“The Future Is Unmanned” presented by Starrs and Cmielewski

Video Still from Vimeo

According to media reports, 2014 was the year of the unmanned aerial vehicle or drone. The increasing normalisation of drone surveillance and warfare has caught the attention of the general public. During a recent artist residency at Bundanon Trust, NSW, Australia, we worked with dancer Alison Plevey to explore aspects of our relationship to drones, mounting a camera on a quadcopter to record site responsive performances in the natural environment. In the resulting videos a young woman exhibits a range of different emotions, including curiosity, agitation, engagement and resignation in response to the persistently intrusive drone.

This work is one aspect of a larger project, Augmented Terrain, supported by the Australia Council to develop an immersive video installation that reimagines the relationship between nature and culture. Augmented Terrain, is an immersive audio- visual installation where we present highly detailed aerial views of landscapes and waterways in the Asia pacific region that we dynamically manipulate in ways that reveal their underlying fragility. Through collaboration with Slovenian artist Marco Peljhan, co-founder of C-Astral, we are using their fixed wing drone system to photograph these zones in crisis. Our vision is to configure the land as active and to imagine it being able to speak and make comment about human impacts upon it.