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
8-10 December 2020
UNSW Media Futures Hub
David Beesley
Flying Underground: an ethnographic view of the Melbourne personal drone scene, 2014
Flying Underground I: Bradmill
Flying Underground II: Batcave
Flying Underground III: Cage
Flying Underground will screen on Thursday 10th December at 11am (AEDT) as part of the Drone Methods Panel
Today personal drones, also termed as remotely piloted aircraft systems under two kilograms gross weight, are a rapidly maturing technology that can be considered ‘mainstream’, but, as recently as five years ago, such technologies were deemed nascent, as was the regulatory environment governing conditions of use, hence creating an underground subculture. This presentation, using case study, video documentary and reflections on personal practice, undertakes an auto-ethnographic examination of the Melbourne personal drone scene in 2014 and investigates the challenges faced by the then fledgling and emerging drone communities that were using personal drones for recreational purposes. ‘Recreational purposes’ is a term used by CASA, Australia’s civil aviation safety and regulatory authority, that encompasses remotely piloted aircraft usage that is not deemed military or commercial. In the civilian realm this encompasses sport, recreation, and creative applications where flying is increasingly of secondary concern.
David Beesley is a media professional, documentary film maker, and technical services manager with the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. He is presently completing his PhD ‘Head in the Clouds: documenting the rise of drone culture’, which is a project-based longitudinal ethnographic documentary looking at the significance of personal drone cultures in Melbourne, Australia.