*in progress*
I have had this model of a drone for a while now, an Italeri 1/72 RQ-1 Predator.
The final aim has been to mount it like the victorian collectors of insects, and start to present the machinic Phylum in this victorian, museum style.
I have finally put it into a frame.
and I expect to hang it on my wall shortly, i doubt it will be in a gallery near you anytime soon though.
On boxing day we visited the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, a clear yet cold day and an opportunity to see Seizure. Later that day we would drive through the oncoming storms of rain and snow but for the couple of hours we were there it was in a beautiful landscape with the works of people to challenge, lighten, darken and question us.
It was on leaving that I realised that Palindrone needs to be in a place like this. The sound of these drones has become a psychological source of fear and terror for those who live in the environments where these systems operate. Yet here, in the English countryside, the sound of a propeller plane is not the sound of an omnicient, panopric super power but the sound of light aircraft, flying for the sake and hobby of flying.
Within the Yorkshire landscape though lie the military bases from which these drones can be operated and across those moors lies the electonic listening post that is Menwith Hill.
So whist these drones are flying over the skys of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yeman and Gaza we should be able to hear Palindrone in the country landscape that hosts the enabling technology of drones.
We created a short video about Palindrone. It’s somewhere between an ‘about this project’ video and an artists video.
I was put together so that it could be shown, as part of a video loop of projects not present at the DEAF 2014 Drones: Presentations and Demonstrations event, part of a day long symposium on Drones to be held at the Biennale on Friday 23rd May.
The piece was installed at the offices of Bethanl Green Ventures for a morning where I shot video and stills in one of the meeting rooms. For the video I used the stills from the installation and used a the audio direct from the piece.
The piece is still a work in development. We are still trying to get in touch with the people who posted the original recordings of the drones in Gaza that we have used as the basis of the piece as we would like to talk to them, and others who have experienced being in such environments more as we develop the piece.
This video is a first opportunity for many to hear what kind of environment we are trying to create / convey in the piece.
palindrone (v1.0) from Mark Simpkins on Vimeo.
Working on Palindrone has opened up a whole new area of research and experimentation in playing with and listening to sound. I have been reading ‘The The Field – The Art of Field Recording‘ by Cathy Lane & Angus Carlyle as it is working with these found, recorded sounds (from the field) that currently interests me.
To work alongside Palindrone I am thinking about sound and landscape, especially the English Pastoral landscape and the sounds of light aircraft, the thrum of the distant yet always near motorways in the UK. When developing Palindrone I was thinking about the sound of light aircraft flying over head whilst on a pleasant walk in the English countryside, as well as harking back to the now Military-Pastoral sound of the Spitfire or Hurricane flying overhead in the south of England. Almost romantic notions of sound, technology and landscape.
There is another sound that pervades these landscapes though, we won’t hear it as we walk through the grass, but the sounds in the electromagnetic spectrum are saturated with noise of the modern and this is also the space for much of the modern Military Industrial Complex, with its Signal Intelligence.
Electrical currents generate magnetic fields, which have sonic properties. You can pick these up with a ‘telephone pickup coil‘. This will pick up all sorts of sounds.
This is the sound of my laptop:
As an experiment I am going to make some recordings of urban, suburban and rural landscapes using this basic set up, just to hear what is there.
Palindrone is about sound.
We spent a bit of time looking for existing recordings of drones to use as a basis for the work, originally I found this recording:
Posted by user Rosa Schiano, who, according to their YouTube profile is an Italian activist and photoreporter. The video was taken during the Israeli military operation “Pillar of Cloud”, which took place 14th through 21st November 2012. (This in the YouTube description for the video, is how Rosa refers to the operation, searching wikipedia returns this entry for “Operation Pillar of Defense” [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Pillar_of_Defense] for which the Hebrew literally translates to “Pillar of Cloud”).
This operation is the first where there was no significant IDF presence on the ground in Gaza, the operation conducted through the use of air power, ostensibly through the use of drones.
When describing the project idea to Cathal, this was the sound that I used to illustrate what I was initially thinking of.
Further research led Cathal to find these samples that have been put online by Rana Baker and Rowaid El-Madhoun. It was these samples that formed the basis of the ‘drone’ that we installed at Lighthouse for v1.0 of Palindrone.
Rana Baker https://audioboo.fm/RanaGaza
Rowaid El-Madhoun https://soundcloud.com/rowaid-el-madhoun
Again, these samples are from Gaza. The reports on drone use that helped to inspire the creation of the piece were reporting on their use in Yeman and Pakistan. In my searches online I have not found any significant online recordings of drone use in these regions though I am sure there are good reasons for this.
Of course, the affect these machines have is the same, the sound creating an omnious terrorizing atmosphere and whilst the report that I initially read was based on the situation in Yeman, further online research has uncovered similar reports from Gaza.
We have tried to contact both people but are yet to hear back from them, hence one reason for writing this post was to creat something to point at explaining what we are trying to do and how we are currently using their samples.
We have started to experiment with creating our own sound, artificially, as well as trying to create some field recordings of light aircraft. We do not want to use the samples we have found in further public installation without having spoken with the originators of the recordings.
How we continue to shape the sound of the piece depends on a lot of things, but if either Rana or Rowaid want to get in touch then they can email me at mark@geekyoto.com and I will be happy to talk to them further about what we are trying to do with Palindrone.
Last night at an event at the Lighthouse in Brighton, Cathal Coughlan and I unveiled publicly for the first time a piece of work we have been collaborating on called Palindrone. We installed, for the evening, v1.0 of the work in the conference room at the Lighthouse venue.
Palindrone is a work that was conceived during my residency at the Lighthouse Studio programme. Whilst at the studio I started playing around with some of the Buddha Machines that I have and started a discussion with Natalie and Honor about drones. The two started to come together quite quickly, initially with an idea to create a circle of sound objects, like the Buddha Machines, each playing different samples to create a soundscape. The idea became simplified to create a background drone and using code, monitors the reports on drone strikes that the Bureau of Investigative Journalism maintains. If a new report is added to the database (which gets reflected by the twitter feed @dronestream, which is run by artist Josh Begley) it triggers an interrupt sound over the background drone.
Whilst playing with the Buddha Machines I remembered a story I had read earlier in the year about the psychological effect the drones were having, specifically on the children. They would not sleep, afraid of the drone in the distance. The drone was a terrorising object, above communities it installed a state of control where activity had to be curtailed, self censored for fear that it might ‘attract the attention of a drone’.
I found a press release from Reprieve, about the psychological effect the drones were having and this was presented along with the piece at the installation.
This is the panopticon, the idea that a central body of control might be observing your activity, so you modify your behavior in case it is watching. The drone though imposes American/British/Western military control over communities in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia and Afghanistan.
Installed, the piece is a sound in a room, at Lighthouse the conference room had subdued lighting and on a table we had some texts that I have been investigating whilst developing the work.
The main sample loop has been constructed by Cathal, we have currently sourced a number of drone samples from the internet and laid these together to create the main loop, the interrupt sound is again a sample based on the sound from a military encrypted message.
Version 1.0 is still a work in progress, we are developing how the sound should be constructed, how much detail and noise we want in that main sound and clearing the use of samples as well as investigating the possibility of capturing our own samples to use in the piece.
The work is an artistic response to a situation that has come to our attention, from investigating this further and in constructing the work we are also highlighting possible responses from a design perspective.
We will document the evolution of the piece here, as well as notify of any installations. If you have any questions on the piece then please get in touch.
