DRONE: Ghosts and Shadows

DRONE: Ghosts and Shadows is an exhibition of paintings, by Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox, that reflect upon accelerating civilian and military uncrewed airborne vehicle (UAV) development and use. While the exhibition pivots around the figure of the drone, Brimblecombe-Fox expands her sights to also reveal the invisible infrastructure that supports drone and other robotic operations. Here, infrastructure roles played by frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum (EMS) are key to understanding the importance of access to bandwidths for device and sensor operation, connectivity, and interconnectivity. With this as a background, the exhibition pays particular attention to the MQ-28A Ghost Bat UAV, developed by Boeing in collaboration with the Royal Australian Airforce (RAAF). The drone is the first military aircraft to be developed in Australia for fifty years, and will be manufactured at Boeing’s Aerospace and Defence Precinct, Wellcamp, Queensland. 

Led by her creative painting practice, Brimblecombe-Fox has spent nearly a decade researching airborne drones, persistent surveillance capabilities, and increasingly autonomous systems. She draws upon various influences and disciplines, including art history, international relations, cultural studies, cosmology, and military studies. These are underpinned by technical enquiry, and study of Defence, military, and defence industry policy statements and publications. As a result of her diverse range of stimulations, Brimblecombe-Fox’s paintings are encounters with multiple layers of enquiry and informed speculation. She does not aim to provide answers or to illustrate, but rather, to pose and provoke questions about technology and war in our network-centric world. DRONE: Ghosts and Shadows, therefore, is an exhibition that helps us think through important twenty-first century and future issues relating to humanity’s reliance upon, and engagement with, accelerating technological developments.

Brimblecombe-Fox’s choice of painting as a medium to scrutinise contemporary militarised and militarise-able technology is a deliberate and informed gesture of independence from the digital, cyber, AI, and signal-reliant platforms and systems she critiques. The paintings in DRONE: Ghosts and Shadows are testimony of her quest to position representations of the materiality of technological devices and equipment with the normally invisible aspects of contemporary technological operation and use. In addition to EMS-enabled signals, Brimblecombe-Fox visualises other normally invisible aspects of technology, including algorithms, speed, and the impacts of connectivity and interconnectivity in a network-centric world. She visualises the normally invisible, for example, by painting lines to represent signals, strings of binary code to reveal algorithmic instructions, and scientific symbols to evoke EMS essential elements of light-speed and photons.

Brimblecombe-Fox acknowledges physical real-world kinetic warfare in ways that alert viewers of her paintings to the complex interweaving of kinetic battle with new and insidious methods of war, such as cyber, hybrid, and information warfare. By using paint to visualise civilian and military reliance on electromagnetic frequencies for the transmission and reception of data, instructions and updates, Brimblecombe-Fox’s paintings provoke questions about the militarise-ability of civilian technology. She questions, for example, what the term ‘theatre of war’ means in a contemporary world where information warfare is delivered via signals to social media apps. Her paintings also trigger questions about the witting and unwitting roles civilian entities and individuals play in a contemporary ‘theatre of war’ that reaches beyond geography into space, speed, time and electromagnetic waves.  

To agitate viewers responses Brimblecombe-Fox uses paint to create cosmic-like scapes that cascade across canvasses and paper. These scapes are overlaid with her painted depictions of various visible and normally invisible elements of technology generally, and drone technology specifically. The layering of paint resonates with Brimblecombe-Fox’s multi-layered approach to her research, across disciplines. Her layered cosmic-like paintings are invitations for viewers to fly in their imaginations, unaided by augmenting devices. Viewers can imagine being, for example, photons, specks of cosmic dust, mythical birds, or intergalactic space travellers. Once ‘airborne’ they realise that Brimblecombe-Fox’s paintings play with perspective, allowing viewers to ‘soar’ above, below, inside, in front or behind various depictions of the visible and normally invisible. For Brimblecombe-Fox this is an introduction to her novel creative and critical approach – imaginational metaveillance. The prefix ‘meta’ means above and beyond, thus viewers can engage their imaginations to awaken innate critical skills of overview veillance.

At one level DRONE: Ghosts and Shadows is an exhibition about the mechanisms of contemporary technology and war. At another level, the exhibition positions human imagination and creative painting practices as alternative and critical methods to hold contemporary technology, and the politics that surround it, to account.

For Brimblecombe-Fox, each painting in DRONE is about caring, taking care, and paying attention.