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We might know American drones are killing hundreds of people every year, but it's not something we truly have a handle on. That's because those people are usually dying far away from where we are and because the machines that are raining death are unmanned and so less real. But mostly we don't realise how many are dying because we aren't told about them.

Now, two artists from Los Angeles have invented a unique device to remind us of the exact number of people dying because of US military drone attacks. Jonathan Fletcher Moore and Fabio Piparo, came up with an autonomous machine that uses information and data from the public database on US drone killings to visualize the deaths instantly.

A single chair is placed in the center of the room where the machine is installed. Every time, there is a US drone attack anywhere in the world, a small toy gun attached to the machine fires, and right afterwards, a printer starts printing the number of deaths, something like “Town-Shawal, Country – Pakistan, Minimum deaths – 6, Maximum deaths – 7."

The machine uses open-source microcontrollers known as Raspberry Pi that fetch data from the public database. That means every time there is a drone attack, the gun's trigger gets automatically pulled, making up for the lack of visceral reaction that goes missing because of the killing that is happening in a far-off war zone.