RADIUS: The Gaze Beyond Vision
a work by Ibrahim Quraishi, 2025
sound by Oliver Baurhenn
This work explores the cognitive presence of drones and their dual role as both observers and participants, addressing themes of surveillance and war.
Radius: The Gaze Beyond Vision makes a powerful statement in the discourse on the ontology and epistemology of machines as witnesses to the human condition.
It explores themes of surveillance, war, and the evolving aesthetics of these phenomena through the lens of primitive, almost analogue sound and visual technology. This work looks into the cognitive presence of drones and the unsettling implications of their dual role as both observers and participants.
Ibrahim Quraishi's artistic journey to this art work begann in 2016, when footage was captured via a homemade drone navigating a restricted zone amidst a devastated landscape in the Arabian desert.
Forbidden to physically enter the area, the artist relied on drone technologies to pierce the barriers of surveillance culture. This creative subversion revealed a chilling portrait of ecological and human tragedies interwoven with the mechanisms of war.
In Radius: The Gaze Beyond Vision, the installation moves beyond traditional visual frames, employing sound as a vehicle for transmitting images and interpreting the drone's perspective.
What does the drone "see," and how might it "think" in the space it occupies? These questions lie at the core of this work, where the focus shifts from mere observation to active engagement with the drone’s own potential cognitive realm. The sound scape of Oliver Baurhenn might give a glimpse of the drones perceptions and reactions.