Semiotics of the Drone / video / 2019
Drone stays stationary in the sky and just observe what happens on planet Earth. Very
quietly... The dramatic growth of drone warfare in the last decade has meant the arrival of a
new kind of war imagery in civilian life: the view through the drone camera. As such, the
drone is not simply a weapon, but also an emerging medium for representing conflict. Also
there are many civilian usage of drones nowadays for creative purposes and video and film
production. Those two different approaches and usage of similliar technology opens many
questions. However, unlike earlier uses of bombs and rockets that targeted the physical
environment, the drone apparatus – UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles), cameras, servers,
algorithms – primarily targets the social environment of those being surveilled in order to
decide who should be killed. Monitoring, profiling and projecting ‘patterns of life’ from
everyday communication, association and movement is the primary function of the drone
apparatus as it searches for ‘signatures’ of hostility among the mass of data it accumulates.
But if you use drone for pragmatically different purpose (collect landscape imagery), than
meaning and the semiotics of the drone created image becomes more human based oriented.
quietly... The dramatic growth of drone warfare in the last decade has meant the arrival of a
new kind of war imagery in civilian life: the view through the drone camera. As such, the
drone is not simply a weapon, but also an emerging medium for representing conflict. Also
there are many civilian usage of drones nowadays for creative purposes and video and film
production. Those two different approaches and usage of similliar technology opens many
questions. However, unlike earlier uses of bombs and rockets that targeted the physical
environment, the drone apparatus – UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles), cameras, servers,
algorithms – primarily targets the social environment of those being surveilled in order to
decide who should be killed. Monitoring, profiling and projecting ‘patterns of life’ from
everyday communication, association and movement is the primary function of the drone
apparatus as it searches for ‘signatures’ of hostility among the mass of data it accumulates.
But if you use drone for pragmatically different purpose (collect landscape imagery), than
meaning and the semiotics of the drone created image becomes more human based oriented.
