Lou Reed: Drones "All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music." (original) (raw)
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
To See Without Being Seen: Contemporary Art and Drone Warfare
2016
Considering an international array of video, sculpture, installation, photography, and web-based projects, this volume, the catalog for a recent exhibition at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, reveals the unique potential of art to further our understanding of, and give visual form to, modern drone warfare and digital surveillance. These essays illuminate how the drone embodies a far-reaching discussion about the rapidly shifting conditions of perception—of seeing, and of being seen—made possible by advanced technology. What is the relation of machine vision to human vision? And how do visual technologies affect our understanding of the agency of images, and of ourselves? Featuring scholarly essays along with texts by contributing artists Trevor Paglen and Hito Steyerl, To See Without Being Seen is a perceptive contribution to the emerging literature on contemporary artistic practice, war, surveillance, and technology. http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/T/bo25078364.html
Making the drone strange: the politics, aesthetics and surrealism of levitation
Geographica Helvetica, 2016
In this paper I decentre the drone from a different kind of vertical figure that has its own prehistory and parallel history of being aloft and particular sets of aesthetic geographies we might productively deploy to reorder what we think about drones, and especially the human's place in or outside of them. The paper explores in what ways we might examine the drone from other points of view that are technical and political, but also theological, magical, artistic and aesthetic. The prehistoric or parallel aerial figure to be considered is the levitator, the subject or thing that floats without any attributable mechanical force, visible or physical energy source. The paper draws on notions of aesthetics and politics in order for the levitator not to be compared with the drone, but to enable its very different visual and aesthetic regimes to begin to redistribute quite a different set of drone geographies that are ambiguous, mystical, gendered and sexed.
2020
Her research focuses on media for architectural design representation. Her writings include "PICarchitecTURE. Il medium è il montaggio" (2013), in which she tracks the purposes and the evolution of montage in architecture. From the Wall to the Pavement and Back. Murals in the Epoch of Drones. [with an interview with the artist Giulio Vesprini] Two phenomena undoubtedly represent our times: drones and street art. Both hit the headlines, are viral, versatile; ignoring them is impossible. In recent years, as flagships of technology and contemporary art, they have experienced points of contact and fusion, a kind of 'symbiotic short circuit' between the two. On the one hand, the image plane of street art has flipped from vertical to horizontal-roofs, the pavement, basketball courts-so passers by do not see the murals on their walks through the streets, but rather through the computer's eye, which displays satellite maps and drone footage spread through social networks. On the other hand, the movement of drones has changed from predominantly horizontal to vertical when used as piloted or automated hands to spray the city walls. This paper retraces and reflects on the fusion in progress between street art, urban planning,