THE GENERAL’S STORK
2016 - ongoing
mixed-media Installation, performance lecture
RELATED TEXT
Heba Y. Amin & Anthony Downey (2023). The techno-politics of programming vision, Visual Studies, 38:2, 192-195, DOI: 10.1080/1472586X.2023.2198393
“Programmed Visions and Techno-Fossils: Heba Y. Amin and Anthony Downey in conversation”. Third Text Online, 21 July 2022, www.thirdtext.org/downey-amin.
Amin, Heba Y. “Allegorizing”. Archives on Show: Revoicing, Shapeshifting, Displacing - A Curatorial Glossary, edited by Beatrice von Bismarck, Archive Books, 2022.
Amin, Heba Y. “The General’s Stork”. The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics: The Changing Ontology of the Image, Vol. 30, No. 61-62, 02 July 2021.
“Drone Technologies and the Future of Surveillance in the Middle East: Heba Y. Amin & Anthony Downey in conversation”. The MIT Press Reader, January 2021, https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/drone-technologies-future-of-surveillance-middle-east/.
Amin, Heba Y. “The General’s Stork”. di’van: A Journal of Accounts. Art | Culture | Theory., No 9, pp. March 2021.
Downey, Anthony, Ed., Heba Y. Amin: The General’s Stork. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020. Print.
Amin, H.Y., Downey, A. “Contesting post-digital futures: drone warfare and the geo-politics of aerial surveillance in the middle east”. Digital War, Palgrave Macmillan, Volume 1, No 103, Dec 2020, https://doi.org/10.1057/s42984-020-00021-y.
Amin, H.Y., Downey, A. “Avian Prophecies and the Techno-Aesthetics of Drone Warfare: Heba Y. Amin in conversation with Anthony Downey”. (W)archives: Archival Imaginaries, War and Contemporary Art, edited by Daniela Agostinho, Solveig Gade, Nanna Thylstrup and Kristin Veel, Sternberg Press, 2021, pp. 143-161.
Amin, H.Y., Downey, A. “A Brief History of Drone Warfare”. Frieze, Issue 215, 30 Oct 2020, https://www.frieze.com/article/brief-history-drone-warfare.
Military technologies throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries were developed against the backdrop of Middle Eastern ge-ographies. As war became dictated by the needs of technology, conquest from the sky transformed Western warfare into an imbalanced spectacle of high-tech weaponry. Techno-aesthetics became inherently tied to the image of the Middle East as the language of occupation and colonization was written in to the visualization of landscape through land surveying, aerial mapping, bombing and drone warfare.
In late 2013, Egypt made worldwide headlines when authorities detained a migratory stork traveling to Egypt through Israel because of an electronic device attached to its body. It was suspected of espionage. Almost one hundred years earlier, Lord Allenby, the British High Commissioner in Cairo, completed a major phase in biblical prophecy by launching ‘bird-like machines’ to capture Jerusalem from the Ottomans. The General’s Stork is an evolving lecture performance that looks at how territory is visualized in direct correlation to the development of twentieth century technological warfare in the Middle East. It takes the perspective of the “disembodied eye” and utilizes a landscape way of seeing to address the political consequences of religious prophecies, colonial narratives, and the politics of surveillance on the contemporary state of paranoia which turned a migrating bird into an international spy.
