Isabella Streffen is an artist based in the UK, where she recently completed her doctoral research into military visioning technologies and their use in fine art practice. She works across media to examine and respond to fundamental problems of politics, perception, technology and narrative. She has a particular fascination with and feeling for contested sites, performing a kind of intellectual fieldwork that engages with the conditions of a particular culture, place and world-view to throw light on their origins and consequences.
Her works often start somewhere between image and text, but rarely stay there, transforming into intriguing and frustrating structures, barely perceptible interruptions, large-scale installations and temporary public realm performances and events. Recent projects include Dead Reckoning, a geo-caching game developed with professional snipers; The Enlistment, a performance examining collective responsibility in war; The Old Razzle Dazzle, a video work that questions the relationship between ‘beauty’, ‘nature’, and ‘art’ at Monet’s Garden in Giverny; and Hawk & Dove, a video installation created with remote-controlled zeppelins in the heart of the American political establishment.
Isabella is currently working on three major projects: dronology.com, a website cataloguing and collating data on projects/research relating to drones, which also comprises the research background for her forthcoming film Volo; her long-term project Border Strategy (2010-); and on the preparatory stage of a substantial new body of work Aerial Culture.
A revised and more comprehensive version of this website will be launched in July 2013.
background image: Shooting The Light Fantastic, Hatton Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2008
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