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
DRONE
CULTURES
an interdisciplinary
symposium
Kate Richards
8-10 December 2020
UNSW Media Futures Hub
A Drone Opera
A Drone Opera is screening on Tuesday, 8th December at 11.45am (AEDT), as part of the Drone Cultures Symposium
A Drone Opera is a poetic and visceral expression of the contemporary abstraction of unmanned flight and our new reality of constant surveillance. This cinematic installation presents a uniquely seductive world featuring custom built drones with live video feeds, laser set-design, opera singers and an original libretto that combine to explore our broader love affair with technology. Loosely structured around the myth of Icarus, A Drone Opera provides a lens through which to view the promise of new technology and our hubris about its potential, while fragments from Ovid’s The Fall of Icarus are sung at key moments to drive a loose narrative of desire, fear and destruction.
Directed by Matt Sleeth; Produced by Kate Richards; Written and Edited by Sleeth and Richards.
Kate Richards is a Sydney-based new media artist, producer and academic. Her media art works have widely leveraged most new media platforms and channels, from generative software to interactive projections and VR. She has exhibited at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, The Performance Space, Carriageworks, the Blake Prize Director’s Cut, The Australian Centre for Photography, The Centre for Contemporary Photography Melbourne, the International Symposium for Electronic Art Sydney, Belfast and Helsinki, Experimenta, the Art Gallery of NSW and the Sydney Opera House amongst others. As a new media dramaturge, Kate has brought her considerable experience to theatre groups such as Sydney’s Urban Theatre Projects and Stalker. Kate has also produced multimedia projects for a variety of clients including Badanami Centre for Indigenous Education, Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority, Sydney Olympic Park, The Australian War Memorial, Landini Associates, the Museum of Sydney and the Justice and Police Museum. Kate’s recent projects include a WebGL environment for Badanami Centre for Indigenous Education; a 5 min VR using archival hand tinted images of Sydney’s The Rocks; consulting on a VIVE VR project for Urban Theatre Projects and designing/producing a drum simulation environment for Paramedics.