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James Bridle’s Drone Shadows, Particle Deceleration from Honor Harger and Natalie Jeremijenko’s Bird Perches

In March I attended FutureEverything 2013 in Manchester. 

Honor Harger‘s talk was titled “Something Invisible in the Landscape is Just Landscape“. Honor showed James Bridle’s Drone Shadows, and talked about what happened when it was installed in different places across the world and how difficult it was to show in Australia. I really highlit something that I’d been thinking about for some time – how technology has served to increasingly remove perpetrators of violence from their actions. Out of sight is out of mind.

Honor also showed Trevor Paglen‘s work:

Trevor Paglen Quote on Galileo during The Enlightenment

I was fascinated by the the possibilities of a rational consensus emerging through Enlightenment enabled intelligent agents being able to communicate openly – we aren’t there yet.

Honor said something fascinating:

“Media Artists let us see the landscape we are in”

Julian Oliver has many interesting things to say about the agency of knowledge – that if we don’t know, we can’t act. Openness is an essential first step to a fair society, and it’s artists responsibility to highlight closed thinking – in whatever form.

Olof from Today’s Art showed the promotional videos for his art show – that actually resulted in his arrest for being too close the the bone.

Finally, I saw the work of Natalie Jeremijenko for the first time. I particularly enjoyed the bird perches that encourage people to feed the birds – especially that the most “effective” one was the one that drew peoples attention to the fact that healthy birds mean less bird flu. As Natalie said:

“We get the diseases we deserve – every swine flu case was within 5km of an industrialised farm”

Her final thought was on pollution in NYC – 80% of NYC’s carbon footprint is air con related. A feedback loop of madness that we need to stop.