Over the last year, I’ve started working on a series of “digital assemblages.” These are physical objects embedded with microcomputers, LCD screens and overlapping layers of found images, video clips, and other media. The piece featured below is called Fire-and-Forget (2007) and it is a rumination on the intersections between technology, entertainment, morality, and violence.
Fire-and-forget is a military term used to describe third-generation advanced missile systems that do not require manual guidance after launch. By appropriating this phrase, I am reflecting upon what it might mean to fire-and-remember.
A video collage plays on an embedded LCD screen inside the gas mask. I’ve mixed cockpit video footage from a friendly fire attack by U.S. pilots on a British tank with short clips from the 1983 movie WarGames with footage from a U.S. apache helicopter attack on three Iraqis with screen-recorded scenes from the official U.S. Army online recruitment and training videogame America’s Army.
Here’s a YouTube version of the embedded video collage (2:47):
And here’s an excerpt from an article (”Scopic Regime Change: The War of Terror, Visual Culture, and Art Education,” 2008) that I co-wrote with Kevin Tavin, Bob Sweeny, and John Derby. You can download and read the whole piece here (.pdf) if you’re so inclined.
Fire-and-Forget: Technologies of Forgetting and the War of Terror
As the proliferation of networked media and insidious systems of observation and dataveillance from the war of terror clearly has demonstrated, we have been living in a society of surveillance where the amassing and storage of immense amounts of information is now commonplace (Sweeny, 2006).
As such, it has seemed counterintuitive that new media technologies and the surveillance-industrial complex, which record virtually every moment and iteration of contemporary life, can also facilitate specific kinds of “memory loss.”
As “technologies of forgetting,” however, the objects, systems, and representations from our surveillance society have played a critical role in how personal and cultural understandings and memories are created and maintained. This has been significant for the “way a nation remembers a war and constructs its history is directly related to how that nation further propagates war” (Sturken, 1997, p. 122).
By framing and shaping the dominant images and narratives of post-9/11 life, these technologies of forgetting have obscured deviant representations and countercultural accounts—thus helping to maintain the social and political conditions required for waging and promoting the war of terror.
“Fire-and-forget,” to borrow a phrase directly from the military lexicon, has described third-generation advanced missile systems that do not require manual guidance after launch. These systems, which allow armaments to store the characteristics of enemy vehicles and other targets directly onboard, have also been thought of as the most lucid manifestation of the technologies of forgetting used in the war of terror. The operators of such weapons have been freed from the responsibility of “watching” once they’ve lifted off.
Designed to allow soldiers to attend to their other combat duties, fire-and-forget has represented the ultimate in “out of sight, out of mind” technologies. Like the soldier remotely firing missiles comfortably in Colorado, operators everywhere and anywhere have fired and then promptly forgotten—the weapons themselves literally retain the memories of war.
