Drone Vision

Abstract

What does the drone want? What does the drone need? Such questions, posed explicitly and implicitly by anthropomorphized drones in contemporary popular culture, may seem like distractions from more pressing political and empirical projects addressing the Global War on Terror (GWOT). But the artifacts posing these questions offer a different way of viewing contemporary surveillance and violence that helps decouple the work of drones from justifications for drone warfare, and reveals the broader technological and political network of which drones are the most immediate manifestation. This article explores ‘drone vision’ a globally distributed apparatus for finding, researching, fixing and killing targets of the GWOT, and situates dramatizations of it within recent new materialist theoretical debates in surveillance and security studies. I model the tactic of ‘seeing like a drone’ in order to map the networks that support it. This tactic reveals a disconnect between the materials and discourses of drone vision, a disconnect I historicize within a new, imperial visual culture of war distinct from its modernist, disciplinary predecessor. I then explore two specific attempts to see like a drone: the drone art of London designer James Bridle and the Tumblr satire Texts from Drone. I conclude by returning to drone anthropomorphism as a technique for mapping the apparatus of drone vision, arguing that drone meme arises precisely in response to these new subjects of war, as a method to call their diverse, often hidden, materials to a public accounting.