Airborne Inscription: Writing with drones

This paper will detail the technical and conceptual aspects behind a developing art project entitled Waveform . This project draws together the technologies of airborne drones, digital image analysis, and automatic text generation to investigate how the observable world is represented through digital sensors—a key issue in the monitoring and depiction of ecological and climactic change. Specifically, the project involves capturing airborne images of coastal shorelines, mapping and analysing the outlines of incoming waves, and then incorporating the resulting data into the generation of text resembling free-verse poetry. The process is not autonomous, and is subject to human intervention at each stage, with the generated poems being curated to engage themes concerning coast, a changing climate, and scientific knowledge-making. The intention is that the process and its outputs can provide a vehicle for deconstructing the remoteness often associated with the aerial perspective—with its connotations of erasing the ambiguities and nuances of the lived experience of a given environment in favour of the absolute and the abstract. In this regard, Waveform is presented as a practical instance of how of airborne imaging and digital sensing might be recast in ways that can resist the prevailing discourses of precision, omniscience, and control that so readily attach to them.

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Richard A. Carter

Conference

Publication date: July 2018

Publication date (Print): July 2018

Pages: 367-373

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[0001]University of York

TFTV, Baird Lane, Heslington

York YO10 5GB, UK

Article

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/EVA2018.69

SO-VID: 206786bb-3500-4103-b575-c51a396f1d65

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: Electronic Visualisation and the Arts

Conference acronym: EVA

Conference number:

Conference location: London, UK

Conference date: 9 - 13 July 2018

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: Electronic Visualisation and the Arts

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1477-9358 BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/EVA2018.69

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

REFERENCES

J. BolenE. ScottA. Yang 2016 Sensing the Insensible: Aesthetics in/and/through the Anthropocene http://www.anthropocene-curriculum.org/pages/root/campus-2016/sensing-the-insensible-aesthetics-in-the-anthropocene (retrieved 26 March 2018)
D. Cosgrove 2001 Apollo's Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore
P. CrutzenE. Stoermer 2000 The “Anthropocene”. IGBP Global Change 41:17 18
H. DavisE. Turpin 2015 Art in the Anthropocene Open Humanities Press London
D. Link 2016 Archaeology of Algorithmic Artefacts Univocal Publishing Minneapolis
S. Schuppli 2014 Can the Sun Lie? A. FrankeE. Weizman (eds.) Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth Sternberg Press Berlin
C. Strachey 1954 The “Thinking” Machine Encounter, 13:25 31

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[1] J. BolenE. ScottA. Yang 2016 Sensing the Insensible: Aesthetics in/and/through the Anthropocene http://www.anthropocene-curriculum.org/pages/root/campus-2016/sensing-the-insensible-aesthetics-in-the-anthropocene (retrieved 26 March 2018)

[2] D. Cosgrove 2001 Apollo's Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore

[3] P. CrutzenE. Stoermer 2000 The “Anthropocene”. IGBP Global Change 41:17 18

[4] H. DavisE. Turpin 2015 Art in the Anthropocene Open Humanities Press London

[5] D. Link 2016 Archaeology of Algorithmic Artefacts Univocal Publishing Minneapolis

[6] S. Schuppli 2014 Can the Sun Lie? A. FrankeE. Weizman (eds.) Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth Sternberg Press Berlin

[7] C. Strachey 1954 The “Thinking” Machine Encounter, 13:25 31

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