Camouflage, behind the abstract pattern, Art-Nature-War

This research builds on H. R. Shell’s work on chameleonic camouflage (2012) to bring ideas of resubjectification through tourism and heritage into dialogue with contemporary theories of surveillance and military practice. The work was acutely topical in considering the relationship between screen/immersion, machine vision/reading and identity. The practice research and main element of this exhibition submission was the production of two new artworks The Old Razzle Dazzle VR (2019) and Dead Reckoning (2019) which reconsidered and technically updated existing works concerned with camouflage, to reframe them as immersive and resubjectified. A (cancelled due to pandemic) book chapter reflected on the research process of making the original artworks, placed them in the wider historical and theoretical context of camouflage practices, and identified immersion as a critical factor in the contemporary camoufleur’s response to machine vision (drawing on Virilio’s ideas on perceptual armaments in relation to Gough’s formulation of scopic control and Mitchell’s operation of landscapes of power).