“What Flies Above”

Like many new technologies, drones can be both destructive and creative. As lethal military weapons, drones—also called Unmanned Aerial Vehicles or UAVs—raise urgent ethical issues about the increasing physical detachment of 21st-century warfare, with phrases like “precision strikes” and “targeted killings” used to cover the realities of ground-level carnage. At the same time, drones have also been harnessed to positive purposes, driving environmental research, responding to humanitarian emergencies and— inevitably—delivering pizza.

The title of this exhibition, “What Flies Above,” suggests also its opposite, what lies beneath. An intelligent and intimate look at our underlying cultural unease with drone technology, this two-person show at Gallery 1CO3 focused on recent work by Winnipeg-based artists Reva Stone and Erika Lincoln. While both artists are known for exploring the ambivalent interface between the technological and biological worlds, each came to the subject of drones independently, following her own line of research.

Stone, whose inventive use of electronic and digital tech dates back to the 1990s, investigates the ways technology mediates our physical experience of the world, particularly through biotech and robotics, and the cultural narratives we have built up around these developments. Lincoln creates carefully calibrated, rigorously beautiful works that embody systems of knowledge, especially as they extend into technology and social control.

There are strains of both horror and elegance, repulsion and attraction, in this show, whose central paradox involves deploying technology to critique technology.

In Strike Release: Sun Models— NGGH, Lincoln uses an algorithmic program to visualize the data from one year of UAV strikes in Syria during Operation Inherent Resolve. (As with many of the references to real-life military operations and weapons in this show, there is evidence that those responsible for their naming have a killer instinct for the worst kind of kitsch.)

In LookingIN and LookingOUT, Lincoln uses 3D-printed Global Hawk UAVs as repeating formal elements in four decorative mirrors. Painted in silver and gold, the drones’ incongruously ornamental appearance becomes more uncomfortable the longer you look. In Arctic Sovereignty: Better Living Through Bio-robotics— NGGH Beluga Drive, Lincoln calls up paranoid Cold War narratives from the DEW Line to weaponized dolphins. Starting with the beluga, a northern Manitoba tourist draw popularly portrayed as a harmless and cheery creature, she creates a pod of “genetically engineered” whales fused with drone missiles, a hybrid effect that is both comic and unsettling.

NGGHGC—Northrop Grumman Global Hawk Grumman Canoe is another hybrid, combining a Grumman-manufactured aluminium canoe—for many Canadians, an icon of peaceful summer afternoons—with one of the corporation’s combat drones. Lincoln condenses the reach of the global arms industry—which infiltrates both the military and civilian worlds—into one small, evocative sculptural object.

Stone’s work Alphabet seems soothing at first, a bit of misdirection that makes the eventual revelation of its meaning even more devastating. The video projection depicts a serene blue sky with wisps of actual white clouds. But there are also word clouds—computergenerated data points in which the size of the typeface corresponds to frequency of use—naming the types of UAVs used by over 75 nations. As these deadly lists rhythmically advance and recede, the wide-open sky sheds its poetic associations with the natural world and is seen instead as a source of sudden technological destruction. Meanwhile, the alphabetized listing of the countries suggests a dark set of ABCs for children who live under this shadow of violence.

Stone’s Console is an interactive video work located inside a dim, closed-in booth at the back of the gallery. The setting is meant to replicate the concrete bunkers where drone operators execute their isolated, technologically insulated, 21st-century military duty, often thousands of kilometres away from their targets. Stone has spliced together footage of multiple forms of drone usage, from the deadly to the giddy, from the terrible violence of military strikes to the vertiginous joys of drone-assisted filmmaking to the mundane practicality of grocery delivery. The participant can switch up the footage with the use of a joystick, a connection meant to bring them into the show’s tricky conversation about the risks and rewards of tech.

As artists who use technology to talk about technology, Lincoln and Stone are aware of the double-edged dimensions of their work. As our real-world situation devolves into even more geopolitical chaos and moral murk, technology often seems to hold out the possibility of control and clarity. “What Flies Above” is frank about the sleek, seductive power of this lure, in order to expose how dangerous it can be. ❚

“What Flies Above” was exhibited at Gallery 1CO3 in Winnipeg, January 11 to February 17, 2018.

Alison Gillmor is the pop culture columnist for the Winnipeg Free Press and writes regularly on visual arts and film.