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This book investigates the representation of civilian and military drones in visual arts, literature, and architecture. What emerges, is a compelling new aesthetic: ‘drone imaginary’, a prism of cultural and critical knowledge, through which the complex interplay between drone technology and human communities is explored, and from which its historical, cultural and political dimensions can be assessed.
The contributors offer diverse approaches to this interdisciplinary field of aesthetic drone imaginaries. With essays on the aesthetic configurations of drone swarming, historical perspectives on early unmanned aviation, as well as current debates on how drone technology alters the human body and creates new political imaginaries, this book provides new insights to the rapidly evolving field of drone studies. Working across art history, literature, photography, feminism, postcolonialism and cultural studies, it offers a unique insight into how drones are changing our societies.
Introduction – Andreas Immanuel Graae and Kathrin Maurer
Part I: Visions
1 Flattened vision: Nineteenth-century hot air balloons as early drones – Kathrin Maurer
2 Signature strikes, drone art, and world-making – Thomas Stubblefield
3 The drone of data – Jan Mieszkowski
4 Empathy and the image under surveillance capitalism: Interview with photographer Tomas van Houtryve – Tomas van Houtryve and Svea Braeunert
Part II: Bodies
5 Disappearing, appearing, and reappearing: Imaging the human Body in Drone Warfare – Svea Braeunert
6 The gender politics of the drone – Lauren Wilcox
7 Borders and migration as seen from above – Rasmus Degnbol and Andreas Immanuel Graae
Part III: Communities
8 Swarm of steel: Insects, drones and swarming in Ernst Jünger’s The Glass Bees – Andreas Immanuel Graae
9 Artificial intelligence and the socio-technical imaginary: On Skynet, self-healing swarms and Slaughterbots – Jutta Weber
10 Stranger things: A techno-bestiary of drones in art and war – Claudette Lauzon
11 Eyes in the skies: Repellent Fence and trans-indigenous time-space at the US-Mexico border – Caren Kaplan
Coda: The life, death, and rebirth of drone art – Arthur Holland Michel
Index