Symposium

Remote Control: Surveying Drones and Culture Today

Feb 9–Feb 11, 2022

Three days of conversations, lectures, and videos examining contemporary intersections of drones and drone warfare, arts, and culture.
Online
Free with registration

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High Line Art, the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School, and writer and researcher Arthur Holland Michel present Remote Control: Surveying Drones and Culture Today, a symposium examining contemporary intersections of drones and drone warfare, arts, and culture. The symposium takes place online and in person from February 9–11, 2022, and features performances, speaker presentations, panel discussions, and film screenings with leading experts, artists, activists, academics, and practitioners across diverse disciplines. The symposium is the second of its kind hosted in concert with Sam Durant’s High Line Plinth commission Untitled (drone), a large-scale art commission that intends to increase visibility around intentionally obscured drone warfare and surveillance perpetuated by the US.

Soundscapes of Conflict 
Panel discussion, online via Zoom
Wednesday, February 9, 6–7 pm ET

Guillermo Galindo, composer and artist; and Raven Chacon, artist, composer; moderated by Christoph Cox, philosopher, critic, and curator.

People living in conflict zones rarely see the drones that pose a perpetual aerial threat to their safety, but they hear them constantly. A menacing sound coming from the sky is often cited as a principal facet of the embodied experience of drone warfare. This sonic awareness stands in direct contrast to the visual experience of those piloting the drone, who engage with their “targets” through a completely soundless aerial view. This panel will explore these tensions and intersections and the ways they illuminate the human costs of living under warfare.

**POSTPONED** Performance: Guillermo Galindo, Remote Control
Remote Control
is a sonic representation of an alternative reality. Just like a video game, the performance is a virtual rendition of a video war game. The work is performed by a string quartet accompanied by a digital soundtrack played by members of the audience through their cell phones, tablets, or any other audio or audiovisual playback devices available. This piece was commissioned for Fifty for the Future: The Kronos Learning Repertoire, a project of the Kronos Performing Arts Association. The score and parts are available for free online at kronosquartet.org. Co-presented in partnership with The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center, Remote Control is performed by a student quartet from The New School.

Soundscapes of Conflict is presented as part of the symposium Remote Control: Surveying Drones and Culture Today, in a partnership between the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, High Line Art, and The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center (The Clemente).

Guillermo Galindo’s Remote Control was  originally commissioned by Kronos Performing Arts Association and Kronos Quartet for Fifty for the Future: The Kronos Learning Repertoire, which is made possible by a group of adventurous partners, including Carnegie Hall and many others. Launched in the 2015/16 season, Kronos’ Fifty for the Future has commissioned 50 new works devoted to contemporary approaches to the string quartet and designed expressly for the training of students and emerging professionals. Free scores and parts, recordings, and more are available online at 50FTF.kronosquartet.org. 

Remote Control: Soundscapes of Conflict

Imaging War: Drones from the Ground 
Panel discussion, online via Zoom
Thursday, February 10, 121:30pm ET

Panel discussion featuring Hajra Waheed, artist; Aziz Hazara, artist; Saks Afridi and Ali Rez, artists and collaborators; moderated by Muheb Esmat, writer and curator.

Depictions of drone warfare in Western and American media diverge widely, sometimes diametrically, from the imagery used by artists to describe life under drone warfare, creating a stark duality of image experience. The medium and presentation of these images, whether analog or digital, capture and express the fractured perspectives on the subject.

Remote Control: Imaging War, Drones from the Ground

Aerial Empowerment: Drones, Activism, and Collective Journalism
Panel discussion online via Zoom
Thursday, February 10, 3–4:30 pm ET

Featuring activist and Women’s Indigenous Media director Brooke Waukau, Aleppo-based activist Monther Etaky, and filmmaker & artist Alon Sicherman; moderated by artist Sean Vegezzi.

While the military and surveillant uses drones can have a profoundly disempowering effect on those at ground level, a growing community of activists, artists and journalists has been using consumer-level drones to record government and corporate activities that would be too difficult or dangerous to unmask by other means. Join three artists and activists in a discussion of the empowering possibilities of these novel aerial instruments and their implications for the broader discourse on technology, power and surveillance.

Remote Control: Aerial Empowerment, Drones for Art, Activism, and Collective Journalism

Algorithms and Warfare 
Panel discussion online via Zoom
Thursday, February 10, 6–7:30 pm ET

Panel discussion featuring Lucy Suchman, Professor Emerita, Anthropology of Science and Technology, Lancaster University, UK; and Erik Lin-Greenberg, Assistant Professor, Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Taniel Yusef; moderated by Arthur Holland Michel, writer and researcher.

Militaries around the globe are investing heavily in artificial intelligence and related technologies to automate the conduct of war, heralding a new age of drone warfare that further removes the human decision-maker from the effects of their actions.  Tracking these developments into the future, this discussion will explore the contested ethical implications of algorithmic warfighting, and what it means for peace, security, and the fundamental right to life.

Remote Control: Algorithms and Warfare

Artist Talk with Sam Durant and Omer Fast
Panel discussion, online via Zoom
Friday, February 11, 12–1:30 pm ET

Featuring Sam Durant, artist; and Omer Fast, artist; moderated by Melanie Kress, High Line Art Associate Curator.

Join artist Sam Durant, whose High Line Plinth commission Untitled (drone) has inspired this symposium, alongside Omer Fast, whose 2011 work 5,000 Feet is Best has been a touchstone for artworks addressing drone warfare for over ten years.

Remote Control: Artists Talk with Sam Durant and Omer Fast

Surfacing the War on Terror Today 
Panel discussion, online via Zoom
Friday, February 11, 3–4:30 pm ET

Featuring Hina Shamsi, Director, ACLU National Security Project; Chantal Meloni, International Crimes and Accountability, European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR); Spencer Ackerman, journalist and author; and Sonia Kennebeck, filmmaker and journalist; moderated by Madiha Tahir, journalist and filmmaker.

Two decades after the United States launched its “War on Terror,” this global campaign of surveillance and violence continues to disproportionately target certain ethno-religious groups domestically and abroad, through instruments operating outside the channels of government accountability, all in the name of domestic security. Charting the evolution of this largely invisible war and the central role that drones have played in enabling its international reach, this panel will lay out the state of counterterrorism policy today under the presidency of Joe Biden and look towards upcoming legal challenges in the US and in Europe, an oft-overlooked player in the realm of drone warfare.

Remote Control: Surfacing the War on Terror Today

Closing Speaker: activist Kathy Kelly 
Friday, February 11, 4:30 pm ET
Online via Zoom

Kathy Kelly’s peace activism has led her to war zones and prisons over the past 35 years. She lived in Baghdad throughout the 2003 Shock and Awe bombing, and in Gaza during the 2009 Operation Cast Lead. With Voices for Creative Nonviolence, she has visited Pakistan to interview victims of U.S. drone attacks and, from 2010–2019, traveled 25 times to Afghanistan, where she and her companions learned from ordinary people about casualties of U.S. war and occupation. She served three months in prison, in 2016, for attempting to deliver a letter and a loaf of bread to the commander of Whiteman Air Force Base regarding drone attacks against Afghan civilians. She co-coordinates the Ban Killer Drones campaign, bankillerdrones.org

Remote Control: Closing Presentation

Remote Control: Surveying Drones and Culture Today is organized by High Line Art and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School, in collaboration with writer and researcher Arthur Holland Michel. The symposium is convened by High Line Art in the context of artist Sam Durant‘s High Line Plinth commission Untitled (drone) and the Vera List Center’s As for Protocols Focus Theme and was preceded by As for Protocols Seminar 7: Drones and the Bird’s-Eye View, September 20, 2021. 

Founded in 2009, High Line Art commissions and produces a wide array of artworks on the High Line, including site-specific commissions, exhibitions, performances, video programs, and a series of billboard interventions. Led by Cecilia Alemani, the Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Director & Chief Curator of High Line Art, and presented by the High Line, the art program invites artists to think of creative ways to engage with the unique architecture, history, and design of the park, and to foster a productive dialogue with the surrounding neighborhood and urban landscape.

Arthur Holland Michel is a Peruvian-born writer and researcher whose work investigates the implications of artificial intelligence, uninhabited systems, and advanced surveillance technologies. His first book, EYES IN THE SKY, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2019. Arthur is a founder of the Center for the Study of the Drone, a research institute at Bard College in New York State where he served as co-director from 2012 to 2020.

The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center, aka The Clemente, is a Puerto Rican and Latinx cultural space rooted in the Lower East Side. We connect and co-create with contemporary artists, cultural workers and small arts organizations by offering subsidized studios, exhibition, rehearsal, office and venue spaces; and produce our own programming in a spirit of responsiveness, heritage conversation and provocative collaboration.

 

The Vera List Center’s participation in Remote Control is made possible, in part, by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts, the Ford Foundation, and the Kettering Fund as well as the members of the Vera List Center Board and The New School.

Lead support for High Line Art comes from Amanda and Don Mullen. Major support is provided by Shelley Fox Aarons and Philip E. Aarons, The Brown Foundation, Inc. of Houston, and Charina Endowment Fund. Additional support is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. High Line Art is supported in part, with a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the New York City Council, under the leadership of Speaker Corey Johnson.

Major support for the High Line Plinth is provided by members of the High Line Plinth Committee and contemporary art leaders committed to realizing major commissions and engaging in the public success of the Plinth: Shelley Fox Aarons and Philip E. Aarons, Jennifer and Jonathan Allan Soros, Elizabeth Belfer, Suzanne Deal Booth, Fairfax Dorn, Steve Ells, Kerianne Flynn, Andy and Christine Hall, Hermine Riegerl Heller and David B. Heller, J. Tomilson and Janine Hill, The Holly Peterson Foundation, Annie Hubbard and Harvey Schwartz, Miyoung Lee and Neil Simpkins, Dorothy Lichtenstein, Amanda and Don Mullen, Douglas Oliver and Sherry Brous, Mario Palumbo and Stefan Gargiulo, Susan and Stephen Scherr, Susan and David Viniar, and Anonymous.

To learn more about High Line Art, visit thehighline.org/art.

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