempt to locate our other half, a slight yet significant addition to the simple

question that Christian Borch identified as Sloterdijk’s overwhelming drive in his

philosophical project: not simply ‘where?’; the more pressing question could be: where

are we?

3.6 Conclusion

Through a thorough theoretical and considerable artistic operation in this chapter, we

have seen that Ben Roberts-Smith and the military mythology that is generated both

within and around him has again, as with drones, radically disrupted Sloterdijk’s category

of militarised atmospheres. Instead of a limited reliance on aerial characteristics of the

‘atmospheric’, we have applied varied techniques and theories from Sloterdijk himself,

Caillois, Krauss and Barthes to set out a deeply mystical field that hosts much of these

spatial operations. Having explored the complex and mystical ways in which the U.S.

military’s drone network operates in Chapter 2, we have now seen the equally complex

and surreal realm of military mythology. I argued that the spatial operation of military

mythology shares a deeply surreal operational logic with the other forms of militarised

atmospheres that we have seen, such as drones. Just as we saw that U.S. drones are a

form of event-prosthetic, we saw that the contemporary Australian war hero Ben Roberts-

Smith and the institutions around him approach a similar ‘spatial intensity’ of operation.

The visual appearance, material quality, production process and final installation

of Spatial Operations (2014) has sought to contain, as much as possible, these complex

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and surreal theories of contemporary military spatiality. Wherever possible, the research

and production of this chapter was undertaken in close proximity to its subject. For

example, rather than being sent to war on behalf of the Australian War Memorial to bear

witness as an agent of the state, I was deployed to the interior chambers of national

memory. This is in direct opposition to the spatial trajectories of the subject of this

residency, Ben Roberts-Smith, who was sent on several occasions to continue politics

by other means in exterior zones and foreign territories. It should be clear by now that

the spatial significance of this being-contained has been a generative and catalysing

force for this research.

In similar terms, much of the labour that I undertook in the production of 210

individual sculptures took place in that thermally crucial zone of human spatial evolution,

the domestic kitchen. Once more, this is also a political posture. By recomposing a now

sacred object from the high-tech military-industrial complex in the lowest, almost ancient

process of sculpting vessels with a simple spoon, there is a kind of mockery of

sophisticated production technique at play. Having said that, the final installation at

Newcastle Art Gallery adopts the precise spatial language of institutional presentation, a

precision that I used in the animation works discussed in Chapter 2. These techniques

and the spatial authority that the museum context provides helps to magnify the theories

at work in this research. It also adds considerable weight to the work as false monument

to military mythology. Even Ryan Johnston, Head of Art at the AWM, suggested during

our panel discussion at the opening of the exhibition in early 2015, that this work

resembled a kind of commemorative monument composed of ossified relics. This was in

part due to the dark background against which the work is presented, the museum

context and lighting, but also the surface quality of the objects themselves, which came

to closely resemble some kind of modified skulls or bones. Similarly, the grid layout

conjures those geometrically precise cemeteries for war dead that lay across Europe. In

this and other anecdotal responses to the artwork, I can begin to answer the question

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that I posed with it; just as artificial climates can be designed, so too can military

mythologies be manufactured.

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4.0 Conclusions

This research set out to present a new way to conceptualise contemporary military

atmospheres using the spatial languages of both art and theory. By grappling with some

of the most important spatial forces at work in the world, we have gained a deeper

conceptual appreciation for the mechanics of both operational and mythological military

activity today. The work of Peter Sloterdijk, whilst sometimes very ambitious in its claims

and reach, has given us intriguing spatial metaphors from which art practice can examine

the state of contemporary militarism. The opening proposition of this research was that

the defining characteristic of contemporary military atmospheres is not only their ‘aerial’

capacities, as Sloterdijk suggests, but rather their surreal spatial practices. This was

presented through close interdisciplinary analysis of two examples of contemporary

‘atmospheric’ military practices: unmanned drones and military mythology. This thesis

has demonstrated through two major creative works produced from research, artist

residencies, exhibitions and discussions that both military mythology and atmospheric

weapons share a surreal operational logic that expand current categorisations of these

fields.

In Chapter 1, we saw how Sloterdijk’s underlying theories of co-subjectivity

frames much of his interpretation of human atmospheres. We also located Sloterdijk’s

debt to preceding spatial theorists, such as Jakob Von Uexküll, Gaston Bachelard and

Michel Serres. From here, we were able to clearly establish what militarised atmospheres

are and how they operate through principles of design and ‘air-conditioning’, by giving

examples of gas chambers, drones and the legal frameworks that constitute them. The

creative works of this research entered the scene in Chapter 2, where the case was

made for the surreal operation of contemporary military atmospheres. The work of

surrealist Roger Caillois was crucial to construct the conceptual framework within which

this point was established. From here, the works of artists Marcel Duchamp, Char Davies

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and Trevor Paglen were analysed through the surrealist spatial optic of Caillois and

Bachelard, whilst presenting and unpacking my own work for analysis. The MQ-9 Reaper

artworks proposed in spatial terms the surreal operational logic of the contemporary

military drone network. By rearranging the broad logistical elements of this network into

a single, unified and truly strange topology, these artworks clearly visualised the key

spatial analysis of the first iteration of military atmospheres for this research. That these

artworks have now been absorbed into some of the very institutional networks that they

seek to critique demonstrates the potential of such modes of inquiry to take on a surreal

operational logic of their own: infiltrating systems of control and power through

techniques of mimesis and simulation, whereby conservative viewers mistake the

absurdly lush military imagery for a politics of military fetish, when in fact the opposite is

true.227 There is a drone-like quality to this deployment, an artwork whose political

payload is delivered by means of distraction and from a safe distance.

Following this point, I have found that the relational proximity of surreal modes of

critique in my animations allow for certain kinds of political critique to emerge. This

proximity can be understood in similar terms to the mimetic nature of surreal drone space

– a mimesis not based on physical proximity as we have seen, but on relational proximity

of exchange. The surreal nature of 3D animation as it is deployed in this research’s

artworks runs on this mimetic drive, which, in turn, facilitates new ways of sensing

militarism, through bodies, atmospheres and installations. Whereas the military usually

senses and targets bodies through its myriad sensors and networks, through these

artworks, bodies can begin to sense militarism. On the surface this is a simple

proposition, but this simple gesture of inverting the gaze as it were can have compelling

flow on effects and affects. This is because it isn’t actually a simple proposition, in fact,

it is much more than an inversion of the gaze; it is a radical adoption and disruption of

227 The institutional networks referred to here are the art collections of the Australian War Memorial

and the Australian Parliament.

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the surreal spatio-military practices that are the primary avenue of political power today

– practices that this thesis has made modest attempts to unravel. It is this alternative

way of imaging and theorising militarism that allows for political critique to emerge. Whilst

Pete Adey rightly discourages over-emphasising the visual representations of the broad

group of processes, relations, technologies and territories that fall under the term ‘aerial

life’, the process of visual rendering in 3D animation provides an alternative to the

practices of remote sensing that the drone feeds on. And indeed, it accounts for much

more than the visual. Here, the process of 3D rendering becomes a way to unite Trevor

Paglen’s emphasis on visualising the invisible, of giving form to the bodies previously

reduced to targets. Rendering here is a kind of conjuring, a giving of form to the formless,

of imaging the imaginary. If militarism increasingly operates in spaces that restrict and

resist access, as we have seen through drone atmospheres and heroic bodies, it is

incumbent upon artists to create pathways of critique that adopt the same spatial

languages upon which power thrives. If drones and their associated sensory

assemblages collect many thousands of hours of video footage for analysis, for their

targeted patterns of life, why shouldn’t we generate patterns of militarism to counter such

imagery?

At the end of this research process it has become clear that Sloterdijk’s Spheres

can be viewed through the elaborate spatial metaphors that he so enjoys as actualised

in artworks. What is his perspective on human society but a kind of Gods-eye-view, a

philosophical surveillance platform from which he surveys the topologies below?

Certainly, the position from which he speaks can be seen as an articulation of ‘aerial’

superiority, surveying vast swathes of human practices before quickly zooming in on

esoteric and niche examples of spatial cultivation, without losing any ‘image quality’.

From the surreal spatial instability of the drone network, Chapter 3 presented the

second iteration of military atmospheres that this research has identified: military

mythology. It argued that the surreal spatial practices of the American drone network can

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also be found in the emergence of the celebrity hero Ben Roberts-Smith VC MG. By

closely analysing the way the state controls image of the hero through theories of

photography and art theory, we were able to see the specific mechanics at work within

the ‘photographic body’ of the hero. This was compounded by comparing this hero’s

image to other ways that images work in conflict today, with reference to the work of

photographer Luc Delahaye, painter Sir John Everett Millais, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and

the discursive style of an American Drone Operator. The major creative work for this

section, Spatial Operations (2014), was then analysed in relation to theories of ‘the grid’

in modern art, before proposing that this installation approached a form of sculptural

photography when conceptualised through these modernist theories and Caillois’ surreal

spatial claims.

From Caillois’ surreal spatiality we can return to the related concepts of droning

and refrain that I will seek to develop further in future work. These terms were used briefly

in this thesis as a way to describe the surreal spatial operations of drone atmospheres,

where musical repetition is substituted for a spatial collapse, where the harmonies that

repeat in musical refrain are articulated by spatial rhymes, where ‘repetition’ is a

relational mirror, a kind of mimesis.

In Caillois, where mimetic insects are perhaps seduced by an urge for spatial

singularity, droning can be seen as a machinic articulation of this same drive for spatial

singularity, where the drive is not natural but political. Military drones are a devouring

force that collapse space as we have seen, so where the refrain or drone in the sonic

realm refers to a monophonic harmony or repetition of tone, in the context of military

drones, the overall strategy of which they are part can be theorised as having a political

goal of a kind of spatial ‘harmony’, perhaps an abolition of difference or the control of

territory, where harmony can be conceived of in numerous non-positive ways (depending

on your viewpoint, of course), such as suppressing an enemy, expressing sovereignty

and ownership over space, establishing ‘peace’, spreading democracy etc. The

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soundtracks in the drone artworks produced for this research called upon the sonic

definition of the drone as a deliberate strategy to fill or complete the space that the works

required and to resolve the atmosphere that such ambient soundscapes allow.

Ultimately, droning is a way of describing the spatial operations that this research has

focused on, a new spatial vocabulary in an area where the slipperiness of the term

‘atmosphere’ becomes too much, when the technically enabled spatial practices of

militarism far exceed the established terminologies that we have to comprehend them.

Whilst the work of Peter Sloterdijk is increasingly the subject of philosophical

inquiry and criticism in the Anglophone sphere, his work remains an incredibly fertile

space a point of departure for art practice. This research never set out to only evaluate

the philosophical integrity or scholarly validity of his work, but rather to use his extremely

spatial approach to human politics, society and culture as a contextual and

methodological catalyst to investigate what I see as one of the most spatially potent

forces at work today: militarism. As a child of the 1980s, my earliest memories of media

were those now infamous (and still ubiquitous) video feeds from the bombs of American

jets pounding Iraq from the skies above. I grew up being fascinated with the machinery

of war, seduced by the technical prowess of fighter jets and the sleek aesthetics of stealth

aircraft. My father, a physicist, nurtured this interest with trips to air shows. For a few

years, he lived not far from the famous Top Gun airbase in southern California – Miramar,

where the screaming jets would tear through the sky like it was being ripped from one

end to the other, opening up a portal to the other side of the horizon. Yet as I grew up

and was absorbed into the world of politics and critical theory, I increasingly understood

the true nature of these beasts and their violent, surreal ecologies. Since then, I have

used technologies from the same systems of control to critique and understand the

forces that shape the world today. The true power of art as a tool of research is that it

inherently resists the concealing practices of the state. Yet it also sits close enough to

the core surreal spatial operations of power to be able to effectively counter them.

165

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