Greg Marshall

"bearing" is a machine-like data based art video by Greg Marshall. It composes sampled Google 360° Sphere photographs from Yemen with recorded data from over 327 US military drone attacks in Yemen between 2002 to 2018. Almost all the attacks occurred between 2009 and 2018 according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. The records of drone attacks were further researched according to their geographic location of longitude and latitude which is then remapped to a planar image that is used to create the image sphere. Hence, the camera reveals the rotational coordinates and timing of each attack, visualizing the 17-year period into about 2 and a 1/2 minutes of animation. The images from Yemen are assembled according to their time of day and weather, set within a synchronized spin of yearly revolution. A mirror-like sphere further reveals and obscures the environment beyond our field of view but also indicates the death toll severity of each attack according to its size while it is locked in the relation to the camera. The internet images date from 2016 to 2018 and depict various regions and cities within Yemen, areas of everyday common interest⁠—a kind of geographic snapshot of the country which for the most part do not depict results of civil war or drone strikes in the country. "bearing" performs and displays data through logical parameters as a silent witness, where the artist continues to examine the effects of technology, consequence, dislocation, militarism and the notion of empire.

The video is a conceptual continuation of a previous animated art video “Drone,” from 2016 which uses news story data collected from Google Alerts dating back to 2013 that is coded and represented into 3-dimensional colour and bump data. "Drone" screened at exhibitions and festivals in both Canada and the US, as well as Germany and Russia, such as the European Media Art Festival in Germany and Cyfest 11 in New York, St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad, Russia.