Dronomation

Post-Civil Drones and Artificial ‚Intelligence‘ in War Zones

The one-day online conference looks to present contemporary critiques of drone-technologies, their scopic regimes and increasing reliance on so-called AI systems. Instead of fetishising the presumed autonomy of these weapons, this conference looks at the logistic dependencies, the operational chains of humans, and the infrastructural layers that enable them; as well as their relation to cinematic technologies.

The first trend we observe is a parallel development to the expensive, large, long-range, remote controlled military drones. Inexpensive, small, and short-range drones were adapted from their civilian predecessors, such as the DJI Mavic 3, for reconnaissance and grenade dropping. Today, a number of post-civilian small drones are produced in Ukraine from bulk parts. First-person-view drones even serve as a complement to ballistic artillery, as they fly remote-controlled into their targets.

A second Dronomation trend is the bureaucratization and accelerating automation of killing in war zones. In this scenario drones produce visual and geospatial data for databases and machine learning processing. Automation appears increasingly as an excuse for a permissive policy of targeting, where responsability is deferred to a seemingly objective machine.

Numerous artistic works have investigated drones in the past, but the developments of the recent military conflicts, as well as the growth of drone use in the consumer area, demonstrate the need for an update.

An event by the class for Emergent Digital Media at the AdBK Munich.