Melbourne-based artist Trent Crawford explores how emerging technologies and autonomous systems alter human perception. Velocities I (Gerardo Dottori), traces its lineage back to Italian Futurist painter Gerardo Dottori’s 1942 masterpiece, Aerial Battle over the Gulf of Naples. Dottori’s generation pioneered ‘aeropainting’, using the novel thrill of airplane cockpits to depict dynamic speed and a radical spatial orientation. Crawford contrasts this historic, highly embodied human experience of flight with the cold reality of today's autonomous machine vision. Using the debossed, archival inkjet print process, Crawford strips away the human ‘lens’ and replaces it with that of a computer or machine. The resulting composition points to a modern state of our aero landscape viewed through the automated ‘eyes’ of satellites and drones. Through this haunting visual reorientation, Crawford prompts us to consider the dizzying ideological shifts triggered by our own rapid technological acceleration. Italian Futuristsstonnington contemporary art collection, trent crawford, print, inkjet, futurist, aeropainting, machine, technology, drone, autonomy