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The Prix Ars Electronica Archive is a collection enabling search and viewing of all the submissions since 1987. The award-winning projects are documented with catalogue texts and audio-visual media. All other submissions can be searched by title/artist and displayed with year, category in list form. Please cite the credits (artwork name, artist and photographer) and only use the materials if your article is related to Ars Electronica.
Dronestagram
James Bridle
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_Dronestagram_ uses Instagram and other social media to share images of the landscape of the drone wars: illegal CIA strikes by unmanned aircraft in the remote regions of Pakistan and Yemen. These landscapes, unlike the battlefields of more conventional wars, are rarely seen or reported from.
The political and practical possibilities of drone strikes are the consequence of invisible, distancing technologies and a technologically disengaged media and society. Foreign wars and foreign bodies have always counted for less, but the technology that was supposed to bring us closer together is used to obscure and obfuscate. We use military technologies such as GPS and Kinect for work and play; they continue to be used militarily to maim and kill, ever further away and ever less visibly. Yet at the same time we are attempting to build a 1:1 map of the world through satellite and surveillance technologies, which allows us to see these landscapes should we choose to go there. These technologies are not just for “organizing” information, they are also for revealing it, for telling us something new about the world around us, rendering it more clearly.
History, like space, is co-produced by us and our technologies: those technologies include satellite mapping, social photo sharing from handheld devices, and fleets of flying death robots. We should engage with them at every level. These are still just images of foreign landscapes; yet we have got better at immediacy and intimacy online: perhaps we can be better at empathy too.
Links: http://booktwo.org
The political and practical possibilities of drone strikes are the consequence of invisible, distancing technologies and a technologically disengaged media and society. Foreign wars and foreign bodies have always counted for less, but the technology that was supposed to bring us closer together is used to obscure and obfuscate. We use military technologies such as GPS and Kinect for work and play; they continue to be used militarily to maim and kill, ever further away and ever less visibly. Yet at the same time we are attempting to build a 1:1 map of the world through satellite and surveillance technologies, which allows us to see these landscapes should we choose to go there. These technologies are not just for “organizing” information, they are also for revealing it, for telling us something new about the world around us, rendering it more clearly.
History, like space, is co-produced by us and our technologies: those technologies include satellite mapping, social photo sharing from handheld devices, and fleets of flying death robots. We should engage with them at every level. These are still just images of foreign landscapes; yet we have got better at immediacy and intimacy online: perhaps we can be better at empathy too.
Links: http://booktwo.org
James Bridle (UK) is a writer, artist, publisher and technologist. His work covers the intersection of literature, culture and the network. He has written for _Wired_, _Icon_, _The Atlantic_ and many other publications, and writes a regular column for the _Observer_ newspaper on publishing and technology. James speaks worldwide at events including SXSW (Austin), dConstruct (Brighton), Lift (Geneva), Web Directions (Sydney) and Next (Berlin). In 2011, he coined the term “New Aesthetic”, and his ongoing research around this subject has been featured and discussed worldwide. In 2012 he was adjunct professor on the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University.