Last Shot (ongoing project)
Last Shot stages the encounter between the human body and the machinic gaze at a moment when technologies of recording and technologies of killing have become inseparable. What initially appears as a lightweight civilian drone, the ordinary apparatus of leisure and self-documentation, gradually reveals itself as a device whose camera is not only an instrument of vision but an extension of lethal force. The dancer, entering into a choreography of seduction with the hovering device, first treats it as a partner, a witness, even a lover capable of mirroring her movements with disarming attention. Yet the intimacy she cultivates suspends her in which the act of watching and the act of annihilation collapse into the same gesture.
Under contemporary international humanitarian law, armed drones are subject to the same legal constraints as any other weapon system; they must observe the principles of distinction, proportionality, and precaution. These norms presuppose a rigor of judgment, a chain of accountability extending from political authorities to military commanders, intelligence analysts, and remote operators whose decisions must be proportionate, verified, and directed only at legitimate military objectives. However, because drones operate across vast geographical distances and through layers of mediated vision, the burden of these principles becomes attenuated, dispersed through a chain of command in which responsibility often becomes abstracted. States remain legally bound to investigate civilian harm and to justify the use of lethal force, yet the opacity surrounding drone operations frequently obscures the mechanisms by which lives are categorized, targeted, and extinguished.
Within this juridical and ethical matrix lies what I have described as the "last image" problem: many victims of drone strikes are photographed or filmed in the minutes, sometimes the seconds, before their death. These final visual traces become both evidence and epitaph, the last proof of a person's existence, captured by the same apparatus that will erase them. The drone's optical capacity is therefore inseparable from its destructive potential; to see is already to situate, to track, to fix a body within a lethal horizon. In Last Shot, this duality becomes the core of the work; the camera acts as both lover and executioner, both as a partner of a funereal dance of pursuit and agent of termination.
The piece also draws upon the psychological paradox reported by many drone operators, who speak of developing a strange, prolonged intimacy with those they monitor. Hours of remote surveillance produce a form of asymmetrical closeness, watching someone walk, eat, greet their family, inhabit their unguarded life, before being commanded to strike. The operator experiences a kind of one-sided proximity that the target never perceives, a proximity that is shattered at the moment of impact. This fractured intimacy resonates with the dancer's oscillation between seduction and dread.
Last Shot therefore situates itself within the broader discourse of militarized vision, exploring how contemporary technologies blur the boundaries between surveillance and desire, care and control, affection and annihilation.
Ultimately, Last Shot asks how art can expose the ethical ruptures and legal fictions that surround contemporary drone warfare, and how the aesthetics of intimacy may themselves be infiltrated by violence. The work invites viewers to confront the uneasy truth that, in an age of remote vision, the final image of a person may be produced not by a loved one, not by a witness, but by a machine that has already determined the end of their breath.
Filmed in December 2025 at the Chapel of Sound in Hebei Province, China, Last Shot is currently in post-production, with editing and sound montage underway. The work was recorded on site using a Hover X1 Pro drone and a FLIR thermal camera, allowing for both visible-spectrum and thermal perspectives of the performance.
The excerpt below (4 min 24 s) presents a selected sequence from the work.
Degree of Freedom
Video 1.58 mn Performance by dancer Shuchang Chen, Beijing, China, December 2025.
Degree of Freedom extends the conceptual framework of Last Shot by isolating a fundamental unit of bodily agency: the capacity to move within defined constraints. The work draws on the notion of “degrees of freedom” as formulated in motor control theory, where movement is understood as the coordination of multiple biomechanical variables under conditions of constraint, resistance, and adaptation. In this sense, freedom is never absolute; it emerges through negotiation with physical limits, environmental forces, and imposed structures.
The performance stages a dancer whose body is partially constrained by a mechanical apparatus resembling a lower-limb exoskeleton. While such devices are typically designed to restore mobility to assist walking, rehabilitation, or functional autonomy, the apparatus here operates ambiguously. It supports and stabilizes the body while simultaneously restricting it. The dancer’s leg is held in a suspended state of partial functionality: neither fully immobilized nor fully free. What appears as assistive technology gradually reveals itself as a mechanism of capture.
This ambiguity transforms the prosthesis into a trap. The dancer may continue to move, but only within a narrow corridor of permissible action. Any attempt to escape this constraint would require a radical rupture, an amputation of the very limb that enables movement. The work thus stages a paradox familiar to both biomechanics and political theory: freedom is preserved only at the cost of self-limitation, while liberation risks irreversible loss.
In this sense, Degree of Freedom operates as a structural metaphor rather than a narrative one. It articulates a condition in which autonomy is permitted only within tightly regulated parameters, producing an illusion of mobility that conceals systemic immobilization. The dancer’s body becomes a site where assistance and control collapse into the same mechanism.
The work resonates with contemporary regimes of technologically administered governance, in which mobility is regulated through infrastructural, legal, and algorithmic systems rather than overt force. In the context of China, this includes the internal passport (hukou) system, which conditions access to movement, employment, and social services across provincial boundaries. Circulation is thus unevenly distributed: one may move, but only within prescribed territorial, administrative, and economic limits. Mobility appears fluid, yet remains structurally constrained, filtered through permissions that remain largely invisible until they are denied.
At the same time, the piece sustains a second, more intimate register: that of affective rupture. The body oscillates between attachment and release, between dependence and separation. Liberation, when it occurs, is not experienced as expansion but as loss an amputation that enables escape while simultaneously diminishing the body’s capacity to move. Freedom here is not redemptive; it is partial, costly, and asymmetrical.
Degree of Freedom thus articulates a double condition: political restriction and emotional fracture operate through the same logic of constraint. The body does not emerge intact from liberation but carries its residue as a permanent modulation of movement. Even in apparent autonomy, motion remains marked by what has been surrendered in order to obtain it.