Droned Life: Data, Narrative, and the Aesthetics of Worldmaking

Critics have noted the 'worldmaking' power of drones (Stubblefield 2020), but the political implications of that philosophical term for this emerging technology, and for the way figures from the creative economy are responding to and shaping its development, have yet to be scrutinized in depth. 'Droned Life' sits at the cross-section of interdisciplinary scholarship, with a team situated across English, Politics, Computer Science, and Digital Media. It investigates how drones and their physical and digital infrastructures produce new ways of interpreting and experiencing the world, and how imaginaries and aesthetics facilitate the widespread and increasing use of intrusive technologies.

It is driven by an overarching research question--what are the aesthetics of drones?--with aesthetics defined as art, embodiment (aisthesis), and as what makes politics perceptible and normalized (Rancière 2004). How do aesthetics inform the politics of prosthesis in relation to drones--seen, for instance, in the 'targeted killings' in the War on Terror, or in the security breaches made by domestic drones at Heathrow airport? In light of the increasingly common use of drones in law enforcement and surveillance, how do the aesthetic dimensions of drones serve to facilitate more nefarious purposes, such as the objectification of human bodies into things to photograph, track, and target in the name of safety and convenience; or the transformation of human lives into data to monitor and aggregate for anticipating trends and collective behaviour? How have drone aesthetics helped to dissolve military and civilian boundaries to help establish the 'world' as we currently know it--where data, algorithm, and artificial intelligence have become endemic to private and public security, and increasingly, to everyday life?

To answer this research question, this FLF programme draws from theories of worldmaking (Goodman 1978, Nunning 2015) to examine what new perceptual, legal, and geopolitical worlds drones create. On the one hand, drones make new worlds because they mediatize and create uniquely embodied, virtual experiences. An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can be operated thousands of miles away from the drone pilot, creating new aerial views and functioning as a prosthesis for perceptual experience through the digital screen. On the other hand, drones make worlds because they establish, even while reinforcing, their own political justifications. Military drones, for instance, employ the real-time circulation of diagrammatic signs to establish a possible, rather than pre-identified, target; this logic of pre-emption has profound consequences for international law. High-street drones, meanwhile, occupy a liminal space between aircraft and plaything, and they continue to disrupt straightforward boundaries in relation to privacy, security, and civil liberties.

Because drones involve manipulations in narrative, perspective, visual framing, and the reading of multimedia, and because they create intersections between human and machinic agency, there is a complicity between the drone object and the cultural and interpretive practices undergirding it. This FLF will examine the worldmaking dimensions of drones through: 1. the empirical study of four areas of the aesthetic arts--literature, film, visual arts, and game design concerned with drones, and 2. through a series of co-designed knowledge exchange activities with non-academic partners to examine how drones have become a part of our world. It focuses on three collaborators and their respective methodologies: data activism (with the NGO Drone Wars UK), virtual and immersive technologies (with the graphics firm Human Studio), and museum curation (with the Imperial War Museum). With drones, sensors, AI, and simulation all combining to produce new modes of worldmaking over the past decade, it is important to reflect on what worlds are being created, and to stage interventions around them.