In these days of drone warfare, the targets of our modern weaponry can sometimes be made nameless by the remoteness of the operator. This remoteness is the target of the latest work by artist Jonathan Fletcher Moore, based in Los Angeles, California. The piece is called “Artificial Killing Machine”.

A Raspberry Pi is used to mine the API of a public database of US military drone strikes. Based on the data it finds there, it triggers the firing of downwards-facing cap guns. Until you see it in action, as you can in the video below, you can’t understand how chilling it is.

The data is also printed out on receipt paper, further hammering home how cheap life becomes when it is reduced to a simple statistic. Read a lot more about the piece here.