Название: Drone Art : The Everywhere War As Medium Автор: Thomas Stubblefield
Издательство: University of California Press
Год: 2020
Страниц: 228
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true)
Размер: 10.1 MB
What happens when a drone enters a gallery or appears on screen? What thresholds are crossed as this weapon of war occupies everyday visual culture? These questions have appeared with increasing regularity since the advent of the War on Terror, when drones began migrating into civilian platforms of film, photography, installation, sculpture, performance art, and theater. In this groundbreaking study, Thomas Stubblefield attempts not only to define the emerging genre of 'drone art' but to outline its primary features, identify its historical lineages, and assess its political aspirations. Richly detailed and politically salient, this book is the first comprehensive analysis of the intersections between drones, art, technology, and power.
By mobilizing the contradictions of data and the architectures and agencies by which they are stored and disseminated, the relational database internalizes the dialectic between threat and aggression that fuels such a condition. As a result, it comes to provide the ideal medium for the immediate elevation of events to the level of threat and an equally immediate retaliation by force. However, this scenario can only be realized by way of a second-order operation in which the parameters and categories by which threats are produced are themselves subjected to the powers of immanence that inhabit the archive.
As databases such as the GeoCell are increasingly linked with other databases such as the Terrorist Identity Data Environment (TIDE) and Terrorist Screening Database (TSD), their assets are subjected to a joint constellation of postrelational (NoSQL) systems and genetic algorithms, which together constitute the computational ground from which targets emerge. In postrelational configurations, the categories by which threats are processed are no longer given in advance, and data are often left unstructured and varied. Unlike their relational counterparts, these classification systems are easily reconfigured in response to changes in circumstances and/or the integration of new data. As a result even the most basic category of drone targeting, the military-aged male, is opened to revision, so much so that even children can qualify as MAMs.
"Do representations of drones that circulate in contemporary media reinforce or subvert the logic of distance warfare? Stubblefield takes a brilliantly nuanced approach in a text replete with stimulating examples to argue that 'drone power' in such media is always 'distributed and elusive' yet open to reimagination and, therefore, critique."--Caren Kaplan, author of Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above
"Stubblefield's book is a groundbreaking study of the role of drones in contemporary visual culture. In a series of dynamic analyses of emerging platforms, he shows how drone art's intimate relationship with the hegemonic networks of power is creating a new kind of politicized aesthetic."--Jan Mieszkowski, author of Watching War
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