Safe Distance

This video, recovered in 1999 during the NATO air attacks against Yugoslavia, is a rare document of the United States military aviation technologies, ‘found’ and decoded after the downing of a plane of the invincible atlantic army. The population who downed the american plane, which was part of a squadron of four on a mission to hit targets near Novi Sad, was able to read the communication codes recorded on a simple tape (a Sony Video 8) and to demolish the pervasive information myths which, in the western collective imagination, described a real war made of blood and death as a ‘humanitarian mission with some unavoidable consequences’. The narration by acronyms and numbers makes even a layman realize the tone of the conversation and the dramatic sequence of events, while the contrast with the simulation, an aseptic and vectorial black-and-white projected on the helmet visor, is strong. This isolation of the pilot, who interfaces with the outer world only through the segments and the simple animations generated by a computer, together with the use of technological means even an average user can grasp (crude simulations, if compared with the realism of contemporary videogames, and videotapes identical to those used for home video), completes a dreary and completely realistic picture of a propaganda system whose nice appearance is here ripped up to reveal its ugly underlying technology and strategy.