Drone cultures: encounters with everyday militarisms

ABSTRACT

Militarized perception is always leaking into public culture, from the aerial prospect of balloon flight to the soldier’s helmet camera. Increasingly, the mode of militarized perception most powerfully emergent in Anglo-American everyday life is that of the militarized drone: flattened, loitering, zooming, networked. This mode of perception is enacted by a logistic assemblage that is military in origin, one in which remote sensors, signal flows and autonomous processes work across complex human-machine networks. The paper tracks this new form of everyday militarism across four scenes of cultural life: the Predator on display in the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum; the DJI Spark consumer selfie drone; recreational use of drones in Sydney, Australia; and the activist deployment of drones as witnesses in Hagit Keysar’s artwork ‘No Fly Zone: Jerusalem.’ In doing so, the paper traces the forms and dynamics of drone perception to argue that an emergent ‘drone culture’ can be seen in the manifestation in everyday life of modes of perception distinct to the remote sensing apparatus of the militarized drone.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• drones
• visual culture
• witnessing
• testimony
• everyday militarism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council under Discovery Early Career Research Award DE190100486.

Notes on contributors

Michael Richardson

Dr Michael Richardson is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of the Arts & Media, UNSW. He is the author of Gestures of Testimony: Torture, Trauma and Affect in Literature (Bloomsbury 2016), holds an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (2019-2021) for the project ‘Drone Witnessing: Technologies of Perception in War and Culture’ and is co-director of the UNSW Media Futures Hub. Michael has been a Visiting Research Fellow at Freie Universität and Goldsmiths University. He is currently working on a book project titled Nonhuman Witnessing: Affect, Matter and Media After the End of the World.