User:Nadiners/ Uneasy Listening - Art in the Age of Asymmetrical Warfare

Uneasy Listening by Susan Schuppli and Tom Tlalim's

Susan Schuppli and Tom Tlalim's sound installation, Uneasy Listening, is overheard throughout the whole floor of the exhibition. Before entering the room where the sound is in fact installed, there is a photograph of Obama being irritated by a fly as a pre-taster. Once inside the room, the visitor is confronted to the loud sound of a drone, as if it were flying just above. It is the sound simulation of a General Atomics MQ-1 Predator drone, to be precise. In this work the artists represent the drones ubiquitous presence flying over the skies of the Afghanistan’s border. Susan Schuppli explains in a text she wrote about the piece, that the civilian population are ‘psychologically affected by the relentless coverage of US drone surveillance in this area, a military presence that is primarily experienced as a sonic threat in which invisible sound frequencies are converted into states of anxiety, depression, and fear.’ Currently there is research into reducing noise footprint of drones in order to increase the precision capacities of a UAV. Not a single thought about civilian’s suffering from this noise, although she questions is the reduction of noise would really lessen their anxiety and fear? or will the idea of an omnipresent menace that one cannot see nor hear induce even greater fear and trauma? (reminder to the Panopticon prison design).

The piece within the exhibition is coherent with the theme introduced. The visitor (or listener, for this piece) once knowing the ‘context’ of the piece can empathize. Though if this work were to be taken out of its context, with no explanation, it would be disturbing and incomprehensible. Is the work set there to make the visitor feel empathy or be disturbed? Either way it is there to make us think and ask questions.

For my own interest, after having done a fair bit of research into drones in the last year, this piece made me think of another aspect which I ignored, the sound (or noise) of a drone. The artist even mentions this in her text ‘Primarily at stake in this discussion is an examination of the sonic dimension of such remote-controlled warfare, which has received only scant mention in comparison to the many contemporary theorizations of the lethal vision of drone technology’. If I decide to carry on my research in this vast subject of drones, Uneasy Listening would have been a reminder for me to think of every aspect for whatever I make or design. But maybe also use the technology of sound as another medium in my work.

Reference: http://susanschuppli.com/writing/uneasy-listening/