Anne Scott Wilson
'X' Marks the Spot
Seeing Not Looking
‘X Marks the Spot’ and ‘Seeing Not Looking’ are art works that explore tensions between Artificial and Human Intelligence. Using an inverted game technology, in which the performers become active participants ‘seen’ by an automated drone camera, power relationships rise to the surface over time. Problems inherent in the notion of AI thought of as communicative, are challenged, raising questions about what is it to be human when measured or surveill-ed by drone technology. By presenting video excerpts of both works I would like to talk to these problems through an analysis of the artistic decisions made in each work and what is revealed through practice led research.
Anne Scott Wilson is a Lecturer in Art and Performance at Deakin University, member of the Art and Architecture research group #VacantGeelong. She sustains a solo art practice, curates and devises projects with colleagues at various Universities. Anne is a Committee Member of the Wyndham Council’s Art and Heritage Portfolio in 2018/19. She is a recipient in 2018 of an Australia Council for the Arts Development Grant which has facilitated research with ARS Electronica and has received grants and residencies from Government Funding bodies, and philanthropic organisations. She received her PhD from Monash University in 2009 titled ‘Memory, Motion and imagination: an investigation into the subjective experience of studio practice.’ 'X' Marks the Spot is in collaboration with Shelley Hannigan and Cameron Bishop.
Anna Munster and Michele Barker
Ecologies of Duration
Ecologies of Duration is comprised of several infinitely looped moving image works, using up to three monitors, that have emerged from experimentation with drones: filming in close proximity to trace geoformations; developing techniques in which the moving image appears to both zoom in and recede from its ‘target’; and filming in visually obscured natural circumstances such as fog or mist. Each ‘ecology’ (each pair of monitors) presents a doubled view ‘from below’ or alongside nonhuman ‘natural’ landscapes’. These ‘ecologies’ try to imagine a nonhuman nonaerial drone scape and together ask: how else might drones see? In the panel presentation, we will discuss the making of these works in the context of the above problems posed by an ongoing aesthetics of the aerialised earth.
A/ Prof Anna Munster is the Acting Deputy Director of NIEA. She has international profile as both a practitioner and prominent theorist in art. Munster has two published books: Materializing New Media (Dartmouth College Press, 2006) and An Aesthesia of Networks (MIT Press, 2013). She has been a Chief Investigator on ARC Linkage and Discovery Projects focused on new media, visualisation and digital art.
Dr Michele Barker works in the field of new media arts, exhibiting extensively both in Australia and overseas. Barker has contributed to the field of new media arts extensively via her engagement as a research-oriented practitioner. Her artwork addresses issues of perception, subjectivity, genetics and neuroscience, and her research has focused on the relationship between digital technologies, medical and scientific applications, and end-user responses..
David Chesworth
Earthwork
Drone warfare adumbrations in Robert Smithson’s Site/Nonsite artworks
Vaughan Wozniak-O'Connor
8-10 December 2020
UNSW Media Futures Hub
Drone Studies: Fused Geospatial and Emotional Response data visualisations.
Drone Studies will be presented on Thursday 10th December at 11am (AEDT) as part of the Drone Methods Panel
This paper focusses on practice-based research conducted as part of an artist residency at Holocenter, New York in 2017. In this residency, a prosumer DJI Mavic drone was used to navigate Governor’s Island. While piloting, Wozniak-O'Connor's emotional response was recorded via Galvanic Skin Response, correlated to individual flights.
Instead of mapping emotional cartographies, my practice-led research uses biofeedback to complicate geospatial data. This suggests an expanded idea of drawing, which parallels the transcriptive associations of gestural drawing. In gestural drawing, the body’s emotional state is transcribed through the hand affect the drawn mark. This configuration of civilian drone tracking and biofeedback data works to a similar extent; using embodied data to intervene into the legibility of geospatial tracking data recorded during drone flights. In doing so, this paper attempts to reemphasize the role of the body within geospatial data, which is largely absent in pervasive geospatial interfaces such as Google Maps. In drone piloting, the body actively produces geospatial route data, which is registered in Keyhole Markup Language as innumerable controller inputs and button toggles. However, the traces of the body are ghosted by the data visualisations, to which Wozniak O'Connor's practice-based research intervenes. By examining practice-experimentation, this paper outline expanded drawing practices that emphasize the presence of the body within emerging drone technologies.
Vaughan Wozniak- O’Connor is an artist and digital holographer based in Sydney.
In particular, his work has explored artist-led approaches to terrain visualisation and geospatial tracking technologies. Recent research has explored the technical and theoretical convergence of terrain and biometric mapping technologies, combining GPS with data from wearable devices such as the Fitbit. Vaughan has exhibited extensively locally at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Carriageworks, C3 Contemporary, Firstdraft Gallery and Casula Powerhouse. International exhibitions and residencies include Holocenter (USA), BKZ Studios (Germany) and Museu da Cidade de Aveiro (Portugal), with grants from Parramatta City Council and MGNSW. He is currently undertaking a PhD Media Art at UNSW Art and Design/Built Environment.