TERRA EX MACHINA.

Jerusalem is a city famous for its walls: the old-city walls, the infamous separation wall. Less known is an invisible wall that encircles the old-city and its surroundings. Centred on the Haram al-Sharif (or Temple Mount) and approx. 3km in diameter, a no-fly-zone is instantiated by a "geofence," a digital barrier programmed and controlled by DJI (the global leader of drone manufacturing), stretching from the ground into the skies to prevent drone flights above the holy structures and near-by neighborhoods. Terra ex Machina explores this instance of automated enforcement in Jerusalem’s urban space. We flew a drone along the geofence perimeter (approx.10km) from 7 launch points with its camera lens fixed on its center, the Golden Dome. Exporting over 10k sequential images we created a photogrammetric point cloud - materializing the invisible barrier as a spatial object: an urban ring of dense data surrounding a black void of missing data caused by the drone’s inability to penetrate the area. The result is an aerial view showing a digitally enforced blackout over one of the most volatile places in the Middle East. Against this machine-made “gaze from nowhere”, we embedded three point clouds of low altitude do-it-yourself aerial imageries, made using kites and balloons within the no-fly-zone - human-tethered, wind-guided, algorithms-resistant - filling the void with situated, community-grounded ways of seeing.

Find more here.


Concept: Hagit Keysar & Ariel Caine
Drone photography: Hagit Keysar & Barak Brinker
Kite & Balloon photography: Hagit Keysar, Jeffrey Warren (PublicLab), Shai Efrat, Zemer Sat, children from Silwan and many other collaborators
Photogrammetry, GIS & Model Cinematics: Ariel Caine
Video Editing: Ariel Caine & Hagit Keysar
Interface Design simulations: Noya Antman Ron
Model Sound Composition: Francisco Mazza, Rafaele Andrade

#Exhibition #videoart