"Drones as things enter into our world through the ways in which they are talked about, but also the way they are represented, repeated and circulated. They become objects and images through which we think." Elspeth Van Veeren (2013)
Competing and conflicting visions of the drone.
"...technologies are not just for “organising” information, they are also for revealing it, for telling us something new about the world around us, rendering it more clearly." James Bridle (2012), Creator of Dronestagram
Elspeth Van Veeren talks of the shifting imaginaries, meanings and contexts within which drones are placed. They are vehicles for the way we think about different things: military power, technological evolution, notions of liberty and freedom, and visual security. These narratives compete for space, at times coming up against each other. The risk is a conflation of these visions into a totalizing one that erases the temporal nuance of the drone debate. But if we are to operationalize this debate we need to think carefully about how tools not only organize information as artist James Bridle supposes, but how they help to bring the world into focus. In one of his own projects 'Dronestagram' Bridle repurposed the Instagram app to post unsettling satellite imagery of drone strike sites, to, in a sense, 'make known' an unknown or distanced world - that of drone strike sites most notably in Pakistan and Yemen. Our driving force was to do something similar...
Drone as (displaced) geopolitical technology. Compare:
rt @ap: breaking: iran state tv claims revolutionary guard has captured another u.s. drone in iranian airspace - 12/4/2012
rt @bbcbreaking: us navy says no american drones missing after iranian reports that one was captured over gulf
"is obama arming iran with high tech us military drones[?]"
Drones, gun control and libertarian politics. Compare:
rt @realalexjones: #guncontrol why doesn't #obama hold press conferences and cry when he murders innocent children with drone strikes? - 12/14/2012
Alex Jones @RealAlexJones 14 Dec #GunControl Obama fakes crying; pure exploitation by the corrupt ruling class that wants to disarm us
Drone as Twitter-meme. Compare:
eight drones a week #replacesongtitlewithdrone
drone go breaking my heart #replacesongtitlewithdrone
if you don't drone me by now #replacesongtitlewithdrone
you can drone your own way replacesongtitlewithdrone
Drones turn the discourse inwards. From a foreign affairs issue to a civil liberties affair.
Courtesy of a 12 hour filibuster by Republican Senator Rand Paul.
Business Review, 2013-4-11: polls show a dramatic turn in public opinion on drones.
From our own analysis we have been unable to prove this ourselves in the Twitter drone space.
We have been able to witness a temporality in the twitter platform that otherwise would have remained invisible.
Drones continuously being remade and repurposed in the Twitter space.
Differing types of refraction. From platform-based events to material practices.
Refraction is a dynamic process instigated along the twitter timeline.
I | Attachment | Action | Size | Date | Who | Comment |
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Refraction_Twitter_Presentation.pdf | manage | 3 MB | 18 Jul 2013 - 15:16 | SamHind |