Surplus Predator Drone Container Morphs Into War Protest Machine

"He told me it would make a great koi pond," said James Enos, recalling the dealer in obscure military surplus who did business, along with his dog, in one of the weedy fields around Ramona, California. "It" was the original logistical container of an MQ-1 Predator Drone Unmanned Aerial Vehicle—the most prominent model of drone aircraft that is waging remote-controlled war on suspected terrorist targets in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere.

"He told me it would make a great koi pond," said James Enos, recalling the dealer in obscure military surplus who did business, along with his dog, in one of the weedy fields around Ramona, California.

"It" was the original logistical container of an MQ-1 Predator Drone Unmanned Aerial Vehicle — the most prominent model of drone aircraft that is waging remote-controlled war on suspected terrorist targets in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere.

"He was a nice guy," Enos remembered of the dealer who had posted the unusual offering on Craigslist, but was close-lipped about its origin in the murky military surplus community around San Diego. "All he would say was he got it at the port."

The koi pond idea wasn't a bad one, but Enos had other plans for the 27-foot-long fiberglass container with a hinged lid. The sides of the object still wore stickers announcing its original price — almost $18,000 — as well as its overseas destination and even the name of the U.S. military officer who took delivery of it in Kandahar, Afghanistan. The dealer wanted $300.

"I was always looking for large things," said Enos, who said that he first figured the box would make good building material. As a co-director of The Periscope Project, an experimental architecture and design cooperative in San Diego, he was constantly in need of salvageable items to use in construction projects. He knew that a fiberglass object that large, vacuum-formed in the manner of a hot tub, had likely cost thousands of dollars to make. "I had to have it," he said.

But Enos soon realized he had a bona fide readymade on his hands. The huge beige container was a powerful object, one that touched many worlds: the drone war, throwaway culture, the American military-industrial complex and its hold on San Diego, a city whose economy is driven by a weird blend of sunny-California tourism and lucrative government defense contracts.

It also symbolized the controversial, covert military strikes that the presidential candidates have been talking about (and, notably, not talking about) in the run-up to the election. Drones barely came up in the debates — Romney said, briefly, that he supported the President's use of them — but they have become one of the most singular aspects of foreign policy under this administration, and there's no sign that aggressive drone strikes will stop, no matter who wins the election on Tuesday.

Enos and his Periscope Project colleagues decided to turn the drone casing into a "threadbare mobile dwelling unit," adding a reference to downtown San Diego's housing crisis to its other layers of significance. ("Homeless people say to us, 'I want to live in one of these. Is this a FEMA program?'" Enos told me.)

They took the container back to Periscope headquarters in a U-Haul truck and got to work. The first step was to take it apart. It swung open at the top; inside was a formed and padded tray that once cradled the drone precisely, and which Enos and team later turned into a bench.

"It had desiccant bags, like you get when you buy a pair of shoes, the size of loaves of bread," Enos said.

Carefully, Enos and a handful of skilled volunteers installed fans in either end of the case, scraped out glue, and put in wooden platform floors and carpeting. They added built-in shelving and wired the unit for electricity. They cut the hinged lid so that the center part of the container can be propped open to the sky. Furnished this way, the drone "coffin" is like a camper without a motor (it still rolls on the ten-inch casters it came with). Working with found parts and donated labor, the team completed the conversion for under $1,000.

Next, they took it on the road. In the summer of 2011, resident artists from The Periscope Project loaded the completed unit into another U-Haul and set out on a tour of several aerospace industry sites in the San Diego Area. They visited the General Dynamics holding at the Nassco Shipyard; the site of General Atomics Aeronautical — the company that makes the MQ-1 Predator drone — in nearby Poway; and finally Shelter Island, across the San Diego Bay from U.S. Naval Air Station Coronado. (Plastics Research Corporation, the company that manufactures the drone casings for General Atomics Aeronautical, is based in Ontario, California, just east of Los Angeles.) At each stop, the artists unloaded the readymade and sat outside of it in blue deck chairs.

When Enos, who went on to show the "Drone Readymade" at more traditional art-world outlets like UCSD and the San Diego Museum of Art, and plans to feature it in The Periscope Project's annual "Urban Labs" program this summer, talks about what the piece means to him, he speaks less in terms of an interesting feat of salvage or a simple protest against the drone war — though it is both — than of an act of making the invisible visible.

"People don't have spatial literacy," said Enos, invoking the experience of driving down the highway, seeing structures and having no idea what goes on in them or why they are there. Under globalization, so much of what matters happens across oceans, over national borders, hidden from view. We're connected to it, but we don't know how.

"There's this huge visualization movement in the arts now," said Enos, one focused on making complex processes apparent. "Like, can we see? Can we even see what's happening?" Enos thinks the growing interest in making—the scarves-and-wallets economy of hipster small business—is one manifestation of the impulse to understand our place in the web of production and consumption. So how about a literacy of the weapon and the airplane?

Not surprisingly, the return of the 'drone' to its birthplace made some people uneasy. In Poway, the artists attracted the attention of a General Atomics employee, who witnessed them reloading the crate into its truck and believed they might be in process of stealing a Predator drone from the plant. Down the road, near the intersection of I-15, the artists were pulled over and questioned by Poway police, after dropping to the pavement at gunpoint. Forty-five minutes later, when the police realized that what they had intercepted was a conceptual art project and not a domestic terrorist plot in progress, they let the artists go with no charges.

For Enos, the readymade's ability to breed discomfort, to bring the fear and danger latent in the circumstances of its creation to the surface, means that it's a success.

"The moment I'm talking about is when somebody, outside of the place they work, sees a bunch of dopey-looking men, struggling with homemade ramps to put this thing in the back of a U-Haul, but they think, conceivably, these guys could be a rogue group and have a Predator drone that they could launch that could be filled with ordnance or who knows what," he said. "It's about being scared of what you do and who you live with."