ViSmedia Drone Researcher at Art Exhibition
“The drones are changing the way we look at others”, says Øyvind Vågnes in relation to the current exhibition The Drones Are Coming.
TO THE FUTURE: Øyvind Vågnes was invited to write an essay about The Drones Are Coming. (PHOTO: Sigrid Haaland)
As one of the first art exhibitions about drones in Norway, The Drones Are Coming is displayed in Akershus Art Centre in Lillestrøm from August 12 to September 4.
Vågnes is a researcher at the ViSmedia project at the University of Bergen, and was invited to write an essay about the very topical exhibition by the two artists Anders Eiebakke and Ruben Pater.
Vågnes writes that with drones, we somehow get closer to people – despite being far away.
“The pilots have exhausting shifts where they for example follow an individual over a long time, without the person having any idea it’s happening,” Vågnes writes on drones in surveillance and warfare.
At the exhibition, Ruben Pater looks at how we as a society respond to the drones. His focus is on the darker side of the drone technology. Anders Eiebakke focuses on how people use drones privately, and confronts the audience with the watcher in us.
You can read more about the exhibition here, and the full essay here.
In 2014, Vågnes published the novel Sone Z, which takes us to a society with total surveillance and strict border control. Read more here.