The exhibition Variable Depth, Shallow Water explores various conceptsthrough the agency of drone imagery. Polish-born, Australian-based artist Izabela Pluta talks to Joseph Agius about the visual language that includes Gozo’s Dwejra and the remains of the Azure Window as one of its themes.

Perception is at the basis of artistic creati­vity. Your art relates to an altered, alternative view that embraces drone technology to deliver a message. Do you feel that there is a dehumanising perspective and Big Brother approach is more relevant, now more than ever, in the AI technology-driven era in which we are living?

I think that there is certainly an altered way that we experience the world – the speed and flow of images and our interactions with them has changed drastically with the advancement of camera techno­logy and the internet. The use of drones seems to have further edged us towards experiencing events from a distance – the gaze of the drone and its inherent visual language is what I’m interested in disrupting, through elements of this video work.

During the filming of it, I was grappling with the fact that I was using drone cinematography but knew that I wasn’t comfortable adhering to the kind of aerial footage that’s associated with a militaristic or colonial gaze, nor did I want to create work that reinforced the issues that concern me in relation to how this kind of aerial perspective has become almost common place.

So I decided to draw on the imperfection of my flying, and in the end decided it was important to present the footage which was jerky and rather hasty in the camera’s movements – the clean, constant sweep of an overhead travelling shot was interrupted in this work. I did this as a way of counteracting the language of the dehumanising perspective to instead remind the viewer that there is an operator on the other end making the images.

You splice together different geographical locations from footage of Dwejra in Gozo and Peppimenarti in Central Northern Australia as a video-collage that disconcertingly blurs the boundaries in all senses; land and sea merge into a new hybrid, offering novel opportunities. Has technology removed truthfulness and actual representation from the equation, through manipulation?

In my mind, technology is responsible for many changes in how the world is represented, but photography has always been a tool used to assert control and to create a very subjective type of representation of the subject. The photograph was never a truthful thing. The three-channel video, Lines of sight 2020, in the exhibition Variable Depth Shallow Water at Spazju Kreattiv incorporates three perspectives – that of looking onto and in approach to the rock debris of the fallen Azure Window where I scuba dived to film in 2018; circumnavigating the debris from above; and a set of sweeps down the cliff face from where the rock fell away – this final section is cut with very quick ‘flickers’ of a specific landscape in Australia – in Peppimenarti, which is five hours southwest of Darwin in the Northern Territory – land of the Ngan’gik-urun-ggurr people. I’ve spent time there and have developed a relationship with artist Regina Pilawuk-Wilson, which is a real privilege.

Izabela Pluta

The significance of splicing this footage made sense to me while making this work. The rescued footage from the fallen drone in Gozo held visual data from my previous trip to Peppimenarti – also in 2018 – both places ‘sunk’ with the SD card in the apparatus after I was filming in Malta and accidently crashed the drone while researching for this exhibition. In my mind, it made sense to interweave these two places in the context of this video. I wanted to negate a singular perspective, and to present an incongruency of places and times that came to be on the SD card at the same time – serendipitously. I’m also interested in how this way of bringing disparate places together on the screen might speak to the fact that we can never really understand or assume knowledge based on what we see in images before us.

British artists like David Bomberg and Paul Nash were commissioned by the British military to act as cartographers and documenters, adding a very personal perceptive dimension that could have interfered in the execution. Can one conclude that drones capture a less personalised reality of any circumstance, and that perception is actually a relatively flawed phenomenon as it draws on the intrinsically human? Are these machines, although controlled by a human being, kilometres away in an office, purveyors of a more truthful art?

The visual language of the drone might point to, through its all-encompassing view, a form of documentation and accuracy – however this is merely its aesthetic shortfall. Drones are controlled by humans, and hence the intention behind the use of them is the point of contention. Who is using the drone, and why? What is the data they are collecting for? Why is that terrain being charted? I think drones can be used in art like any other creative medium – for me it’s more about the intention of the work, and that by using the drone as a capturing device, it can both signal to the visual tropes of visual imagery that’s associated with its suspicious ways and hopefully form a critique around the issues of how they operate in the world.

I’m interested in how every aspect of my process has a knock-on effect on other things – things that play out in the studio between components and materials

The concept of loss seems to permeate the exhibition – the lost drone, the loss of a Gozitan geological tourist attraction, the loss of actual human perception, loss of orientation, loss of clarity. Are we indeed living in a time when we are losing everything including our humanity, sanity and identity?Are we losing our grip on the reality out there as machines do the job for us?

Yes, there seem to be themes and topics that have kind of gravitated to one another. My PhD was about how can art engage productively with the complex ebb and flow of migratory movements, shifts and the diasporic experience of the migrant imagination – about how an attachment to the past manifests itself in places and objects that surround us – loss and a sense of precariousness is at the centre of these ideas.

Still from the three-channel video

Later on, when I stared to use diving as a way of experiencing the subject at hand (the Yonagni Monument, and then the Azure Window) I was thinking about how diving redefines the limits of human experience – ‘control’ through various apparatus, yet when the dive takes place you absolutely let go to uncertainty – being underwater is a very different feeling to being on land. Light, distance and luminosity are different and constantly shifting. So the very physicality of this experience is about losing a sense of orientation.

When I learnt about the Azure Window crashing into the sea, I was researching and diving the Yonaguni monument in Japan. These sites operate in direct opposition and bring up a way of thinking about slow time and fast time. They remind me of the fact that rocks are a record of planetary history – where millions of years become flattened and collapsed into strata of just a few centimetres. Forces of geological time are compressed into this kind of ‘ledger’ that not only documents (not in a way that I understand it, as I am not a geologist) this massive expanse of time, but also reminds us of it. The way that I approached the site (Dwejra), how I came across the news of the fall of the window, the organic (and in a way uninvested dive of the ruins of the arch), and the misadventure that occurred with the drone crash, brings up a lot for me in relation to uncertainty of place, or locating oneself.

For me it’s very much a turn to reality – to the experiential qualities of places and things around me and how these become a trigger for speculating on how we move through and connect to the world – and I guess in line with your question – that perhaps it’s the effects of technology on our everyday that reorientates us with things that are solid, tactile, material, rather than man-made and machine like.

In the essay for the exhibition catalogue, exhibition curator Ellie Buttrose claims that “an attentiveness to accidents, glitches and blurriness can reveal other alternative ways of relating to the world”. Have these alternatives become more relevant than the crisp and crystalline?

I’m interested in how every aspect of my process has a knock-on effect on other things – things that play out in the studio between components and materials. It’s kind of cyclic – for example, I employ a camera in quite conventional ways – although I am not relying on its or my technical ability, but rather the camera as an exploratory tool for mediating the world. The mechanisms of the apparatus are responsible for the way the world (or underwater world) is translated – yet all the parameters – be that light (its intensity or lacking), focus (perceiving proximity or distance) or movement – that govern the way an image is recorded are in flux, they are unpredictable.

And so I like to remind myself of that – of the way my work calls that up. Often parameters lead to mishaps, things never panning out as I had expected in the way I approach a site, or what I imagine the place to be. And so I embrace the incidental and then also try to inscribe the work, be that through materials, visual syntax, the installation, or the components and how they relate to one another – with that element of chance, or misadventure.

Chance procedures have been adopted in art since 1900 in practices of artists working during Dada and Surrealism – perhaps the way that artists today are grappling with the world and its very own precarity, this moment is giving way to all kinds of practices that questions rules and order in a range of social and political contexts.

Variable Depth, Shallow Water, curated by Nicole Bearman and Francesca Mangion, is hosted by Spazju Kreattiv. It was meant to run until April 11 but this has been curtailed due to the new COVID-19 measures.