Technical data:

Industrial Monument MPEG-4 movie, 405,7MB

Created October 2022

Dimensions: 1920 x 1080

Codes: H.264 AAC

Industrial Monument and AI

It is quite recent that there has been talk about the semiotics and aesthetics of camera images shot by drones as they fly around. The most specific thing about drone footage is its verticality: the constant change of altitude can even cause vertigo when the drone's camera is connected to VR glasses.

In the filmed performances shown here, I focus as a performer on the question of what the difference is between a sculpture made by a sculptor or an object set on a pedestal and called an 'industrial monument'. The difference is that a drone exploring an area will have little trouble detecting a sculpture. The industrial monument, however, is a pars pro toto and a Readymade. The object used to be part of an industrial process, as in this case of Luxembourg's steel industry. Because the machines were shut down, it was possible to choose a part of it and exhibit it in the public space. By choosing an object that is not a work of art but which is exhibited 'as if' it were a work of art, we should refer to the work of conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp, who did the same thing in 1917 with a urinal.

The two filmed performances show the different roles of the performer: in the first case, an active role, and in the second, the performer seems redundant to her contextual reference, a sculpture that itself shows a strong message. ('Trophy', Wim Delvoye, 1999). In my research on ontologies for drone exploration, I use theory from conceptual art to add new knowledge to drone vision. Thus, in the future, we would like to experiment with drones that are trained to be able to recognise objects set up as works of art in public spaces. This is important because these objects are part of industrial heritage but are often overlooked and thus risk being removed from public space.

This artwork will have an update in the near future, when I will use AI as a medium to interact with from a distance, this will be a great opportunity to develop "live" Human Drone interaction which enables us to include "undefined objects" like the industrial monument and represent the images made by the drone cameras as artworks.