with Che Applewhaite
“how extremely lazy of me” is the real title for a series of photographs and written text that Che Applewhaite sent me after some time we spent in Trinidad. He wanted to prepare for some film called Drone Life AKA “R.P.J”. I didn’t tell him my full name because nobody knows it. I don’t either. And yet, I’m looking at this thing with my initials in the title. Does he really think that he can replace the missing elements in me? lol.
In this lecture performance, Che Applewhaite draws on personal experiences common to the legacies of displacement across Trinidad and Tobago, England, Okinawa, Japan, and the United States by moving through different modes of image playback while in flight: airplane movie-watching, computer-game simulations, smartphone footage, unmanned aerial vehicles, and flying insects. The lecture performance questions the limits of what image technologies can see (or choose to see) as the creation, distribution, and playback of images are distributed across screens and online networks.