NOTES ON AERIAL PHOTOGRAPHY
Single channel film, 30 mins, 2023
Script and edit by Henrietta Williams, sound by Merijn Royaards
Digital renders by Keren Kuenberg, motion graphics by Simon Ball, voice work by David Anderson
An exploration of the aerial viewpoint through three objects from the same place in different times: Babylonia, Mesopotamia, Iraq.
object i.
The Babylonian Map of the World (c. 600 BC) – was excavated by Hormuzd Rassam 30 kilometres outside of today’s Baghdad and shipped to the British Museum in 1882. This object is rebuilt within the film as a digital model to reform the clay tablet into a landscape and demonstrate the power embedded in this early cuneiform artefact.
object ii.
Notes on Aerial Photography (1918) – was created by the Royal Air Force for use by British colonial forces in Mesopotamia. The small booklet was a tool designed to instruct in the gathering and decoding of aerial images for military application.
object iii.
The September Dossier (2002) – released by Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government preceding the Iraq War. Careful unravelling of the image/text structures begin to reveal the rhetorical and semantic processes that have been applied to the pixelated satellite photographs that purported to show the sites of Weapons of Mass Destruction.
The film layers and complicates these objects at the moment of the 20 year anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War. Cartographic systems of meaning are revealed as embedded in the distancing gaze of the aerial viewpoint as it develops to become a colonial tool of suppression and control.
Single channel film, 30 mins, 2023
Script and edit by Henrietta Williams, sound by Merijn Royaards
Digital renders by Keren Kuenberg, motion graphics by Simon Ball, voice work by David Anderson
An exploration of the aerial viewpoint through three objects from the same place in different times: Babylonia, Mesopotamia, Iraq.
object i.
The Babylonian Map of the World (c. 600 BC) – was excavated by Hormuzd Rassam 30 kilometres outside of today’s Baghdad and shipped to the British Museum in 1882. This object is rebuilt within the film as a digital model to reform the clay tablet into a landscape and demonstrate the power embedded in this early cuneiform artefact.
object ii.
Notes on Aerial Photography (1918) – was created by the Royal Air Force for use by British colonial forces in Mesopotamia. The small booklet was a tool designed to instruct in the gathering and decoding of aerial images for military application.
object iii.
The September Dossier (2002) – released by Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government preceding the Iraq War. Careful unravelling of the image/text structures begin to reveal the rhetorical and semantic processes that have been applied to the pixelated satellite photographs that purported to show the sites of Weapons of Mass Destruction.
The film layers and complicates these objects at the moment of the 20 year anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War. Cartographic systems of meaning are revealed as embedded in the distancing gaze of the aerial viewpoint as it develops to become a colonial tool of suppression and control.