Drone Pilot

2016  ·  live performance, sound

Drone Pilot is a set of vocal and kinetic poems created for live performance. The project abstractly traces a path of telepresent violence: an American drone pilot waking in the morning, traveling to work, entering a bunker, connecting to a global military apparatus, merging consciousness with the system, and killing a child with a Hellfire missile on the far side of the world.

Drone Pilot explores the moral complicity of a singular individual within an impossibly huge and dehumanizing power structure. To what degree is each of us responsible for violence inflicted in our name, on our behalf, by a system that we have questionable degrees of agency within?

Publications:

Drone Pilot 7", a subset of the Drone Pilot poems on vinyl, cOsmOsmOse

Private, a Drone Pilot poem published as a transparent chapbook, Inpatient Press

⌰ (Total Runout), a kinetic poem from Drone Pilot, Imperial Matters [BROKEN LINK]

Discussed in:

Álvaro Seiça, Kinetic Poetry, in Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities: Contexts, Forms & Practices (Bloomsbury, 2021)

Álvaro Seiça, Lit Mods, Electronic Book Review (2020)

Álvaro Seiça, A Critique of Control and Black Boxes: Lit Mods of Ian Hatcher’s “⌰ (Total Runout)”, Poetics Today (2020)

Scott Rettberg, Electronic Literature (Polity, 2018)

Stagings:

2017 - Simon Fraser University, for The Capilano Review, Vancouver, Canada

2017 - Gold + Beton, Cologne, Germany

2017 - De Player, Rotterdam, Netherlands

2017 - Flatterschaft, Basel, Switzerland

2017 - Record launch, Errant Sound, Berlin, Germany

2017 - cOsmOsmOse Festival, Karlsruhe, Germany

2016 - EAPSU, Clarion University, Clarion PA

2016 - Actoral Festival, Usine C, Montreal QC

2016 - We Have Always Been Digital, The Kitchen, New York NY

2016 - United States Embassy, Helsinki, Finland

2016 - ELO 2016, University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada

2016 - 101 Festival, Alexandrinsky Theatre, St. Petersburg, Russia

2016 - International Symposium of Electronic Art (ISEA), Hong Kong

2016 - cOsmOsmOse Festival, Düsseldorf, Germany

2016 - Infrastructural Aesthetics, Pratt Upload, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn NY

2016 - In Visible Architectures, Artists Space Books and Talks, New York NY

2016 - User Agent (NYPAC / Rachel Valinsky), Judson Memorial Church, New York NY