INSULAE [Of the Island]

Flying at drone height over glitching waves, UK artist Nye Thompson’s INSULAE [Of the Island] contemplates the impact of island geography on national identity in the time of Brexit, through a perpetually looping digitally-reconstructed tour of the waters just off the British coastline. With the ocean as a metaphorical buffer between the UK and the rest of the world, the viewer is taken on a journey – endlessly circling the entire British mainland, obsessively patrolling these watery borders. The deeply emotive concept of the national border is re-framed as aesthetics through the distancing god gaze of the satellite imagery.

INSULAE was created using Google Earth; initially developed as a CIA global surveillance tool, this AI-powered imagery has the quality of looking like ‘reality’ but in fact it is a patchwork of data from different sources, processed, visually enhanced, artificially beautified and reconstructed by Google and the major satellite imaging suppliers. Artefacts and glitches become incorporated into the visual narrative, and fleeting moments are frozen, distorted and monumentalized. Some areas may be removed or obscured behind the scenes at the request of governments with sufficient political clout. So, this vision of the world comes to echo the way a popular historical narrative is constructed: assembled from multiple sources, strategically enhanced but with key political agendas obscured.

Title: INSULAE [Of the Island

Medium: single channel video installation

Artist: Nye Thompson

Year: 2019

Location: On display at Pedion tou Areos

INSULAE was created as a joint commission between the Barbican, Sky Arts 50 and Lumen Art Projects

Glossary: artificial intelligence (AI)