Lou Reed: Drones "All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music." (original) (raw)
Related papers
Analyses of the works of Bill Viola have been extensive, which often emphasize his use of time-distortion technology, religious iconography, and dazzling imagery. The consideration of his approach to sound, however, has only been sporadic. This article investigates Viola's interest in drones in particular, and examines the interaction between drones and slow-moving images of figures in water. A survey of Viola's earlier works demonstrates that drones have played a significant role in his artistic production. Using Five Angels for the Millennium (2001) as a starting point, this article attempts to identify and analyse that role, and argues that it is related to his exploration of time and expanded perception. This article places Viola's use of sound squarely within recent debates about new media art's emphasis on embodied experience, tempo-rality, and immersion.
New Formations, 2017
'Drone Poetics' considers the challenge to the theory and practice of the lyric of the development of drone warfare. It argues that modernist writing has historically been influenced by aerial technology; drones also affect notions of perception, distance and intimacy, and the self-policing subject, with consequences for contemporary lyric. Indeed, drone artworks and poems proliferate; and while these take critical perspectives on drone operations, they have not reckoned with the phenomenological implications of execution from the air. I draw out six of these: the objectification of the target, the domination of visuality, psychic and operational splitting, the 'everywhere war', the intimacy of keyhole observations, and the mythic or psychoanalytic representation of desire and fear. These six tropes indicate the necessity for a radical revision of our thinking about the practice of writing committed poetry in the drone age.
Artistic Politics of the Drone
The shape reminds of a little spaceship, the sound feels uncanny—like a swarm of bees. Its movement seems beautifully shy and aggressive at the same time and its cyborg-like nature seems somehow human. Drones are the centerpiece of my current research and artistic practice and I realized the dangers and potential dilemmas first hand. One day, my drone just disappeared. I lost the connection. The drone took off as usual, then suddenly accelerated and turned towards the middle of a lake as if it had a mind of its own. It turned right and was gone. Maybe someone else hacked the remote, maybe it was a technical glitch, maybe the drone had taken control over itself. When looking up the word “drone” one reads about recent collisions with planes and the horrific reality of drone strikes. But drones also provide new forms for artistic expression and journalistic investigation. Drawn by both the threatening and beautiful aspects of these new technologies, I am trying to further explore our relationship with drones through my arts practice but also through a theoretical approach. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger has argued that we will never be able to explore our relation to technology as long as we think about it as something only technological. Thought to the end, this would mean that we remain unfree, chained to the technology, no matter if we approve it or deny it. The most dangerous thing would be to see technology as something neutral, because then we would be completely at the mercy of it and remain blind for its essence. Instead, we should be questioning technology. Heidegger’s idea of the essence of technology is both technical and poetic. In the essence, he sees a disclosure rather than a mean. One way of approaching this issue with Heidegger is by art, as this area is connected to technology but completely different to it at the same time. Thus the interest in researching about the drone lies in exploring a new technological tool and perspective which I think could develop into a new practice of contemporary art. Against the backdrop of these thoughts, it is vital to shift our focus away from attempts to control these technologies and push aside fears that they could control us one day. Rather we should be questioning these new forms of technology and try to understand their essence, in terms of their origin, their relation to the human and our common future. Heidegger’s advice seems topically relevant, at a time in which we seem to sleepwalk into a future of observation and control. In social but also political terms, it is essential to reflect on how this future would look like, as we can expect the use of drones in logistic, military and other areas to increase significantly. This not only means raising questions on ethical and legally issues amongst many others but more import: How this will affect being human in general?
This essay appears 'Hyenas of the Battlefield, Machines in the Garden', a monograph of recent work by artist Lisa Barnard. London: GOST Books, 2014.
Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 2022
Between 1963 and 1966, John Cale, Tony Conrad, La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela and a handful of other collaborators rehearsed together on a daily basis. Held since then in the archive at Young and Zazeela's Church Street apartment in New York City, the tapes of the Theatre of Eternal Music have become obscure objects of fascination and mystery for experimental music fans. They have also been at the centre of disputes over the authorial propriety of the drones that they record. This paper offers a material history of those tapes as they circulate online. By tracking and organizing the available bootlegs, I trace the ensemble's changing sonic self-conception as it moved from a composer-led ensemble supporting Young's saxophone improvisations to an egalitarian collective constituted in its dedication to the daily practice of listening from 'inside the sound'. The contract that accompanied a reel-to-reel tape of Sunday Morning Blues likely gave Cornelius Cardew a laugh. It stipulated, his biographer and long-time collaborator John Tilbury writes, that the tape be returned 'immediately on demand'; that Cardew 'agrees not to perform the Tape or the actual music recorded on the Tape, publicly or for profit'; that he 'agrees not to permit any copy of the Tape or the music on the Tape to be made on tapes or recorders or any other form of reproduction', that he 'agrees not to perform the Tape or any of the music recorded on the Tape at private gatherings where it has been previously announced that the Tape shall be performed'; that he 'agrees not to permit any kind of performance, copy, or reproduction of the Tape or the music recorded on the Tape, without the express written consent of the composer'; and so forth. 1 In the contract dated 4 May 1967, La Monte Young was carefully defending from free circulation a recording he had made on 12 January 1964 with his collaborators John Cale, Tony Conrad, Angus MacLise and Marian Zazeela. Tilbury tells us that Cardew
forthcoming in Culturemachince
The drone is the signature object of the contemporary moment, incarnating a quasi-theological power to see and to kill. The danger of trying to analyse the drone is that we reproduce the image of this theological or metaphysical power, embracing the discourse of techno-fetishism that surrounds it. Here I analyse this discourse primarily through a series of literary, visual, and philosophical discourses that while pre-drone predict and probe the metaphysics of drones. This metaphysics toys with the possibility of a fully-automated or subject-less weapon, which integrates and deploys the human. Counter-drone discourses have tended to emphasise the human element in the “kill-chain” to disrupt this discourse of technological perfection. This is necessary, but my concern is with how notions of integration, acceleration, and “loading” suggest the drone “assemblage” is one which constantly includes the human through transforming the human into a dream of transcendence. The attempt to stress the banality of the drone as just another weapon does not counter this metaphysics, which aims to integrate the messy materiality of the human into “autonomous acceleration.” To resort to messy materiality as a counter remains within the ambit of drone metaphysics and instead, I suggest, we have to attend to the disruption and negations at work within the discourse of transformation and acceleration that surrounds and finds its destination in the drone.
Drones are in the air. The production of civilian drones for rescue, transport, and leisure activity is booming. The Danish government proclaimed civilian drones a national strategy in 2016. Accordingly, many research institutions as well as the industry focus on the development, usage, and promotion of drone technology. These efforts often prioritize commercialization and engineering as well as setting-up UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) test centers. As a result, urgent questions regarding how drone technology impacts our identity as humans as well as its effects on how we envision the human society are frequently underexposed in these initiatives.
Inner-Sense and Experience: Drone Music, Esotericism and the Hieroeidetic Field
Sustain/Decay, Owen Coggins, James Harris, eds., forthcoming (Voidfront press 2017). As a musical genre that has blossomed alongside the development of the ‘post-secular’ religious sensibility, drone music invariably attracts mystically-loaded hyperboles such as ‘transcendent’, ‘ecstatic’ – and even ‘tantric’. But, moving beyond journalistic cliché, to what extent do philosophies or practices that we might categorise as mystical or ‘esoteric’ actually shape the experience of creating and listening to drone music? To explore this question, we will further develop the concept of hieroeideticacy, casting it as a concept of central importance to the psychological experience of creating and appreciating music that posits itself within the esoteric. We will begin by ‘reverse engineering’ one of Versluis’ historical case studies in order to isolate particular themes or ‘building blocks’ implicit in the concept. We will then explore the work of sound artist Kim Cascone through a hieroeidetic lens, with particular attention to his concepts of auditory ‘grain’ and ‘subtle listening’. From here, we will take a reflexive turn, to explore how an initiation into Cascone’s work has affected my own recent collaborative musical work. Finally, we will discuss the implications of musical hieroeideticacy, with particular regard to notions of authenticity, experience and the formulation of ‘ritual drone’.
Media-N
Access and habituation are socio-cultural forces that have acted to domesticate the drone in contemporary society. Initially a military tool for surveillance, drones took on the role of munitions platforms providing a means to conduct military operations without physical risk to their operators. As the critiques and visibility of drones in our military and foreign policy grew, we began to witness artists engaging critically with the policies and impact these technologies have on redefining and controlling geographies and human bodies alike. Drone On revisits the 2015 Art2Drone catalog by v1b3:video in the built environemnt. This online exhibition and catalog features twenty art works and three critical essays.