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E-book Drone Aesthetics : War, Culture, Ecology

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Penilaian

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There can be little doubt of the canonical drone aesthetic: a flattened aeriality that moves with an inhuman smoothness, drifting, and pitching to capture an uncanny vantage. News reports, leaked videos, and Hollywood movies have all made a decidedly militarised drone vision all too normal: grayscale envi-ronments seen from above, punctuated by the white intensity of body heat as figures move beneath the targeting reticule. Such images are a recreation in pixels for the eyes of human operators of the forward-looking infrared sensor, or FLIR, that forms an essential component of the surveillance payload of most large military drones. The product of a complex sensory apparatus that registers infrared radiation and transmits its measurements through multiple systems, signals, and satellites, the images pored over by sensor operators and military analysts are but one narrow instance of drone aesthetics. In cinema-tography, drones generate hyper-real environments. In art, they are both an object of aesthetic investigation and an instrument for aesthetic production.Yet aesthetics – sensing and making sense of the stuff of the world – concerns much more than imagery. Navigation itself involves its own aesthetics, as the drone senses its environment, maintains stability, and provides flight data to pilots. Autonomous swarms sense for and between one another, generating a collective grasp of environments as relational phenomena. Even the sim-plest consumer quadcopters register the air around them and make sense of remote control commands. Aesthetics, then, are not separable from drones but constitutive of their operation. Nor are drone aesthetics pregiven. They arise through drone practices and help shape what drones become. Just as the drone itself is an unstable object – vehicle or system, aerial or marine, autonomous, or piloted – so too are its aesthetics always in process, always doing, always both sensing and making sense.The past two decades have seen an efflorescence of scholarly work about drones, particularly in relation to drone warfare and practices of ‘targeted killing’ during and after the war on terror (Benjamin 2012; Cockburn 2015; Gusterson 2016; Tahir 2017). Our volume differs from the field, however, in its critique of a rapidly and radically changing drone landscape, and in its concern with both drone presents and drone futures. Although drones gained prominence during the post-9/11 US security state, the idea of a drone, and what counts as a drone, has since moved beyond the military sphere to fields as wide ranging as journalism, visual arts, wildlife conservation, oceanogra-phy, advertising, agriculture, and climate activism, among others. Drones have now taken to the skies across multiple sectors such that, in Michael J. Boyle’s words, there is a ‘Wild West atmosphere in the field’ (2020: 14). War spurred more research into drone technology, which has created new exper-tise and new applications for drone use in countless fields. Not all drone prop-ositions will take flight; many will fail. But what seems beyond question is that drones will remain in a state of constant and unstable evolution for some time to come.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

629.1 BAR d

Penerbit

London : OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS., 2024

Deskripsi Fisik

276 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781785421020

Klasifikasi

629.1

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Aerospace Engineering

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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