Here Come the Drones!

At the Furtherfield Gallery, London, now until 26th May.

From their website:

“The devices that once populated the creepy dystopian futures of science fiction have broken through into our daily reality.

Drones of dozens of different types are becoming a part of everyday life. They scout our public (and private) spaces, carrying out surveillance or reconnaissance in the service of nation states and as unmanned robotic tools, armed with missiles and bombs, acting in defence of “national security”.”

Includes Bit Plane by Bureau of Inverse Technology (Natalie Jeremijenko and Kate Rich), Parallel by Lawrence Bird, The Private Life of a Drone by Patrick Lichty, Lines by Dave Miller and Gavin Stewart, TELEWAR by Dave Young and The Force of Freedom and Moveable Borders – The Reposition Matrix by Dave Young. The latter forms the central installation for the whole exhibition:

“The Reposition Matrix aims to reterritorialise the drone as a physical, industrially-produced technology of war through the creation of an open-access database: a ‘reposition matrix’ that geopolitically situates the organisations, locations, and trading networks that play a role in the production of military drone technologies.”

Situational awareness

geographical imaginations

brighton-festival-2013Two art projects from Lighthouseat the Brighton Festival in the UK this month (4-26 May); thanks to Sam Hind for the information.

 James Bridles work will be familiar to most readers, and in Brighton he’s reprising his Under the shadow of the drone, which is a true-to-scale rendering of a Reaper, this time on the seafront:

The stark marking out in an unexpected public space of a Reaper drone’s silhouette brings the reality of these technologies into our daily lives. The work critiques the way that contemporary networked technologies, while enabling the digitally saturated culture of the 21st century, can also obscure and distance us from political and moral responsibility.

Bridle explains:

“Drones are just the latest in a long line of military technologies augmenting the process of death-dealing, but they are among the most efficient, the most distancing, the most invisible. These qualities allow…

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