Dr Aaron Burton has recently had a chapter published in a media arts compilation Shifting Interfaces: An Anthology of Presence, Empathy, and Agency in 21st-Century Media Arts (edited by Hava Aldouby) titled Unmanned Imaging of the Anthropocene.
Chapter abstract:
2018 marked the 50th anniversary of the famous Earthrise image taken by William Anders of the Apollo 8 mission. One year earlier, in 1967, the NASA ATS-III weather satellite took the first complete colour photograph of the Earth. Both images have been credited as important to the environmental movement and highlight the fragility of the planet, however, the provenance of the two images reveal divergent meanings. Earthrise is arguably embroiled in cultural and political battlefronts of the Cold War, whereas the ATS-III satellite was tasked with transmitting images for weather forecasters to look for extreme events and study cloud formations. Furthermore, the two images represent an important ontological distinction, the human world versus a non-human world. Over the last five decades the human-centric perspective of Earthrise has continued to dominate documentary photography leaving a visual record suitably reflective of the Anthropocene.
A recent proliferation of unmanned imaging technologies and a renewed counter-cultural imperative, has reawakened this ontological distinction. Removing the human from behind the camera significantly alters the provenance and meaning of the image, non-human actors are foregrounded — such as the weather, objects, plants and animals — and there is a levelling of existence. Unmanned imaging technologies offer an unprecedented range of spatial encounters, from impossibly close to impossibly far, opening up new ways to experience the fragility of our ecosystems. This chapter explores the potential of unmanned photographic technologies such as drones, GoPros, and satellite imagery to assist a non-anthropocentric understanding of the environment and urgent ecological issues.
Originally presented at Re:Trace the 7th Conference for the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology as Ecological intimacy and unmanned photography: drones, GoPros, and satellites. Recording of the presentation is available at https://vimeo.com/256418532.
Book description:
Early 21st century media arts are addressing the anxieties of an age shadowed by ubiquitous surveillance, big data profiling, and globalised translocations of people. Altogether, they tap the overwhelming changes in our lived experience of self, body, and intersubjective relations. Shifting Interfaces addresses current exciting exchanges between art, science, and emerging technologies, highlighting a range of concerns that currently prevail in the field of media arts. This book provides an up-to-date perspective on the field, with a considerable representation of art-based research gaining salience in media art studies. The collection attends to art projects interrogating the destabilisation of identity and the breaching of individual privacy, the rekindled interest in phenomenology and in the neurocognitive workings of empathy, and the routes of interconnectivity beyond the human in the age of the Internet of Things. Offering a diversity of perspectives, ranging from purely theoretical to art-based research, and from aesthetics to social and cultural critique, this volume will be of great value for readers interested in contemporary art, art-science-technology interfaces, visual culture, and cultural studies.
To purchase the book, please visit https://lup.be/products/123857