drone technology has been in existence for over one hundred years and has been gradually evolving ever since the drones ancestry can be traced to as far back as eight hundred ninety seven when the inventor nikola tesla demonstrated a remote controlled electric boat to the u s navy but the navy dismissed his idea as being from practical and unnecessary the military application of the principle of remote controlled vehicles first emerged in the form of unmanned aircraft during world war one pioneered by the british scientist archibald lowe and was further developed during the one nine hundred twenty s armed with explosives and got it from the ground by radio waves these expendable weapons were designed essentially as missiles culminating in the cruise missiles of today the first non expendable drones to take to the air or were developed during world war two to toe targets for gunnery practice all the targets were also told by manned aircraft whose pilots were understandably nervous about the accuracy of the gunners so what was belted like to become a bird  originated as a kind of clay pigeon later der in the period known as the cold war more sophisticated drones began to emerge now equipped with cameras driving this development was the increasing vulnerab about the russians on monday but it also leads to an admission that the u s has been conducting reconnaissance flights high over the soviet union u two planes like this one it is a civilian piloted an armed research plane carrying special photographic equipment in washington the state department says intelligence flights are necessary for the security of the united states the u s had put aside some money in a program called big so far this money was to be allocated toward special reconnaissance programs so one thousand nine hundred sixty two enter brian a small company in san diego right by lindbergh field who is major product line hundred sixty five we were worried about what was happening in china and this is what eventually brought me to work in san diego the u s wanted to overfly red china at very high altitudes out to tubes of seventy thousand feet or above they needed a new aircraft one that was still when they had radar absorbing the one that had an engine capable of flying at very high altitude all the oldies reconnaissance drones were successful they were quite expensive to operate because they required other aircraft flight crews and complex recovery operations and the air force began to consider other options for the mission so ryan was given a contract to build an airplane compass arrow twenty eight of these airplanes were built none went into service my belief is that the s are seventy one was the first known attempt to put a missile on a drone started with a program called have a lemon began in one thousand seventy one a number of fire beams were equipped with vehicle drones are what they're called today these drones were called b q i'm thirty four a's and starting in late one thousand nine hundred seventy one they performed remote controlled strikes on simulated air defense flying in a c one thirty would look at what the drone was looking at and let's say he saw a crowd of dust coming up from the roadway he would steer the drone to get closer to the cloud of dust let's v seeker and now you're looking at the pilot was looking at what the maverick missile was looking at some distance from the target a light would go on and the pilot's console indicating the missile was within target range of the target he would then launch the missiles which would then steer toward the car here destroying the results were acceptable but politically the culture in the air force didn't want to accept the use of an unmanned aircraft to wipe out a target and so monies were withheld and the program was terminated nevertheless the funding for drone development continued during the one nine hundred seventy s bryant continued to fly cas program demonstrated the feasibility of twenty four hours of the fifty five thousand feet we also put a payload in the nose it was a u two payload we flew that off cape canaveral florida gathering information proving the airplane could get out of the way of manned aircraft on the carter from new york to miami we were controlled by a out of atlanta and the tests were successful and fortunately the production contract was awarded to boeing and fortunately for ryan and unfortunately for me since i worked at ryan we  protested to you ward the air force decided in boeing's favor however the program was cancelled and the air force drone program officer of right field was suspended so that left  aircraft over the andes into central and south america and that expedition was a early head of its time and it was written up in life magazine in fact they were on the cover of life and they subsequently developed several businesses including the plantations in south america but much more recently they've been and got involved in natural beautician utilities and other areas of energy when they had an opportunity to acquire general comics and at that very same time general a comic's new defense division begin a project to develop an on aircraft system our position in this new field took a real big step forward in nine hundred ninety one when the company acquired the assets of another firm called leading systems incorporated of irvine california they had developed the net seven hundred fifty that a little insect that was a small unmanned aircraft under a government program then in nineteen ninety four the navy naval air said systems command that's a naval air systems command awarded general atomics a contract for ten tactical in durance unmanned aircraft that would meet the navy's need for a system that could carry forty five pounds  to an out of two to twenty five thousand feet general atomics was tasked to deliver a scaled up surgeon of the earlier now seven fifty that would be ready to deploy within twelve months fantastic company a patriotic company i know the owners they love america lyndon blues who's one of the c e o s of the company is a former air force pilot and they they do they just have great great people it's a type of they are the type of jobs you want in your district and the type of manufacturing you want in this country and they're relatively cheap for the bang that they provide for the buck that makes sense still a whole lot cheaper to fly a reaper than an an f if seen with a a a man to fifteen if you talk to him they try to to mask off the fact that these two this company and this congressman are very very friendly with each other lyndon blue in fact was his campaign finance chair person in two thousand and eight and so what he did was he basically who or when you're when you're the candidate running against somebody like this you're not running against duncan hunter you're running against lyndon blue in general atomics that's your adversary because lyndon blue can go out to all of his friends get all the money in a big pile in and pass and then once he amasses a couple million dollars he sends it to all of the other candidates doesn't spend it on this campaign spending any money here at all i think sixteen thousand dollars all they spent on this campaign the other i think three and a half million dollars went to all of the other candidates across the country in close races thus those right leaning candidates that would that were all saying i want to expand the military budget i want to make it i want to make us more safe and so forth put those people in so that his contracts will be renewed and years to co the amount of government money funneled to general thomas is truly staggering five point three billion dollars over the next ten years in amounts to over one hundred thousand dollars per capita for the population of power way california where about four thousand people are employed at the general atomics facility similar funding goes to northrop grumman raytheon and other contractors working on drone technology in virginia and throughout the country we're in a situation now where these workers and i've talked to them that work at general atomics they say well you know i kind of don't like what i'm working on because i don't really like warfare some of these people are  progressive and liberal you know people that really don't like warfare but they say in the back of my mind i'm thinking i'd like to have that war way over there keep going for almost forever to keep my job security  so setting up some tamil piece here for exhibition we were able to find predator predator drone cough and unmanned aerial vehicle container ships for seventeen thousand six hundred forty seven dollars by way of the u s taxpayer and we were able to acquire it on craigslist for three hundred dollars and there's a surplus bulk of think there were nine of them originally the in the area and gentleman we found dave in the gym and his dog out in r mona happen to have two of them and they just were trying to get rid of them so we figured we needed to find a way to take it as a ready made object and insert it back into the landscape or to figure out a way to you know tha some dialogue about accountability for the industries that we produce here locally are the ones that were part of having acquired this on craigslist we were sort of we were kind of struck by everything that's implied within it in terms of it being sort of links to this region specifically and we were trying to think of some way to amplify that and i think by batting around a d is we eventually arrived at sort of one modifying it as a kind of quasi little unit and then secondly to sort of take it out as a sort of sentinel with which to visualize the military industrial complex landscape in san diego something that is otherwise doesn't call a lot of spectacular attention to itself even though it's you know even though it's such a significant decade not economic driver in the region so as part of a part of the performance or part of sort of taking it around the region in order to sort of visualize it in that landscape or so that we could use it kind of as a prism through which to kind of  see here and just sort of hung out for forty five minutes to an hour or so when we had sufficiently documented everything we began sort of man handling it back into the u haul truck and  at that point an employee of general atomics saw sauce doing this kind of out of context of the original performance and so he became alarmed and alerted the authorities that  predator drone was being stolen what we did was we did some modest modifications to the project to convert it into a two bedroom camper that can be pushed around the town but we use that as a tour of photo pilt pilgrimage that happened through the last two weeks running about in various military industrial complex sites nasco shipyard several miles down the road we got swarmed by police cruisers at that point i had sort of thought oh this is where we learned that it's illegal for this thing to be hanging seven feet out the back of the trailer  then when i saw the cop get out with a shotgun in my rear view here it was thinking that things were a little bit more serious so myself and the passenger moeller were apprehended we were you  know face down on the asphalt in traffic with shotguns pointed at us and we were sequestered in separate police cruisers while the sheriffs went around and assess the situation and after about forty five minutes of corroborat stories they were able to sort of conclude that we we were within our legal rights to own this thing and that it was no really nothing more than a glorified ammo case so they  let us go right there so i mean i think the project for everybody is trying to be a greater performance and then see how we can convert it into design studio pedagogic where we can begin to talk about industry ethics locally  we can start raising some of these questions as to how does the industry butter its bread what are the strong ties to the history of you know this the suburbanization of warfare as as inherently occurred in southern california most notably san diego with the second largest naval installation and i believe two hundred fifty billion dollars annually consumed by the top nine private defense contractors in the region so we want to bring accountability that we want to talk we want to you know find ways that are that are functioning and soft in the sense that are not easily dismissive so there is a handful of fascinating things on the box itself when we acquired it if you read this shipping label closely there's a sort of a return address to keep creech support center which is the air force base that they pilot nice things from about forty five minutes northwest of los vegas and then the  address to operation enduring freedom kandahar afghanistan which sort of locates this piece of hardware in contemporary history i think and then we we made some additions to it including sort of the world war two style in those art where there is usually kind of a central cartoon character or a pin up girl usually the cartoon character was riding a bomb and then usually in world war two bombers that have swastikas or something to designate the amount of nazi targets hit or something like that so in keeping with the kind of with tourism in the military in san diego over our mascot a sham you use sort of piloting a drone remotely it's kind of in in the vein of an angry bomber pilot with a cigar and everything in the tank or tattoo and i guess the slogan comes from a postcard i have on my refrigerator shamoun it says san diego is killer so yeah and then the little as sort of the hit markers but then we also have the kind of nascar defense contractor logos so even though this this box is specifically for a general atomics developed thing we've got war in boeing and northrop grumman general dynamics at the i c c general atomics and all of those came from a list of the top ten largest military contracts with the department of defense and i think eight of which are have significant presence in san diego so what we have then are these operations going on that debt persist because these companies want to continue making money from the government general atomics is not a free market company it is not a capitalistic company it is scum politically a creature of the taxpayer gets all of its money from the government it is essentially an expansion of the government into this sort of private enterprise allowing these people become multibillionaires by sucking money from the taxpayer and putting it into this big pile over here and what are they doing they're making all kinds of sometimes going on forever in fact i talked to somebody who used to work at general atomics before it was bought by i believe it was before it was bought by  know they just kind of want to keep trying things and keep their jobs and and and keep this thing going you know they never really want to try to think in this big reactor which is take so much money to get started but you know the people there capture the imaginary imagination it's it's usually a combination of of things like that it's not always that something is so lovely you know it's that kind of odd combination of something which is actually what could be really cute but also quite lethal something which is quite quite extraordinary and captivating but also really disturbing i think drones do that the ultimate in you know a weapon that doesn't really doesn't require any of our knowledge is very cheap cheap way to fight a war no casualties on the american side perfect there's but there's a fascination or some sort of a fascination of human beings and this is what maybe keeps us in these wars there's a fascination of hunting of you know get the other guy that is maybe  something inherent in this and in the in the human construct that i don't know what's behind that or why we have to have the wars but it be great if we move away from war and move on to the things we need to solve