Anne Scott Wilson | Seeing not looking

13 July – 3 August 2019

Artist Talk: Saturday 27th July at 3:30 pm

Seeing not looking, 2019, single channel video, 7 min 28 sec, edition of 5

I started with a premise that feelings experienced while dancing cannot be measured as data. I hoped to frustrate the programming of an autonomous airborne drone camera by distinguishing between movement and emotions and to pitch man against the machine. Taking on the role of a dramaturge, I collaborated with the dancers and programmers in emphasising the push and pull between humans and algorithmic programmed machines.

Initially I attempted to video views from the mind of a dancer, a mental process of remembering choreographic sequences, however this idea became subsumed by the presence and behavior of the drone. It’s relentless seeing (not looking) triggered emotional exchange between the dancers, programmers, myself and the mechanical roaming eye. While editing a video with two dancers and one drone, a power struggle emerges caused by a one-sensor driven camera on the drone privileges one of two dancers to image. The dancers negotiate who was in frame, when and how to escape the frame. Dynamic emotionally charged exchanges evolved over five days – anger, playfulness, fear, love, and suspicion shaped each performance.

Anne Scott Wilson is an artist, academic and sometime curator who sustained a live performance career before studying at university. Transitioning from performance to visual art, her practice explores what it is to be in a body through a lens of dance, studio practice (visual arts) and years of live performance. She explores the dichotomous relationship between movement and meaning, and more broadly what it is to be human and inhabit a body, as a curator and in solo practice using video, sound, photography, AI and installation in public and gallery contexts.

She has received several public commissions, grants and residencies in Australia and overseas and is currently exploring artificial intelligence in artistic practice supported by the Australia Council and ARS Electronica Australia. Her works are held in public and private collections and she is represented by Conny Dietzschold Gallery in Sydney, Hong Kong and Cologne.