Shona Illingworth Topologies of Air

Can practice-led research in the arts develop legal frameworks for understanding the future of digital technologies and their relationship to airspace?

Topologies of Air and Lesions in the Landscape are two major bodies of work by Shona Illingworth. Informed by the artist’s long-term investigations into individual and societal amnesia, these projects critically examine the devastating psychological and environmental impacts of military, industrial, and corporate transformations of airspace and outer space.
 
Employing interdisciplinary research and collaborative processes, Illingworth’s practice uses creative methodologies to visualize and interrogate this proliferating exploitation of airspace. Through the development of a proposed new human right, Topologies of Air and Lesions in the Landscape connect diverse cosmologies, knowledges, and lived experiences to counter the colonization of the sky and protect individuals, communities, and ecologies from ever-increasing threats from above.
 
Contributors
Caterina Albano, Amin Alsaden, Jill Bennett, Giuliana Bruno, Martin A. Conway, Anthony Downey, Conor Gearty, Derek Gregory, Nick Grief, Andrew Hoskins, Catherine Loveday, Issie Macphail, William Merrin, Renata Salecl, Gabriele Schwab, Gaëtane Verna

Anthony Downey is Professor of Visual Culture in the Middle East and North Africa within the Faculty of Arts, Design, and Media at Birmingham City University. He sits on the editorial boards of Third Text and Digital War, and is the series editor for Research/Practice (Sternberg Press).

Shona Illingworth is a Danish-Scottish artist known for her immersive video and multi-channel sound installations, and evocative, interdisciplinary research-led practice in which she explores the dynamic processes of memory, cultural erasure, construction of histories, and imagined futures in situations of social tension and trauma. Since 2012 her work has been concerned with examining impacts of accelerating geopolitical, technological and environmental change on the composition, nature and use of airspace and the implications for human rights. Her work has been exhibited internationally.