Aerial Eyes I
An artist duo—Prerna and Hayden—are committed to interdisciplinary practices spanning the humanities and social and physical sciences, they have collaborated and independently worked on projects examining the actualization of invisible or virtual boundaries within cultural production.
We seek to better understand the space above our heads, literally and metaphorically, and to ask what entities exercise control in that space and by what means. This summer we have proposed a participant-oriented project that allows participants to launch weather balloons from a designated location. These balloons will proceed to float through the many layers of controlled airspace collecting data. More specifically, we aim to investigate, through collective experience, the ways airspace figures into and what Liz Millward refers to as “hegemonic Western tradition in which technologies of vision (such as maps, binoculars, [sensors], etc.) [create] conditions of power based on knowledge” (“The ‘Aerial Eye’: Gender and the Colonization of Airspace”).