For X-Space, Jamie Wagg proposed a one-to-one digital encounter with a B-52 bomber. Existing entirely at full scale, the work denied viewers any complete overview, transforming military technology into an immersive monochrome and reconsidering the possibilities of history painting within a networked environment.
Full size 1:1 scale, B-52
Full Spectrum Dominance
Commissioned by INIVA for X-Space, Full Spectrum Dominance proposed the construction of a full-size, one-to-one representation of a Boeing B-52 Stratofortress. The work was conceived not as a sculptural object but as an online environment whose scale could never be comprehended in a single view.
Visitors entered the work at full scale. Their viewpoint was positioned so close to the aircraft that only its surface was visible: an uninterrupted field of military grey. Stepping backwards was impossible. As viewers navigated the work, they travelled along the fuselage and wings, yet could never occupy a position from which the aircraft could be seen in its entirety. Reaching one edge of the bomber simply returned them to another surface, creating a continuous, seemingly endless encounter with the machine.
The project transformed the B-52 into a form of monochrome painting. What appeared initially as a field of minimalist grey gradually revealed itself as the surface of one of the most destructive military technologies of the twentieth century. The work asked whether abstraction could still function as a form of history painting, and whether a monochrome surface might carry historical and political meaning without depicting violence directly.
Unlike Goya’s Disasters of War, the project contained no bodies, ruins or scenes of destruction. It proposed that contemporary warfare no longer requires representation in the traditional sense. The consequences of military power are already mediated through photography, television and the internet. Rather than illustrating destruction, the work confronted viewers with the technological object that makes such destruction possible, while denying them the detached perspective necessary to comprehend it.
Seen today, Full Spectrum Dominance anticipates many of the questions that continue to shape Wagg’s practice. It investigates how scale structures understanding; how systems of representation determine what can and cannot be seen; and how historical knowledge is constructed through the viewer’s relationship to images rather than through images alone. The work is less concerned with the B-52 itself than with the conditions under which contemporary history becomes visible.
One unexpected consequence of constructing the work emerged only during its exhibition. Because the bomber existed as an image on a computer screen, viewers inevitably saw their own reflection superimposed onto its surface. The work therefore refused the detached position traditionally occupied by the spectator. Looking at the aircraft also meant seeing oneself looking.
The reflection subtly implicated the viewer within the work. It suggested that military technologies cannot simply be observed from a position of critical distance; they exist within the same political, technological and economic systems that also produce the spectator. The screen became both window and mirror, collapsing the distinction between observer and observed.
In retrospect, this moment anticipates a recurring concern throughout Wagg’s later practice: the viewer is never external to the historical systems they seek to understand. Whether confronting surveillance, colonial archives or contemporary warfare, the work repeatedly questions the possibility of an innocent or detached gaze.