SEMINAR: Drone Imagery in Irish Visual Culture 23 Feb 2023
Topic: Irish Studies’ Seminar Series – Drone Imagery in Irish Visual Culture 23 Feb 2023
Time: Feb 23, 2023 04:00 PM London
Meeting ID: 997 8478 1437
Passcode: 948866
Drone Imagery in Irish Visual Culture: Evoking a Nostalgic Past amidst the Contemporary Future
Dr. Jeannine Kraft, Columbus College of Art & Design
Photo credit: © Nick Fox / Adobe Stock
Drone imagery has played a key role in the twenty-first century in the framing and dissemination of images of the Irish landscape. The internet has provided a broad global dissemination of images that are not just static visualizations, but also include interactive video and three-dimensional images, thereby re-circulating notions of place, identity, and geography. New tools used by television and tourist campaigns include drone photography and video. Both have been used to reinforce the emptied-out “wild” nostalgic landscapes of Ireland through the means of sheer physical distance, rendering any existing modernity framed out of the view. It is a repeated trope of the past, but one now further enhanced and spectacularized by new technology. In the 2007-10 Irish show Single-Handed, set in Connemara in the West of Ireland, the main character’s mother highlights the contrast between the nostalgic vision of past and present Ireland to its historic and contemporary realities: “There’s a tragedy here is what I’m saying. People come here now to look at the view. Don’t think they know what it is they are seeing.” This talk will examine how drone imagery engenders the spectacularization of the landscape, a trope frequently encountered in the envisioning of Ireland.
Dr. Jeannine Kraft is Professor, and Chair of the History of Art & Visual Culture department at Columbus College of Art & Design (Columbus, Ohio). She completed her PhD, Landscape Legacies: The Renegotiation of the Irish West in Contemporary Visual Culture, with the Centre for Irish Studies at the National University of Ireland Galway, now University of Galway, in 2019. She has received CCAD Faculty Development Grants (2016-22) as well as the Griffith Faculty Excellence Award in 2016. She has presented her research nationally and internationally. Her work focuses on the legacy of the representation of Ireland in contemporary Irish visual culture and she is currently teaching a seminar class on landscape in Ireland and how contemporary artists negotiate the inherited legacies of place.
Photo credit: ãNick Fox / Adobe Stock