Susan Schuppli, Tom Tlalim, and Lawrence Abu Hamdan at The Wind Tunnel, Farnborough

“It is a queer experience, lying in the dark and listening to the zoom of a hornet which may at any moment sting you to death. It is a sound that interrupts cool and consecutive thinking about peace. Yet it is a sound—far more than prayers and anthems—that should compel one to think about peace.”
From: Virginia Woolf “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid”, October 21 1940

A performative lecture produced by Susan Schuppli with sound design by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, which explores the sonic dimension of life under armed drone surveillance in FATA, Pakistan as well as the broader history of pilotless planes using audio and visual materials drawn from contemporary eye and ear-witness accounts to the historical archives of the FAST museum at Farnborough.

“The sound of the drones is like a wave of terror coming over the community.”

“These drones hover over our heads constantly and one can always hear the buzzing, mosquito-like sound they make.”

As US strategies around the War on Terror shifted from secret prisons and detention camps to targeted assassination under the Obama Administration in 2009, Predator and Reaper drones have come to saturate the airspace over the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Northwest Pakistan. Their ubiquitous presence signalled by high-frequency emissions has become a permanent feature of the skies along the Afghan border. Although various organisations, try to maintain comprehensive datasets of reported casualties (fatalities and injuries) from drone strikes in Pakistan, these numbers do not begin to represent the injurious nature of what it means to live under the constant sonic menace of drones.