Heba Y. Amin

Documenting the development of a multidimensional and ongoing work on the politics of aerial surveillance.

In 2013, Egyptian authorities detained a migratory stork for espionage. This incident is the focus of Heba Y. Amin's The General's Stork, an ongoing project that investigates the politics of aerial surveillance—against the backdrop of biblical prophecies, drone warfare, and colonial narratives—from a bird's-eye view. The research that informs The General's Stork looks at how conquest from the sky—through land surveying, mapping, bombing, and drone technologies—has effectively transformed Western power into a spectacle of high-tech weaponry. Through the lens of paranoia that can lead to a bird being accused of spying, this volume reveals, with the indispensable work of contributors Adam Harvey, Adel Iskandar, Haitham Mossad, and Laura Poitras, the extent to which military techniques of visualization define and ultimately delimit the topography of the Middle East.