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 Witnessing: Technologies of Perception in War and Culture
"Drone Witnessing: Technologies of Perception in War and Culture" is a projected funded by Australian Discovery Early Career Researcher Award Fellowship DE190100486 (2019-2021), held by Dr Michael Richardson, a Senior Research Fellow in the School of the Arts and Media, University of New South Wales. The project investigates how drones and other technologies of perception are changing how we bear witness and determine the meaning, importance and truth of events. This project seeks to generate new knowledge about the impact of drone warfare and surveillance on forms and processes of witnessing by analysing both primary and creative texts and by conducting field research into new practices of testimony.
Michael Richardson is Senior Research Fellow in the School of the Arts & Media, UNSW. His transdisciplinary research investigates the intersection of affect, power and violence in culture, media and politics. He is the author of Gestures of Testimony: Torture, Trauma and Affect in Literature (Bloomsbury 2016), as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters. Currently, he is working on two new book projects, with the working titles of Nonhuman Witnessing: Affect, Matter and Media After the End of the World and Drone Visions.
UNSW Profile | Academia.edu | @richardson_m_a
Madelene Veber is Research Assistant for Drone Witnessing, and an RTP-awarded PhD Candidate in the School of Social Sciences, UNSW. Drawing attention to the complex social and moral responses to nonhuman error, Madelene’s research examines the status of the individual subject in relation to contemporary processes for measuring ethical conduct and responsibility. She collaborates on projects in media and social studies, film, and education.
