Unicorn Riot

Unicorn Riot
Infrared Aerial Surveillance from Standing Rock, 2016-2017, 2019, digital video, 1:57:48
Courtesy of Unicorn Riot Media, Redistributable Under Creative Commons Non-Commercial Share–Alike.

In late 2019, the media collective Unicorn Riot obtained over 100 hours of infrared surveillance footage taken by police reconnaissance aircraft during the 2016-17 #NoDAPL protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline. The footage, alternating between color and the grayscale of infrared, is redolent of U.S. military drone strikes in the Middle East, yet here tipis, tented dwellings, and other silhouetted signifiers identify the sites as the Sacred Stone and Očhéthi Šakówiŋ camps near the Standing Rock Reservation, and the moving bodies as Indigenous Water Protectors. The surveilled movements of Water Protectors were relayed to the militarized police and militia forces mustered to quell resistance to the pipeline, which crosses treaty territory and life-giving water sources. Yet the infrared feed is often obfuscated by cook fire smoke, teargas, and surprising natural encounters that capture the attention of the aircraft, such as a roaming herd of bison. Most notably, during many of the confrontations between Water Protectors and law enforcement at the front line barricades, freezing water was sprayed on Indigenous protesters and their allies, lethal in the below-freezing temperatures. Yet this brutal police tactic also undermined their surveillance tactics, as the water masked body temperatures from the thermographic technology of infrared capture. In the footage, Indigenous bodies disappear from view, the water cloaking the protestors from the colonial police state’s machine vision.

DESCRIPTION

A selection of views of the New Red Order installation framing a viewing alcove in the gallery’s main corridor. In the viewing alcove a turquoise meandering line is painted on the back wall of the gallery over white, yellow, and red triangular sections as part of the New Red Order’s wall installation titled Progenerator. The New Red Order Recruitment Station installation is visible on the right side of the image, including the table, video monitors, banners, and transparency and vinyl covered windows. Progenerator, features two painted walls, meeting at a ninety degree angle, with a continuous design painted across them both. The left wall is approximately eight feet high and has a gap between the top and the ceiling, while the right wall reaches the ceiling of approximately twelve feet high. The design painted on the wall consists of four triangular quadrants in yellow, red, dark brown, and white. The quadrants meet at a center which is located slightly to the right of the wall joint. A turquoise river-like line meanders across the walls, moving from the top left of the left wall, across both walls moving up and down on the surface, before terminating in the bottom right corner behind two white pipes. Text, prints, video monitors, and other paraphernalia are hung, studio style, on the two walls. These include images of white Americans dressed up as Native Americans, historic artifacts related to the Improved Order of the Red Men, and Manifestos and Histories of the New Red Order.

ARTIST BIO

Unicorn Riot is a decentralized, educational 501(c)(3) non-profit media organization of artists and journalists. Their work is dedicated to exposing root causes of dynamic social and environmental issues through amplifying stories and exploring sustainable alternatives in today’s globalized world. Born from the Internet in 2015, their commercial-free platform operates non-hierarchically, independent of corporate or government control. Unicorn Riot spans across multiple cities including Boston, Denver, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and Durban, South Africa.

ABOUT THIS PAGE

This webpage provides both images and description to render a virtual experience of each artist’s work. Below is an image gallery that includes installation shots, video, and details of Unicorn Riot’s work. In-depth written descriptions that provide visual, auditory, contextual, and other sensory information are available below the image gallery.

Exhibition Photography © EFA Project Space/Yann Chashanovski