This Is Not a Drill
2019
Video, sound
12 minutes, 16 seconds
Related projects:
Public Privacy Hotline
Lost in the Desert of the Real
At the 13th Istanbul Biennial, the artist and theorist Hito Steyerl asked whether the museum is a battlefield. My essay film poses Steyerl’s question in reverse: Is the battlefield also a museum? Is it the battlefield that determines where and how we look?
In the spring of 2019, I visited the National Museum of the United States Air Force on the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Fairborn, Ohio, where an active shooter training drill was mistaken for a real active shooter alarm. In the three years preceding the Wright-Patterson incident, at least nine other U.S. military installations reported similar false alarms. Through first-person narration and a mix of found and original footage, my essay film explores the blurring of art and violence and what happens when we can no longer meaningfully distinguish between reality and our own projected meanings. Along the way, I examine UFO conspiracy theories, the Hawaii false missile alert, the police murders of Tyre King and Tamir Rice, and the historical role of artists in military deception.
