Droned Life:
Data, Narrative, and the Aesthetics of Worldmaking
Context
Drones—pilotless or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)—have existed since the early twentieth century, but their presence became transformational in the twenty-first century, when they facilitated the surveillance and identification of suspects, as well as practices of ‘targeted killing’ from a distance, in the ‘War on Terror’. Today, drones are present in multiple facets of contemporary life, deployed in fields as wide-ranging as journalism, humanitarian relief, agriculture, and hobbyist photography. How is this technology with military origins becoming civilianized, and what lessons can be drawn from the militarization of everyday life? What legal, geopolitical, and cultural worlds do drones create or curtail? How do drones engender different ways of embodying that which is distant and inaccessible, or re-vision that which is close and familiar? How do they affect the way one encounters and interprets the human and more-than-human worlds?
Understanding the socio-political implications of this technological revolution requires examining not only what we imagine drones can do, but how drones themselves function as an imaginary of society. In social and cultural criticism, ‘imaginary’ is a flexible term that refers to the values, symbols, and institutions through which a group of people imagine their social whole. Imaginaries mediate collective life and shape the way we live because they are ‘instrumental and futuristic: they project visions of what is good, desirable and worth attaining for a political community; they articulate feasible futures’ (Jasanoff and Kim, 123). Foregrounding imaginaries and aesthetics as key to understanding the normative and ethical elements of drone technology, the project’s long-term goal is to improve regulations and norms around its use: to understand and shape drone futures.
Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox, On the Edge of Being, Oil on linen 112 x 92 cm (2022). Image courtesy of the artist.
Programme of Work
Bringing together a team of academics spanning English, Politics, Computer Science, and Digital Media, this project examines: 1) drones’ ongoing implications for socio-cultural life through concepts of imaginaries, aesthetics, and worldmaking, and 2) their use in military and civilian realms through four narrative, worldmaking forms—literature, film, the visual arts, and game design. Our core questions include:
How is the public perception of drones changing alongside their proliferating use in military and civilian realms?
How are drones, and their broader relationships to AI, sensors, and simulation, impacting on the way users understand and interpret human and more-than-human worlds?
How can researchers address the asymmetrical relations created by drones, in particular the people or geographies subjected to the drone’s gaze?
What are the aesthetic dimensions of drones—aesthetics understood as embodiment, subjectivity, sensing, and as that which makes politics apprehensible or sensible (Rancière)? How do the aesthetic arts bring drone aesthetics to light?
Droned Life studies these questions in the realms of art, war, humanitarianism, and ecology. It also engages in scholarly as well as practice-led, creative inquiry. With three partners—the Imperial War Museum, the NGO Drone Wars UK, and the creative agency Human Studio—the project team organizes knowledge exchange and public engagement events as part of its sociological research to facilitate conversations between different drone publics.
More broadly, the project investigates how drones are intertwined with the digital infrastructures of contemporary life, such as the use of global positioning systems, aerial and satellite photography, facial recognition systems, biometrics, infrared vision, remote sensing, as well as the role played by databases, algorithms, and informational networks. Therefore, although focussed on unmanned technologies, Droned Life understands drones not as unique or unprecedented, but rather, as a case study for how intrusive technologies become enabled and naturalized.
From Richard Carter, Waveform (2018/2020). Image courtesy of the artist.
The Centre for Drones and Culture
Throughout the project period, the Centre for Drones and Culture (CDAC):
runs an online interdisciplinary seminar series to share and build capacity in different areas of research related to technology, culture, and aesthetics
organizes an annual series of public events on the theme of ‘Digital War’ at the Imperial War Museum, London
promotes critical vocabularies and ‘aesthetic literacy’ for the study of drones though research as well as multimedia content, such as exhibitions and blog posts
Funding
The Centre for Drones and Culture is funded as part of a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship (MR/W010429/1) from 2023-2027. The fellowship is hosted by the Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge.
A pilot project, 'The Aesthetics of Drone Warfare,’ ran between 2019-2021 and was funded by a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award (R/160051). Activities related to that project are archived here and discussed here.