ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the process of making artworks that relate to military airspaces. It describes a body of work made during an artist residency in the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology at Newcastle University. The photographic works, airspace planning tables and film described were made during a 12-month period and relate to the hidden geographies of military aviation. The discipline of making a body of work that relates to a specific area of military activity has required learning a set of new practical skills and developing an investigative research methodology. The use of black-and-white footage of clouds implicitly evokes aerial films from the Second World War and before, but also an otherworldly dimension beyond the terrestrial plane. The slow, sequential presentation of the airspace charts over the cloudscapes also suggests a form of mechanical and visual automation, one that alludes to the increasing use of drones and semi-autonomous aerial vehicles.
