Lisa Barnard
Machines in the Garden, Hyenas of the Battlefield
Machines in the Garden, Hyenas of the Battlefield is a study into the ‘unholy alliance’ between the military, the entertainment industry and technology and how these alliances increasingly coalesce around modern-day warfare. As Fredric Jameson famously observed in 1991, ‘the underside of culture is blood, torture, death and horror’. Julian Stallabrass claims that ‘war and the state are central to each other, and to experience warfare is also to experience the modern world in the most complete and extreme fashion … war is necessary to the symbiosis of business and state’.
What this project in its entirety reveals is the complex relationship between these apparently divergent arenas and how the screen is pivotal to the emergence and ongoing development in the relationships between war, media and industry as they relate to the virtual and the real.
The ‘machines in the garden’ denotes the dialectical tension between the American pastoral ideal and machine technology. The ‘hyenas of the battlefield’, the technologically driven corporations, keep the US soldiers ‘in the loop’ but off the ground by the use of remotely piloted aircraft (RPA). For this is the goal – a mode of warfare designed to fulfil the new paradigm of the US administration, where no more American soldiers die on the battlefield.