Try and catch this film installation at Towner Eastbourne only on until 30th September……..

Omer Fast: 5000 Feet is the Best

5000 Feet is the Best (2011) is a film about drone warfare and the pilots who operate these machines. Based on a series of interviews the artist conducted with a former drone operator now working as a Las Vegas casino security guard, the work takes its name from the optimum operational flight altitude of a US Air Force Predator drone – at a distance of 5000 feet drones can identify virtually anything.

The film weaves together the operator’s account of his life and work to explore the shifting divisions between reality and representation, truth and memory. Its eerie effect is in the way it uncannily brings drone vision close to home, enabling us to visualise events taking place in landscapes we have no direct access to, while the consequences of killing at a distance remain hidden.

………………We saw this work installed in Grand Parade at the Brighton Photo Biennale 2012. It was installed to a very high spec in the North gallery where they build a box with a double light block, so when you entered, it really was pitch black except for the light of the film…. for a moment or two, you could see nothing in front of you… it was disorientating and quite difficult to find a place to sit.  Slowly your eyes adjust to the dark and you notice other viewers sitting on benches…. you sit down to a vertiginous series of vignettes, stories from a man being interviewed in a hotel room underneath a casino. The room is off a dark windowless basement corridor, the man is being interviews by a film crew, he tells of his time operating a drone, in a series of stories, and we cut to inside that story, when it seems to finish, we again see the man in the corridor go into his room and the interview begins again, but it’s not quite the same, its edited differently, and the questions and answers proceed along similar lines but are different, and another story unfolds. The interview itself, and the flashbacks or episodes he narrates are filmic and gripping. Then we see the head and shoulders of a young man, filmed as if being interviewed on Skype, his face pixelated so we cannot identify him. He talks more directly about his experience of flying drones and pressing the button and then driving home. I remember spending a lot of time in this installation with students, spending time with L5 FACP students there, and then on to discuss it afterwards G5, October 2012.

Thanks for the photo Lauren Heckler