THE WHAT
“circlers” is a stop-motion animation shot by drone during a performance at the historic Houston Orange Show theater.
During the performance the audience was invited to take turns reading a narrative out loud. The action of the story was then interpreted in the performer's movement. Excerpts from the narrative are seen here on the screen.
THE WHY
“circlers” explores themes around privacy, ecology, the sea, object oriented ontology verticality, authoritarian control, collective action, and word soup turned narrative. Within voyeurism what is the tension between visibility and immersion? There are ways to peak into private spaces, but the sight doesn’t imply knowledge of the intimacies. Yet more and more our view is mediated by action, through clicking, surveying, and at the worst, violence.
Relevant research on art made with drones brought me this quote from Drone Vision published in the Krisis Contemporary Journal of Philosophy (https://archive.krisis.eu/drone-vision/):
“ … the effects of the emergence of operative imagery “points to a man-made reformatting of our entire field of vision, suggesting a world of images that has moved beyond our reach” (Van Tomme 2014, 29). Elsaesser sees a “more general shift of our culture towards recoding seeing into a form of action,” in which technologies of imaging:“are not means of assisting sight, whether of real or imagined things, but technologies of probing and penetration. As vision machines, they generate knowledge that has little to do with human perception or seeing, in the sense of ‘I see’ meaning ‘I know’, and more to do with controlling territory, occupying space, monitoring a situation, and mining it for useful information or active intervention’ (Elsaesser 2013: 242v). “
