This week, Vera List Center at the New School is pleased to partner with High Line Art, writer and researcher Arthur Holland Michel, and The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center to present Remote Control: Surveying Drones and Culture Today. Our three-day online symposium kicks off on Wednesday, February 9 with Soundscapes of Conflict, a panel discussion that will explore the embodied experience of drone warfare. (Please note: Guillermo Galindo‘s live performance of Remote Control at The Clemente has been postponed to a later date.)
On Thursday, February 10, Imaging War: Drones from the Ground will address the disconnect between depictions of drone warfare in Western and American media with the lived reality of those who experience it. The panel Aerial Empowerment: Drones for Art, Activism, and Collective Journalism brings together artists and activists in a discussion on the empowering possibilities of consumer-level drones and their implications for the broader discourse on technology, power, and surveillance, while Algorithms and Warfare explores the contested ethical implications of algorithmic warfare that separates human decision making from the effects of their actions.
On Friday, February 11, Shifting Focus: Representing Drones considers filmic and artistic representations of drones, while Surfacing the War on Terror Today focuses on the twenty-year evolution of the “War on Terror” and the central role that drones have played in enabling its international reach. And finally, a closing lecture later that day features activist Kathy Kelly, whose peace activism contests the decades-long international disruption of US drone policies and occupation.
The Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School is generously supported by members of the Vera List Center Board and individual donors as well as the following institutional funders: The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Boris Lurie Art Foundation, Dayton Foundation, Ford Foundation, Kettering Fund, the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, Pryor Cashman LLP, and The New School.
