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 Chesworth
Earthwork
Drone warfare adumbrations in Robert Smithson’s Site/Nonsite artworks
Earthwork will screen on Wednesday 11am (AEDT) as part of the Drone Arts Screening Session. The paper, Drone warfare adumbrations will be presented during the Drone Arts Panel.
Robert Smithson was a seminal American artist and writer known for pioneering the Land Art movement in the 1960s and early 70s. This presentation will explore the parallels between Robert Smithson’s famous Site/Nonsite dialectic and the methodology of drone warfare.
This paper's analysis of Smithson’s Nonsite artwork, Gravel Mirrors with Cracks and Dust, investigates why it was encountered by Chesworth as a reification of drone warfare. To this end, this paper compares Smithson’s 'Nonsite' framing concepts with ‘systems’ processes, in which alternative concepts of site exist in cybernetic oscillation, whereby a site is ‘understood’ through a virtual site (a Nonsite). I assert that systems processes inform Smithson’s Nonsites but that the artist deliberately introduces experiential and conceptual paradoxes, which systems methodology normally seeks to eliminate.
Earthwork’s two images of site: one framed within the other, can be thought of as alluding to systemised relations between Site/Nonsite. Earthwork attempts this by representing relationships between actual and virtual sites similar to those encountered in a theatre of war. In this artwork, the actual site is represented by a destroyed Western suburban landscape (supplanting the location of the Iraq desert), and the virtual site is represented by the smaller nested image of data sets and mappings that allude to representations and conceptions of the actual site based on collected data.
David Chesworth is an artist and composer who creates installations, artworks, and music in a wide range of contexts. His video artworks with Sonia Leber are speculative and archaeological, responding to architectural, social, and technological settings. Their artworks have been exhibited at the Venice and Sydney Biennales, Art Gallery of NSW, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art and the National Gallery of Victoria. They recently had a major survey of their practice that toured to galleries in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.
In 2018, David received a doctorate from Monash University for research into ontologies of engagement. David is currently a Vice-Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Art, RMIT University.