War as constant competition: The weaponized future and the fantasy of total control.

This chapter was published in the monograph Topologies of Air - Shona Illingworth. The book profiled Topologies of Air and Lesions in the Landscape, two major bodies of work by Shona Illingworth. Informed by the artist’s long-term investigations into individual and societal amnesia, these projects critically examine the devastating psychological and environmental impacts of military, industrial, and corporate transformations of airspace and outer space.

This chapter by Andrew Hoskins and Shona Illingworth examines how the sky is rapidly becoming a source of existential threat, anxiety, and increased hyper-vigilance. Driven by a militarized imaginary and the fantasy of total control, the colonization of airspace and outer space is accelerating through the expansion of digital technologies and the algorithmic creep into weaponized spaces of surveillance and never-ending war.