Drone Aesthetics (original) (raw)
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Drones are in the air. The production of civilian drones for rescue, transport, and leisure activity is booming. The Danish government proclaimed civilian drones a national strategy in 2016. Accordingly, many research institutions as well as the industry focus on the development, usage, and promotion of drone technology. These efforts often prioritize commercialization and engineering as well as setting-up UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) test centers. As a result, urgent questions regarding how drone technology impacts our identity as humans as well as its effects on how we envision the human society are frequently underexposed in these initiatives.
New Formations, 2017
'Drone Poetics' considers the challenge to the theory and practice of the lyric of the development of drone warfare. It argues that modernist writing has historically been influenced by aerial technology; drones also affect notions of perception, distance and intimacy, and the self-policing subject, with consequences for contemporary lyric. Indeed, drone artworks and poems proliferate; and while these take critical perspectives on drone operations, they have not reckoned with the phenomenological implications of execution from the air. I draw out six of these: the objectification of the target, the domination of visuality, psychic and operational splitting, the 'everywhere war', the intimacy of keyhole observations, and the mythic or psychoanalytic representation of desire and fear. These six tropes indicate the necessity for a radical revision of our thinking about the practice of writing committed poetry in the drone age.
Artistic Politics of the Drone
The shape reminds of a little spaceship, the sound feels uncanny—like a swarm of bees. Its movement seems beautifully shy and aggressive at the same time and its cyborg-like nature seems somehow human. Drones are the centerpiece of my current research and artistic practice and I realized the dangers and potential dilemmas first hand. One day, my drone just disappeared. I lost the connection. The drone took off as usual, then suddenly accelerated and turned towards the middle of a lake as if it had a mind of its own. It turned right and was gone. Maybe someone else hacked the remote, maybe it was a technical glitch, maybe the drone had taken control over itself. When looking up the word “drone” one reads about recent collisions with planes and the horrific reality of drone strikes. But drones also provide new forms for artistic expression and journalistic investigation. Drawn by both the threatening and beautiful aspects of these new technologies, I am trying to further explore our relationship with drones through my arts practice but also through a theoretical approach. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger has argued that we will never be able to explore our relation to technology as long as we think about it as something only technological. Thought to the end, this would mean that we remain unfree, chained to the technology, no matter if we approve it or deny it. The most dangerous thing would be to see technology as something neutral, because then we would be completely at the mercy of it and remain blind for its essence. Instead, we should be questioning technology. Heidegger’s idea of the essence of technology is both technical and poetic. In the essence, he sees a disclosure rather than a mean. One way of approaching this issue with Heidegger is by art, as this area is connected to technology but completely different to it at the same time. Thus the interest in researching about the drone lies in exploring a new technological tool and perspective which I think could develop into a new practice of contemporary art. Against the backdrop of these thoughts, it is vital to shift our focus away from attempts to control these technologies and push aside fears that they could control us one day. Rather we should be questioning these new forms of technology and try to understand their essence, in terms of their origin, their relation to the human and our common future. Heidegger’s advice seems topically relevant, at a time in which we seem to sleepwalk into a future of observation and control. In social but also political terms, it is essential to reflect on how this future would look like, as we can expect the use of drones in logistic, military and other areas to increase significantly. This not only means raising questions on ethical and legally issues amongst many others but more import: How this will affect being human in general?
PhD thesis: The Cruel Drone -- Imagining Drone Warfare in Art, Culture and Politics
The Cruel Drone: Imagining Drone Warfare in Art, Culture, and Politics, 2019
The dissertation investigates how military UAV’s (unmanned aerial vehicles), or so-called drones, are represented within the aesthetic field as a “drone imaginary,” reflecting radical changes in the history of warfare. Using the imaginary as a conceptual framework, the drone is analyzed as a cultural construct fueled with ideological and political imagination, including, above all, promises of liberation from the burdens and vulnerabilities of human lives and bodies in war. The main goal of the dissertation is to critically analyze how the drone imaginary builds on a fantasy of the perfect weapon which is, essentially, cruel. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s thoughts and ideas, my claim is therefore that the social and cultural imagination of drone warfare follows a logic of cruel optimism. This means that the object for these desires, the drone, becomes an obstacle for its own flourishing by actively impeding the goal it promises to fulfill. In other words, my aim is to show how the popular attachment to drones is formed by fantasies and imaginations that are “cruel” in so far as they compromise themselves and obstruct their aims through a negative feedback loop, which constantly negates the promises these very same machines seem able to deliver on regarding a higher and safer mode of warfare. Each of the chapters in the dissertation contains examples that demonstrate how these fantasies and promises in turn prove to be flawed or imperfect. Using the realm of aesthetics as prism, the analyses expose the darker side of this drone imagination focusing on its inherent cracks and frailties that altogether undermine the legitimacy as well as soundness of the fantasy of the drone as a new wonder-weapon. For instance, the analyses show how figurations of drone automation is uncannily non-human; how drone invincibility also entail trauma; how dreams of total vision become blurred by immensity; and how the myth of surgical precision ends up as carnage. Thus, each chapter specifically examines one of these drone figurations in order to show how they are con-figured into the larger drone imaginary. Based on strategies of close-reading in combination with a cross-disciplinary conceptual approach, the dissertation offers new insights to the rapidly growing field of academic drone research. While this field has, however, so far mostly focused on the political, juridical, and ethical aspects of drone warfare and less on imaginary, literary, and aesthetic constructions and configurations vibrating beneath these debates, the dissertation contributes with an alternative cultural drone imaginary.
To See Without Being Seen: Contemporary Art and Drone Warfare
2016
Considering an international array of video, sculpture, installation, photography, and web-based projects, this volume, the catalog for a recent exhibition at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, reveals the unique potential of art to further our understanding of, and give visual form to, modern drone warfare and digital surveillance. These essays illuminate how the drone embodies a far-reaching discussion about the rapidly shifting conditions of perception—of seeing, and of being seen—made possible by advanced technology. What is the relation of machine vision to human vision? And how do visual technologies affect our understanding of the agency of images, and of ourselves? Featuring scholarly essays along with texts by contributing artists Trevor Paglen and Hito Steyerl, To See Without Being Seen is a perceptive contribution to the emerging literature on contemporary artistic practice, war, surveillance, and technology. http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/T/bo25078364.html
Drone Warfare: War in the Age of Digital Reproduction (2012, Master's Thesis)
Lund University, 2012
In this paper I explore the scopic regime of drone warfare as the production of the image as a site of meaning. The first part of the paper I describe what a drone is, through its technical specifications and through detailed reports on actual drone attacks in the recent ‘War on Terror.’ I highlight some of the contemporary debates surrounding its use and how drone technology has transformed the mechanization of war. In the second part of the paper I relate drone technology to a historical framework, specifically referring to the work of Walter Benjamin and his seminal essay, ”The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” This moves through a discussion of the relationship between vision and war during the First World War and political implications of representations of mechanized warfare during the aesthetic movement of the Futurists. The final section of the paper approaches specific aspects of drone technology that depart from mechanized warfare into a digital realm. These aspects connect to the development of artificial visual intelligence programs and the primacy of visual pattern recognition being increasingly utilized in drone surveillance. I highlight concepts in the work of Paul Virilio in his book, “The Vision Machine” such as telepresence and the industrialization of vision, in examining the contemporary implications of drone technology.
Drones Signals and the Techno-Colonisation of Landscape
PhD Thesis: Curtin University, Western Australia, 2023
This research project is a cross-disciplinary, creative practice-led investigation that interrogates increasing military interest in the electromagnetic spectrum (EMS). The project’s central argument is that painted visualisations of normally invisible aspects of contemporary EMS-enabled warfare can reveal useful, novel, and speculative but informed perspectives that contribute to debates about war and technology. It pays particular attention to how visualising normally invisible signals reveals an insidious techno-colonisation of our extended environment from Earth to orbiting satellites.
Bringing the War Home: How Visual Artists Return the Drone's Gaze
The drone’s scopic regime is defined by asymmetry. While one side is the subject, the other side is the object of a very powerful gaze. According to this logic, drones couple the idea to see without being seen with the idea to harm without being harmed. While drone operators sit safely in front of a screen far away from the battlefield, the people in the world’s frontier regions are exposed to the drones’ ubiquitous gaze, harrowing noise, and a constant lethal threat. The asymmetry manifested in this operative divide is indicative of an asymmetrical, undeclared war causing civilian death, injury, and traumatization, violating the sovereignty of countries, and breaching international law. A number of artists – among them James Bridle, Trevor Paglen, Omer Fast, and Tomas van Houtryve as well as directors Brandon LaGanke and John Carlucci, software developer Josh Begley, and activists working together with Pakistani human rights lawyer Shahzad Akbar – have addressed the asymmetry and secrecy of drone warfare. They have explored ways to counter the drone’s scopic regime through the tropes of disappearing, making visible, looking back, and turning the gaze around. The latter is the main focus of my talk, as it pertains to the idea of bringing the war home by filming and photographing the US from a drone’s view.
Media-N
Access and habituation are socio-cultural forces that have acted to domesticate the drone in contemporary society. Initially a military tool for surveillance, drones took on the role of munitions platforms providing a means to conduct military operations without physical risk to their operators. As the critiques and visibility of drones in our military and foreign policy grew, we began to witness artists engaging critically with the policies and impact these technologies have on redefining and controlling geographies and human bodies alike. Drone On revisits the 2015 Art2Drone catalog by v1b3:video in the built environemnt. This online exhibition and catalog features twenty art works and three critical essays.