SENSOR

Lisa Barnard (UK)
David Birkin (UK/USA)
James Bridle (UK)
Mahwish Chisty (Pakistan/USA)
Trevor Paglen (USA)
Pitch Interactive (USA)

View of James Bridle's installation for the exhibition SENSOR at FotoFest. Photo courtesy of Nash Baker.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs, or more colloquially, “drones”) are a controversial technology. Though the earliest versions (remote operated aircraft) originated during WW I, and saw important and deadly innovation through WW II and the Vietnam War, they only came to greater widespread public knowledge within the last decade and a half, as the post 9/11 wars on terror expanded in Afghanistan and Iraq, and drones strikes reach into Pakistan, Yemen, and now Syria.

Used for both surveillance and weapons delivery, they are an integrated part of modern warfare and intelligence gathering. UAVs are prized for their efficiency, efficacy, and safety, and praised for creating a more “humane war”. They are airborne for days at a time, over conflict zones, controlled by pilots sitting safely at their screens, 8,000 miles away in air-conditioned trailers outside of Las Vegas, Nevada.

Many Pakistanis understand that their government lacks the capability to suppress the Taliban, and therefore accept CIA drone strikes as a temporary, if unsavory necessity. In the West, as the public’s awareness of drone usage increases, questions are being raised about the ethics and implementation of the technology. Concerns about the distance, both geographically and psychologically, between the operators and the targets; between the justifications and the decision-makers; and between the all-seeing eye of the drone camera and real cultural understanding, are also being raised. This international group of artists, engineers, writers, and activists are among those asking those questions and expressing those concerns. They are all searching for greater accountability.

Lisa Barnard works with victims of missile attacks, drone pilots, and psychologists, trying to uncover the secrecies surrounding the use of drones by Western governments. Trevor Palgen’s hacked drone video, Drone Vision reveals a “drone-eye” view and questions information security between operators and the machines they pilot.

David Birkin’s Severe Clear asks viewers to rethink notions of justice and responsibility during the “war on terror”. Mahwish Chishty‘s paintings open a dialogue between drones and folk-art truck painting, juxtaposing traditional Pakistani culture with contemporary, 21st Century concerns.

Technology writer and artist James Bridle, and interactive designers Pitch Interactive, examine the unknown and virtual spaces within contemporary war. Both are interested in bringing us closer to understanding the realities and consequences of the technology we use.

Pakistani lawyer Mirza Shahzad Akbar has spent the last decade collecting photographic-evidence and testimony about drone-targeting errors and bringing lawsuits against the Pakistani government and the CIA. He, like these artists, believes that the United States should hold itself to a higher standard. “This is not about taking the Taliban side or the American side,” says Mr. Akbar in a recent New Yorker article.1 “Our work has been about the fact that there is no transparency or accountability.”

Jennifer Ward, Curator

1. Steve Coll. “The Unblinking Stare.” The New Yorker Nov. 2014

About the artists
Lisa Barnard (UK)
Lisa Barnard’s photographic and film practice is placed in the genre of contemporary documentary. Her work discusses real events, embracing complex visual strategies that utilize both traditional documentary techniques with more contemporary forms of representation. Barnard connects her interest in aesthetics, current photographic debates around materiality, and the existing political climate. Of particular interest to her is the relationship between the military-industrial complex, new technology, and the psychological implication of conflict. Barnard receives regular funding, exhibits frequently both nationally and internationally, and has portfolios of her work featured in contemporary photographic publications. She is a senior lecturer on Documentary Photography at The University of South Wales. Chateau Despair and Machines in the Garden, Hyenas of the Battlefield are both published by GOST.

David Birkin (UK/USA)
David Birkin is an artist based between New York and London. He was an ISP fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art and is a graduate of Oxford University and the Slade School of Fine Art.

Birkin started out photographing subjects on the periphery of conflicts, such as the training of female journalists in Kabul, the founding of Afghan Film, and conscientious objectors during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon War, before starting the Speakers’ Society: a non-profit lecture series for art and politics. In 2009, he was awarded a bursary by the National Media Museum and a graduate scholarship by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Birkin was the recipient of the 2010 Sovereign Art Prize (Barbican, London) and the 2012 Celeste Prize for Photography (Museo Centrale Montemartini, Rome), and was an artist-in-residence at Yaddo and at the Art & Law Residency in New York. He has performed in films by Nathaniel Mellors for the ICA, Tate Triennial, British Art Show, Hayward Gallery, Venice Biennale and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and narrated the English translation of Chris Marker and Alan Resnais‘ 1953 film Les statues meurent aussi at the French Institute in London.

Talks and exhibitions include the Courtauld Institute, The Photographers’ Gallery, Saatchi Gallery, Paradise Row, and Trolly, London; The Institute for Ethics, Law & Armed Conflict, Oxford; the Solyanka State Gallery, Moscow; Tallinn Kunstihoone, Estonia; Gervasuti Foundation, Venice; Dumbo Arts Center, Brooklyn; and MoMA PS1’s Rockaway Dome. Birkin presented a solo exhibition at The Mosaic Rooms in London in 2015.

James Bridle (UK)
James Bridle is a writer, publisher, artist, and technologist based in London. The Drone Shadow series was born in collaboration with Einar Sneve Martinussen, a designer working in interaction design, product design, and research. It forms but one part of Mr. Bridle’s wide-ranging visual and textual activism dealing with issues germane to the post-privacy era: secret surveillance, extraordinary rendition, and the systems that permit and encourage such violence against and among citizen-subjects. He has written and lectured extensively on what he terms the “New Aesthetic”—the visual and social systems produced by the increasing interconnectedness of virtual and physical worlds. The Drone Shadow project makes the impact of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) visible at a 1:1 scale. The purpose of a drone is to be invisible, making the operators completely unaccountable for their actions. For Mr. Bridle, the drone also stands for the now-ubiquitous network of technology that makes observation and action possible at a distance: “Those who cannot perceive the network cannot act effectively within it, and are powerless. The job, then, is to make such things visible.

Mahwish Chisty (Pakistan/USA)
Initially trained as a miniature painter from the National College of Arts, Lahore, Pakistan, Mahwish Chishty has aggressively combined new media and conceptual work with her traditional practice. Ms. Chishty has exhibited her work nationally and internationally at venues like the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MOCADA), Brooklyn, NY; University of Technology (UTS Gallery), Sydney, Australia; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI; Maryland Art Place, Baltimore, MD; and Canvas Gallery, Lahore, Pakistan among others. By camouflaging modern war machines with folk imagery, Ms. Chishty is shedding light on the complexity of acculturation, politics, and power.

Ms. Chishty also has pieces in public and private collections including the Foreign office of Islamabad, Pakistan, and Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka Shi, Japan.

Trevor Paglen (USA)
Trevor Paglen’s work deliberately blurs lines between science, contemporary art, journalism, and other disciplines to construct unfamiliar, yet meticulously researched ways to see and interpret the world around us. Over the past decade, Trevor Paglen has trained his lens and directed our attention to the “Military Black World” of classified defense activity.

Mr. Paglen’s visual work has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Tate Modern, London; The Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the 2008 Taipei Biennial; the 2009 Istanbul Biennial; the 2012 Liverpool Biennial, and numerous other solo and group exhibitions.

He is the author of five books and numerous articles on subjects including experimental geography, state secrecy, military symbology, photography, and visuality. His most recent book, The Last Pictures is a meditation on the intersections of deep-time, politics, and art.

Mr. Paglen has received grants and awards from the Smithsonian, Art Matters, Artadia, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the LUMA foundation, the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology, and the Aperture Foundation. He is represented by Altman Siegel, San Francisco, Metro Pictures, New York and Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne.

Mr. Paglen holds a B.A. from U.C. Berkeley, an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in Geography from U.C. Berkeley.

Pitch Interactive (USA)
Pitch Interactive’s work spans illustrations, physical installations, projections, console game user interfaces, software applications, websites, and textiles. Their work has been showcased at the MoMA’s TalkToMe exhibit in New York, La Penacée’s Conversations Électriques in Montpellier, France, the McKnight Foundation’s 30-year anniversary exhibit, the Foosaner Art Museum’s The Art of Networks exhibit, The Max Planck Science Express Train, the Data Flow books and many other internationally acclaimed publications.

The team is: Wesley Grubbs, Katrina Madrid, Anna Hodgson, Nick Yahnke, Adam Florin, and Mladen “Tipo” Balog.

EXHIBITION SPONSORS
Steven Evans and David Klonkowski; John and Carola Herrin;Gregory and Lisa Spier; Eliane Thweatt

Refreshments provided by Karbach Brewing Co.

FOTOFEST 2014-2015 ART PROGRAM SEASON SPONSORS
Houston Endowment Inc; City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance; National Endowment for the Arts; Texas Commission on the Arts; The Wortham Foundation; FotoFest Board of Directors; Judith and Gamble Baldwin; Robert Gerry III; William and Rosalie Hitchcock; HexaGroup; Houston Public Media; European Photography Magazine; iLand Internet Solutions; and Silver Street Studios

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