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Matthias Wieser (MK)1/29/26, 9:00 AM
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Kathrin Maurer (University of Southern Denmark)1/29/26, 9:15 AM
Early drone scholarship was instrumental in framing debates around the technology’s emergence, often emphasizing the “scopic regime”—a militarized mode of hyper-visuality that enacts hierarchical power through vertical surveillance. While this regime remains central to understanding drone vision, this presentation expands the perceptual framework of the drone by introducing the sensorium: a...
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Svea Braeunert (University of Applied Sciences Potsdam)1/29/26, 10:30 AM
Artists were among the first in the 2010s to give an image to what was conceived off as invisible to (most) human beholders, i.e., the clandestine use of drones in undeclared zones of war and the respective case of machine vision. Today, the situation has changed fundamentally, as drones, and FPV drones in particular, have become ubiquitous, versatile, agile, embodied, small, and affordable,...
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Anna Schober-de Graaf1/29/26, 11:00 AM
This paper explores the audience-oriented aesthetics of the work of photographer Pablo Albarenga (Uruguay). His photo-series Seeds of Resistance (since 2018) serves as a starting point to reflect on the role of art in popularizing shifting ethical attitudes related to knowledge of marginalized or indigenous cultures and their role in struggles against construction projects, exploitation of...
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Petra Missomelius1/29/26, 11:30 AM
The talk explores drone aesthetics as a form of visual emotionalization that generates an aesthetics of overwhelm. Unlike the classical notions of the spectacle – as theorized by Guy Debord as a totalizing regime of images and later differentiated (Röttger) – this contribution shifts the focus to the performative and affective dimensions of civilian drone imagery. Drone perspectives stage...
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Ms Paulina Dudzińska (Unversity of Warsaw)1/29/26, 2:00 PM
As noted by Andrejevic [1] and others, drones epitomize new forms of monitoring surveillance and control. With their optical and non-optical means of capturing data about distant and mobile objects, drones establish a specific mode of surveillance that traverses new frontiers of datafication of both human and non-human. Their increasingly ubiquitous presence exemplifies power mechanisms...
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Lucrezia Pozzi (USI (Academy of Architecture), SUPSI (Institute of Design))1/29/26, 2:30 PM
The practice of urban exploration of abandoned places such as factories, villas, and disused hospitals, known as “Urbex”, has recently evolved thanks to the use of FPV (First Person View) drones, transforming into the phenomenon of “Bando”. The term “Bando” is popular slang from the early 2000s that designates a(bando)ned structures where freestyle pilots enjoy performing dangerous tricks with...
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Mr Qiaodan Liu (School of Creative Media, CityUHK)1/29/26, 3:00 PM
Drones are often framed as seamless extensions and augmentations of human vision and action - from cockpit simulators and pilot training to remote drone piloting and first-person-view (FPV) immersion, visual regimes have long sought to discipline and extend human perception toward seamless situational awareness. Yet these same regimes repeatedly confront the body’s resistance in the form of...
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Dr Keren Tsuriel (Post-doc)1/30/26, 10:15 AM
Political protest has always incorporated the technologies of its time. In Israel’s 2023–2025 anti-government demonstrations, civic drones operated by protesters have become central to documenting mass gatherings from above, producing striking images of scale and density. Within this ongoing documentation lies a more deliberate practice we call drone protest choreography: collective...
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Dr le cao (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg)1/30/26, 10:45 AM
Abstract
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In China's accelerating "low-altitude economy," drone food delivery has moved from technical pilots to everyday logistics, yet we lack an integrated account of how it becomes socially acceptable as a quotidian performance. This study conceptualizes drone delivery as a media practice of "everyday performance" and proposes an integrated model: on the backbone of Social Cognitive... -
Orestis Kollyris1/30/26, 11:15 AM
On May 15, 2025, the image of a shoe lit the night sky of Athens, partially obscuring the Acropolis. The drone performance proved to be an Adidas advertisement, resulting in an outcry and a wide discussion on the value of public heritage. Based on Sianne Ngai’s concept of the gimmick (2020), I will analyze this incident to describe how prosaic uses of drones produce “aesthetically suspicious...
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Jens Hälterlein (Paderborn University)1/30/26, 12:00 PM
Robotic swarming is the application of methods from the field of Artificial Swarm Intelligence which mimics the ability of natural swarms to work collectively towards a common goal and to perform complex tasks. In the military realm, robotic drone swarms are seen as the key to superiority on future battlefields. At the same time, there is widespread scepticism that these weapon systems can be...
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Prof. Laeed Zaghlami (Algiers University)1/30/26, 12:30 PM
Beyond being an important social phenomenon and the framework for a new visual aesthetic in society, drones have rapidly and radically evolved into military use by becoming an integral part of the landscape of warfare. In North Africa, for example, and more specifically in the disputed territory of Western Sahara, between Morocco and the independent Polisario movement representing the Sahrawi...
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Dr Lennart Soberon (VUB)
This paper explores the use and visual output of civilian drone activism in areas of political tension, focusing on the work of Georgian activist David Katsarava along the administrative boundaries with Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Between 2023 and 2024, Katsarava employed drones to observe military infrastructure, track changes along occupation lines, and document potential human rights...
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Jens Schröter
The popular movie Black Panther (Ryan Coogler, USA) came to cinema in 2018. One of the visually interesting ideas of this movie was that there were, in the fictitious and highly developed African country Wakanda, strange three-dimensional images that looked as if com-posed of moving tiny particles: Particle-Voxels so to speak. This is an interesting concept of a volumetric image, insofar such...
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Katharina Kinder-Kurlanda, Matthias Wieser (MK)
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