Andrew Gibbons

In this article the life of droids is explored through a weaving of scenes, dialogue, analysis, theory and an exhibition. The imagery and text are employed to work through the experiences of the droids and the relationships that are revealed, or perhaps even presenced (Heidegger, 1993). The works of Heidegger and Camus on technology and science, the story of Viktor Frankenstein’s absence of care for ‘his’ creation, and insights from Daniel Wallace’s book, Star Wars: The New Essential Guide to Droids add textual flavour to the images that have been produced by the authors and that invite exploration of life in the age of droidean corporeal horror. In this exhibition of machine lives, the images are presented as uncanny moments (Rancière, 2010), revealing questions concerning technology and being (Heidegger, 1993). The educational intention of this work is not to emancipate machine life through the horror stories of droidean cultures and communities, but rather to offer insights into the error of Modern mastery.

Bee Movie is a short film that invites questions for conversations on visual ethics. The viewer is invited into a world of circular, tragic and absurd questions concerning what a filmmaker, an abstract writer, a journal editor, and a film viewer ought to do when observing the apparent reality of a bee’s circular attempts to escape a pond. As a filmmaker and abstract writer, one does not want to tell the viewer and reader how one feels about this bee, bees, insects, ponds, water, life, death and circles. And one feels obliged not to explain the context through which the film came to life as the bee was engaged in efforts that might be narrated as lifesaving but also as another complex of efforts entirely. As an open image, without our textual dissection (or, at least, with a dampening of that dissection to an abstract and with a few questions and challenges), we regard Bee Movie as inviting questions about the ethics of the use of images as pedagogy. Whatever we thought about whether and how to share this film, we find ourselves in 359 other relationships, and always back again to what we assumed might be the starting position.