An installation of drone fiction by Jamie Zigelbaum, performed at the Spring Break Art Show in NYC on March 5th, 2013
###Description Void Kill () is an imagined moment: a vision of the looming future when humans will imbue machines with formulae to decide life or death.
Right now, military personnel in Nevada operate unmanned aerial vehicles in Afghanistan and elsewhere: drones. The human operators who control them decide from afar when to take the lives of other humans, judgements based on sensor feeds, actions according to the protocols and rules of law that govern the use of deadly force for the United States Armed Forces. Pilots, and other soldiers, have made similar decisions for a long time. The salient difference here being these decisions are made by remote control.
Drones will soon become more than teleoperated weapons. They will gain the autonomy to decide when and how to apply lethal force. Sometime, somewhere, a software developer will sit at a workstation and write a piece of software that will be programmed into a drone to give it the ability to decide on its own to kill human beings. That moment will likely be a mundane one.
Void Kill () is a simple performance and installation: a desk, computer, display, keyboard, and mouse. The software editor is open; the cursor blinking; the code unfinished. The artist starts by sitting in the gallery space as he would at home working. He starts from scratch and writes a piece of code to control a drone and give it the authority to kill. Then he leaves; the work unfinished.