The Ontological Surveillance Drone photo series began accidentally in 2013 when I stopped drawing one day and took a series of still photographs of my Ontological Road Map ink drawing that was lying flat on my table. In 2020 during the Covid-19 lockdown I had no access to my studio I worked on mechanical pencil drawings in my Plan series at home and took a video “fly-over” of the drawing. This became the initial video of the Ontological Surveillance Drone video series.

These photographs and video stills are a more contemporary and technology driven variation on my earlier Ontological Surveillance Map series, which uses blown up painted detail images of the map drawing to mimic the “insets” of traditional cartography. This body of work mimics the surveillance video taken by security cameras, police departments and the military. They are a simulacra of observations of a fictional landscape that could be a depiction of a real physical exterior space but also a psychological interior space.