Art @ Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox
FLYING SOARING...IRRESISTIBLY...We're all the same.
Monday, May 19, 2025
THE WORDS WE USE: ENCODED?
Tuesday, April 22, 2025
SURRENDERING
Against a background of contemporary hyperconnected warfare and accelerating advances in drone/robotic systems, this article discusses the airborne drone in relation to concepts of surrender, both historic and contemporary, literal and metaphoric. Drawing upon Paul Virilio’s (2002[1991]) observation that, during the first Gulf War, ‘technologies employed are too powerful’, the author examines how continuing military aspirations for technological speed and lethality represent surrender to the lure of techno-power. Two incidents of human beings surrendering to drones, in Kuwait in 1991 and in Ukraine in 2023, anchor an exploration of literal and metaphoric surrender implications. This discussion is expanded through a military aviation history lens and an art historical perspective. The latter includes close visual and contextual analyses of James Rosenquist’s 1964–1965 painting F-111 and the author’s multi-piece 2022–2023 painting Ghost Bat.
PAINTINGS
Sunday, March 30, 2025
DRONE: Ghosts and Shadows
DRONE: Ghosts and Shadows, the curated survey exhibition of the last decade of my creative practice and research is entering its last week. The exhibition is at the University of Southern Queensland Art Gallery, Toowoomba, Australia. The exhibition was curated by the gallery director, Brodie Taylor, JP (Qual), BCRA (hons), FRSA, FSA Scot, MIML, GAICD. The exhibition represents a milestone in my creative and academic journey.
The show finishes on Friday April 4. Gallery hours Tuesday - Friday 10am - 3pm.
The exhibition has, according to the Director, attracted hundreds of visitors. I am thrilled! The opening event was also a vibrant occasion, which ended with a panel discussion, 'War in the Age of Hyperconnectivity: What does it look like?'. I was very pleased to discuss military and civilian impacts of signal-enabled hyperconnectivity and the importance of art as a method to examine these impacts, with colleague, Dr. Samid Suliman (Griffith University) and, industry representative, Dave Devine OAM, from Alkath Group-Mellori Solutions.
Here are some photos of the exhibition, opening, and panel discussion. My artist's statement is at the end of the post. And, the exhibition essay 'Against the Sensoration of the World', by Associate Professor Michael Richardson (Uni of New South Wales), is also at the end.
Right: Ghost Cloud, 2024.
The event had to be postponed to mid-way through the exhibition due to Cyclone Alfred causing havoc and flooding across a vast area of Queensland.
Thanks must also be given to Brodie Taylor, JP (Qual), BCRA (hons), FRSA, FSA Scot, MIML, GAICD. He is a terrific curator to work with. He had a vision for the show, and it has worked wonderfully.
Artist Statement
DRONE: Ghosts
and Shadows
I invite
viewers of my paintings to ‘fly’ in their imaginations, above, below, inside,
and around the mechanisms of war and spawning new modes of signal-facilitated
warfare - information, hybrid, cyber, space, and electromagnetic. If you ‘fly’
beyond orbiting satellites, the earth-to-satellite environment can be
cosmically ‘viewed’, as an extension
of landscape. It is an invisible hyper-landscape of signals carrying data and
instructions, transmitted at beyond-human speed – lightspeed.
Drone: Ghost
and Shadows
represents a survey of my work created over the last ten years. While the
paintings address militarised technology, the militarise-ability of civilian
technology, and increasing military interest in the electromagnetic spectrum
(EMS), each painting has multiple other influences. As a pre-teen I loved
biographies of famous scientists - Marconi, Faraday, Curie, Pasteur. I also
loved art. During my B.A, while majoring in art history, I undertook a
year-long history subject, The History of Science. This subject has
profoundly influenced my life’s work, helping to integrate my youthful
fascinations, and inspiring me to ‘see’ connections between art, science,
culture, technology, society, war, politics, and more. This throng of
inspirations has shaped my creative practice, and my interdisciplinary
post-graduate studies.
I grew up on a farm between Dalby and Jimbour, Queensland. As I gazed across the vast landscape of endless skies and flat horizons, I ‘flew’, in imagination, above our farm. I knew what it looked like - buildings, crops, ploughed paddocks, roads - from above. Childhood imaginational flight is the source of my creative and critical method - ‘imaginational metaveillance.’ I combine it with painting practice to interrogate the visible, and to expose the normally invisible, elements of our hyperconnected world – from civilian and military airborne drones to the lightspeed electromagnetic frequencies our civilian and military technologies rely upon for connectivity and interconnectivity. While imaginational metaveillance and painting are not reliant on digital/cyber devices, or signal connectivity, this does not preclude them as methods to critique these technologies. Rather, they provide a distance from them that affords different perspectives. DRONE: Ghosts and Shadows is your chance to ‘see’ what this distance reveals.
In other news, I invite you to watch/listen to the first half hour of my presentation 'Painting the Politics of Drones' at the March Visual Politics Research Program seminar, University of Queensland. The second half was Q&A.
Saturday, January 18, 2025
HOLDING ON OR LETTING GO?
NEWS!
New article, Surrendering to 'too powerful' technologies: from the F-111 to the MQ-28 Ghost Bat Drone, published in Media, War, and Conflict journal.
__________________________________________________________________________
HOLDING ON OR LETTING GO?
Beliefs and Battlefields (above) and An Unfolding Story (below) were inspired by the work of Jacquelyn Schneider and Julia MacDonald, co-authors of a new book The Hand Behind Unmanned: Origins of the US Autonomous Military Arsenal (2024 online, 2025 print). The third painting, Another Unfolding Story (bottom), was inspired by creating the first two paintings. Jacquelyn Schneider is a Hoover Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and is the Director of the Hoover Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative. Julia MacDonald is Director, Research and Engagement Asia New Zealand Foundation, NZ.
Having previously read some of Jacquelyn Schneider's work, when I read the early edition of this new book's Introduction, I was inspired. From a US perspective, the book examines various issues dealing with human beliefs about the conduct of war, including "technological determinism and military revolutions, force protection and casualty aversion, and service identities"(abstract).
(the binary code 'instructs' repeated questions marks ?????
Cheers, Kathryn.
Sunday, December 29, 2024
WHERE ARE THE SHADOWS?
2024: Brimblecombe-Fox, K. 2024. “Imaginational Metaveillance: Revelations in the Drone Age” in Drone Aesthetics: War, Culture, Ecology, Open Humanities Press. Eds. Beryl Pong (University of Cambridge) and Michael Richardson (University of New South Wales).
2024: Brimblecombe-Fox, K. 2024. “Imaginational Metaveillance, Creative Painting Practice, and the Airborne Drone” in Drones in Society: A New Visual Aesthetics, Palgrave Macmillan. Ed. Elisa Serafinelli (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK).
Sunday, December 15, 2024
GHOSTS AND SHADOWS: SEEKING PATTERNS
Sunday, September 29, 2024
SPOOFED AI GENERATION: A PAINTED PORTRAIT
Is 'cultural product' a better description?
I'll add here, to avoid being called a technophobe 😁, some images and videos derived from gen-AI tools, could be called art. It's what someone, an artist, does with the tool or the tool's product generation? For example, if an artist develops their own datasets and experiments with them, or 'breaks' the technology by introducing glitches or other interstices, or does something with a generated image, for example - prints it and then draws or paints over it, or rips it up and weaves pieces into other ripped up pieces. There are so many possibilities.
One needs to keep in mind that art, whether AI assisted, painted, sculpted, digital or other, can be good or bad, fashionable or cutting edge. Critical appraisal is another subject for another day.
'Art' and advertising
Simply ascribing the term 'art' to a product/service/tool does not elevate the product, but some opportunistically seem to think so. The term 'art' has become a marketing word or medium for companies that develop gen-AI tools. This reeks of desires to legitimise and elevate their products. But, this reeking exposes ignorance, opportunism, carelessness.
John Berger's observation, in Ways of Seeing (book and TV show-1970s), that during the mid 20th century famous paintings/art were used to advertise completely unassociated products, such as alcohol and cars, provides a way to critically think about how the term 'art' is used to market contemporary tech products. The 21st century twist is that the so-called 'art' and the tech being promoted/sold are less divisible than in the mid 20th century promotions.
Divisibility is illustrated in the image below, a photo from a 1967 edition of a French magazine, Réalités, that my mother used to subscribe to. A detail of Emil Jean Horace Vernet's painting Bataille du pont d'Acole' (1826) is used to promote a product, Courvoisier Cognac. AND, while the advertisement in effect cheapens art as an advertising motif, please notice that the advertiser places a caption acknowledging the artist, the painting, and the context of the painting. This does not happen with images now scraped from online sites where artists works are posted. In the twenty-first century the cheapening continues at speed! Ironically, this is at the same time people aspire to be called artists, many claiming the anybody can be an artist, and that all artists are inspired by other artists, so copying is ok etc! Regarding the latter, the art theory term appropriation is another topic - for another post!
Self Portrait: From My Dataset, 2024
SO, my self portrait at the top of this post, is a painting, an actual painting - a triptych painted over a number of months. It is a spoof of gen-AI processes and outputs. This self-portrait seems to be grappling with how it might emerge. Each piece of Self-Portrait: From My Dataset conveys something about me; my likeness, my personality, my geeky sense of humour. Therefore, each piece is a portrait/self-portrait. Combined, the three paintings are another self-portrait.
The first piece of the triptych makes my 'prompt', To paint a portrait of Kathryn, appear like the headline for a fabulous show! Is it a gameshow, a carnival oddity, or....? This is a critique of the importance placed on prompting, now a 'profession' eg: prompt engineer.
The middle piece is my image 'dataset', but it includes images chosen for reasons no scoping/scraping algorithm could detect.
The third piece is the final 'generated image', but there seems to have been a glitch because the 'AI' has not been able to pixelate a final 'perfect' image. Have correlations from the dataset and statistical probabilities failed to sequence? Did my painted dataset of characteristics no algorithm could scope, trick the tool? Or, maybe it was because, over the few months I took to paint Self Portrait: From My Dataset a few insects got stuck in wet paint. While I did attempt to remove them, and repaint areas, I am pretty sure insect body parts may still be embalmed in the paint. Pretty sure an AI tool would not have to deal with a stuck insect! But, for an artist - a painter - this kind of occurrence is all part of the process of problem solving.
NEWS
- My commentary piece, "Light-Speed, Contemporary War, and Australia's National Defence Strategic Review", published in Digital War Journal.
- Visual essay chapter "Imaginational Metaveillance: Revelations in the Drone Age", published in Drone Aesthetics: War, Culture, Ecology Open Humanities Press.
BOOK LAUNCH for Drone Aesthetics: War, Culture, Ecology on Wednesday October 2, 2024. Please register through the Centre for Drones and Culture, The University of Cambridge, site
- Visual essay chapter "Imaginational Metaveillance, Creative Painting Practice and the Airborne Drone", in Drones in Society: New Visual Aesthetics Palgrave MacMillan.
- In November 2024, I am presenting at Artificial Visionaries two day workshop, The University of Queensland. Humanitix Registration
- In March 2025, a major solo exhibition DRONE: Ghosts and Shadows at the University of Southern Queensland Art Gallery, Toowoomba, Australia.
Tuesday, August 13, 2024
VISUALISING THE INVISIBLE
The Centre for Law as Protection is building a scholarly community to study the idea of protection, shape policy and develop legal tools to protect people, animals and the environment.
The keynote speaker for the Centre's launch was Professor Matilda Arvidsson from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her presentation was inspiring. She introduced us to a history of data collection practices, including early warnings about automating data collection. She brought us into the present with a discussion about the digital shadows we generate, and more. I keep thinking about her presentation.