Every Drone Wants to Live is a solo video installation performance in which Leralee Whittle investigates one’s worth in contemporary society, being a consumer. Her physical performance about the subordination of the average American citizen / consumer is an embodiment of ethics, value and place within a-corporate-profit-driven-existence. She juxtaposes extreme, poignant performance states with videos containing enhanced physical textures, levity, humor, visual detail and sound.
In the videos, Whittle takes over the 5th floor of an office tower to reckon with “the pre-apocalyptic zeitgeist”. She exorcises “states of mind” lingering in corners, cubicles and crevices of the abandoned office suite. As she shape shifts through the building her actions as a creative medium are captured on camera. She picks up on a degraded cultural milieu in traces of social meetings at corporate coffee houses, voyeuristic fetishes of being under watch (surveillance cameras and bosses) and drone status sublimated into obsession with celebrity. Movement vernaculars convey our impulsive nature and a lack of “big picture thinking” in this creative critique of how we live.
Along the way she personifies the ethos of a crumbling capitalist empire where one’s stuff is an extension of self. Disposable objects root one to a sense of place. Thoughts compete for attention without clear priority (spectacle distracts from important issues). Collective conscience about ecological impact of trendy, disposable commodities and the affects of corporate profit is, well, retarded, impeded and manipulated.
Before the performance begins the audience will fill out a questionnaire regarding the neoliberal “free-market” which seizes a disproportionate share of the world’s natural resources and exploits poorer countries for their assets, an imbalance that’s having a dire impact on many groups of people and the environment. Questions about subordination of comparatively wealthy American consumers will be derivative of social ecology, ecofeminism, ethical consumerism and Noam Chomsky’s “Maufacturing Consent :The Political Economy of the Mass Media ”. The questions will serve to draw out a conscious connection with one’s level of freedom and responsibility as a citizen of the world. Some of the audience’s answers and Whittle’s answers to the same questions will be integrated into the live performance as text, embodiment and interactive video.
“Just as men are converted into commodities, so every aspect of nature is converted into a commodity, a resource to be manufactured and merchandised wantonly. … The plundering of the human spirit by the market place is paralleled by the plundering of the earth by capital.” ~ Mooray Bookchin (Social Ecologist)
social ecology, ecofeminism, ethical consumerism and the book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (Noam Chomsky).
