Drone Drama: Music for the Dead is a short film anthology which consists of 11 Chapters by Berlin based American composer Sean Derrick Cooper Marquardt produced and filmed by Cecelia Chapman on the San Francisco Peninsula and Silicon Valley. The collaboration explores the interplay between Chapman's video interpretation of Marquardt's subtle drone compositions and titles that address what it is to be human in the age of the drone. Chapman interprets Marquardt’s original titles to question the militarisation and commodification of knowledge, and the friction between technology corporations and her own community of the San Francisco Peninsula.
1. I love watching the movement of your limbs when they tremble from the wind’s gentle caress. Filmed on the full moon summer solstice four hundred miles away from Aliso Canyon gas storage that was leaking a methane plume visible from space into the air for four months in 2016. It was one of the worst unreported environmental disasters in U.S. history. Christa Hunter.
2. Things that never die have never lived. Found online war video and war explosions posted as entertainment.
3. Music for the Dead examines domestic violence and it's connection to collective anger and violence through the eyes of the traumatized witness. Martha Martinez, Bob Selfe.
4. Offerings of the Oracle examines two repositories of knowledge and prediction in split screen. An online psychic-oracle, descendent of transgender shaman who used costume and herbs to find answers for the survival of tribe. And Oracle software corporation, a militarized knowledge editor named after it’s first CIA contract, the headquarters, salt pond and Oracle Team USA American Cup Challenger.
5. People build fences to keep people out and other people build fences to keep people in... the ‘surveillance eye,’ by drone at the coast near Pedro Rock where the US government patrols for foreign invasion, and by design of San Francisco Alcatraz prison, to keep prisoners imprisoned. Josh Berkowitz drone.
6. If you are not a fish, how can you tell if the fish are happy? …considers the relevance of ancient dialogue about knowledge to contemporary digital information practice. It addresses the dilemma of knowledge at the precipice of nuclear and environmental disaster, in the age of drones. Asian Gardens, San Francisco.
© 2023 CECELIA CHAPMAN