Paul Tebbs (Director of Studies), Professor Angus Carlyle (Co-supervisor), Jananne Al-Ani (Co-Supervisor)
Thesis
Unruly Encounters: Restaging Images of Drone Warfare through an Embodied Art Practice.
About
My practice-based research project centres upon operative images uploaded online by the UK and US militaries. These images (published and networked through YouTube) present contemporary aerial warfare as disembodied, clean, and precise. The research asks how an art practice could engender an embodied experience with these censored operative images without re-inscribing techno-scientific and colonial modes of treating the body? Through a fine art practice of writing, video, sculpture and installation, my research project engages with a range of methodological concerns; embodiment, fictioning, posthuman assemblages and new materialism. Employing Donna Haraway’s theory of situated knowledge and partial perspectives locates this research in my own body, rather than in or through bodies marked as other. My body is porous and permeable to the multiple bodies relevant to the research; the body of the spectator of the videos on YouTube, the body of the drone operator, the body of the phantom data-double, the targeted body, non-human and technological bodies and the body of the viewer of the practice, yet acknowledges that is a partial and constructed temporary inhabitancy, explored through and perpetually returning to my own split and contradictory self. Situated practice in this sense, emerge from an ongoing attention to the vulnerability and injurability of all bodies. The research intervenes in techno-scientific modes of visualising that are employed by the military and have become prominent in art practice concerned with drone warfare. Through this methodology it establishes and contributes a non-corrective body of work to this well-established field. My research is both iterative and cumulative, composed of four bodies of hybrid practice engendering experiential sensory modes of encountering the images in installation-based settings. Artistic production in this context could open momentary disruptions in the perception of bodiless warfare propagated through these images online, creating the conditions for a critical, self-reflective and relational response.
