X Marks the Spot

This paper problematizes the ethics of coding and other languages that drive future technologies such as computer programming, drone programming, facial recognition and robotics. Exploring Annie Wilson’s and Cameron Bishop’s video work, X Marks the Spot (2019), which occupied an old industrial building in the city of Geelong, the paper investigates the emergent patterns and interactions between programmers, a drone, artists and a children’s choir. Such engagement involved a range of aesthetic experiences for the humans involved including noise, choreographed and reflexive movement, emotion, touch, and expression. Unlike other arts based or performance events the improbabilities of drones’ movements, interferences and interruptions were at play. In a discussion of machine learning and sensory input we consider the drone’s point of view while drawing on another research project which explored patterns and patterning in ancient, indigenous and contemporary societies and cultures around the world to advise on patterning pedagogies (Hannigan, Kilderry & Xu, 2018). Given that engagement with drones as arts-based events is relatively new the paper offers new understandings of what aesthetic experiences might be for participants and how we can utilise this knowledge in future drone studies and research. This discussion of aesthetics in relation to our drone research project and images, raises issues about coding and the rhetoric that drives technological progression. The project has emerged as a result of recent studies into the ethics of computer programming towards a digital totality that we are complicit in, but seemingly passive to (Andrejevic, 2020; Bridle, 2018). As some theorists have argued platform capitalism and its ascendance in capturing data, facilitating our communications, financial transactions and affective gestures, are rendering our critical tensions with technology obsolete, because technological infrastructure as software and hardware is increasingly being ‘blackboxed’.