Drone Performances. Aesthetics, Mediation, Politics

Jan 29, 2026, 9:00 AM → Jan 30, 2026, 5:00 PM Europe/Vienna

O.0.01 Stiftungssaal (University of Klagenfurt)

Katharina Kinder-Kurlanda, Matthias Wieser (MK)

Drones are reshaping visual culture, human-machine interaction, and aesthetic expression. From cinematic landscapes to military surveillance, from art installations to everyday leisure, drones are increasingly mediating how we sense, see, and relate to the world.

This international and interdisciplinary workshop aims to bring together scholars and artists to explore how drones perform, intervene, and matter in cultural and social contexts. Hosted by the Department of Media & Communications and the Digital Age Research Center (D^!ARC) at the University of Klagenfurt, the workshop (29.-30. Jan 2026) is part of the FWF-funded arts-based research project “Performing Drones.” Contributions address drones from perspectives such as media studies, STS, anthropology, cultural studies, and sociology, particularly focusing on the entanglements of aesthetics, mediation, agency, and politics—as drone imaginaries travel across contexts. Topics discussed are drone art and images, drone visions, drone performances as well as civilian and military drone uses.

ProgramWorkshop_DronePerformances_AAU2026_rev.pdf

Thu, January 29

1 Welcome Introduction

Speaker: Matthias Wieser (MK)

2 Opening Keynote: The Sensorium of the Drone: Embodied Sensing and Communities

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 synesthetic, multi-modal assemblage where human and machine sensing intertwine.
This talk focuses specifically on the concept of “embodied sensing” as a non-scopic mode of drone sensing within the realm of amateur drone practices. It examines diverse expressions such as drone racing, drone-based performative artworks, “dronies” (drone selfies), and choreographed drone dances, while also engaging with the imaginaries of human-machine communities that emerge through these interactions. To contextualize these non-scopic forms of embodied sensing, media-historical perspectives of telepresence (panorama, telephonoscope) are discussed, offering alternative genealogies of aerial sensing.

Speaker: Kathrin Maurer (University of Southern Denmark)

10:15 AM Break

Session 1: Drone Art & Drone Images

Svea Braeunert (University of Applied Sciences Potsdam)
Drone Modernism*Data Aesthetics: How Artists Image Machine Vision

Anna Schober (University of Klagenfurt)
Pablo Albarenga’s Seeds of Resistance: A Relational and Horizontal Aesthetics

Petra Missomelius (University of Innsbruck)
Drone Imagery: Between Desire, Display, and Distanced Immersion

Jens Schröter (University of Bonn)
Volumetric Images Made of Moving Particles: History, Aesthetics, Imaginaries

12:30 Lunch (Hotspot, Lakeside Park)

Conveners: Anna Schober-de Graaf, Petra Missomelius (Institut für Medien, Gesellschaft und Kommunikation an der Universität Innsbruck), Svea Braeunert (University of Applied Sciences Potsdam)

3 Drone Modernism*Data Aesthetics: How Artists Image Machine Vision

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, proliferating as artistic tools, agricultural monitors, and war machines alike. These recent developments notwithstanding, I believe there is something to be learned from the first wave of drone art, and my presentation, building on my long-time engagement with drones in the field of contemporary art, is an attempt to delineate one common strand in these positions that I call drone modernism fueled by data aesthetics.

Drone modernism is the harking back of artists and writers to forms, aesthetics, and artists/artworks of 20th century modernism. Instances include Hito Steyerl’s textual engagement with Piet Mondrian, the likeness of Tomas van Houtryve’s photographs to Alberto Giacometti’s sculptures, Trevor Paglen’s nod to colorfield painting, and, more recently, Simon Denny’s renderings of futurism. After outlining how these artists use modernist forms and references to make the invisible of drone warfare visible, I will inquire in more detail about the role and effect of their quotations and appropriations: Do they use modernism as a metapher, opening up but also shifting and displacing the discourse of drone warfare? What of modernism do they evoke, hold on to, or discard? Is this the modernism of the 20th century, or does it become something else by being conjured up, written about, and painted in view of the 21st-century and its data-driven aesthetics?

Speaker: Svea Braeunert (University of Applied Sciences Potsdam)

4 Seeds of Resistance (Pablo Albarenga): A relational and horizontal aesthetics as a means to popularize environmental issues.

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 resources, and the use of violence.
The presentation will focus on how the human body and portraits are used in these photographs to “calculate” (tangible bodily experiences of resonance for the audience. Furthermore, the paper pursues two goals. Albarenga’s specific “relational” aesthetic will be located within a “long” pictorial tradition of audience address operating through the use of anthropomorphic figures and an aesthetic of corporeality. Religious as well as political-secular motif traditions and stylistic models are addressed – especially those that have emerged from the body-based protest culture of the globalised environmental movement since the 1980s. On the other hand, the deviation of the specific aesthetics of Albarenga’s work from this tradition is discussed in detail. In this context, the reclining of the bodies and a related “horizontal” orientation of the representation of things will be discussed, which contrasts with a dominant aesthetic of “verticality”.

Anna Schober is Professor for Visual Culture at Klagenfurt university. She studied history, art history and political theory in Vienna, Frankfurt am Main and Colchester/UK. Her research focuses on political iconography, image and the public sphere, figurations of difference (gender and ethnicity) and methodological questions of the humanities and visual culture studies.
For more information see: www.annaschober.com

Speaker: Anna Schober-de Graaf

5 Drone Imagery Between Desire, Display, and Distanced Immersion

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 vastness, symmetry, and spectacle in ways that reconfigure perception and desire, producing a paradoxical interplay of distance and immersion: viewers experience both omniscience and vulnerability. In tourism, soaring aerial views dramatize landscapes as sublime and irresistible, promising experiences that transcend everyday perception. In real estate marketing, the same logic elevates properties into exclusive sites of prestige, embedding them in spectacular surroundings that magnify value and aspiration.
Here, spectacle is less about alienation than about persuasion: a strategic orchestration of affect that converts fascination into consumption. Contrasting these elevated views with the body-centered immediacy of action-camera footage, the presentation highlights how drone aesthetics expand regimes of affect by coupling disembodied overview with embodied intensity. Ultimately, drone performativity exemplifies a civilian form of spectacle, where visual overwhelm is mobilized to amplify desire and reframe the politics of space, value, and everyday mediation.

References
Debord, Guy (1994). Die Gesellschaft des Spektakels.
Emmert, Claudia; Bleibler, Jürgen; Neddermeyer, Ina; Busch, Dominik (Ed.) (2020). Game of Drones.
Gerling, Winfried; Krautkrämer, Florian (Ed.) (2023). Versatile Camcorders: Looking at the GoPro-Movement.
Rieger, Stefan (2025). Imagination und Immersion.
Röttger, Kati (2022). Spektakel: Plädoyer für die Revision eines umstrittenen Begriffs. Internationale Zeitschrift für Kulturkomparatistik 8. 9-23.
Serafinelli, Elisa (2025). Theorising Drones in Visual Culture: Views from the Blue.
Serafinelli, Elisa; O’Hagan, Lauren Alex (2024). Drone views: a multimodal ethnographic perspective. Visual Communication Vol. 23(2). 223-243.
Urry, John; Larsen, Jonas (2011). The Tourist Gaze 3.0. 3rd ed.

Speaker: Petra Missomelius

12:30 PM Lunch (Hotspot, Lakeside Park)

Session 2: Drone Visions

Paulina Dudzińska (University of Warsaw)
Augmented Voyeur: Visual Economy of Drone Gaze in Drone Boning [2014] and The Drone [2019]

Lucrezia Pozzi (University of Lugano)
The “Bando”: Unlocking New Perspectives in Urban Exploration with FPV Drones.

Qiaodan Liu (City University of Hong Kong)
Fragile Vision: Nausea, (Dis)Embodiment, and Drone Subjectivity

Conveners: Dr Lucrezia Pozzi (Università della svizzera italiana (USI) (Academy of Architecture), SUPSI), Paulina Dudzińska (Unversity of Warsaw), Qiaodan Liu (CityU HK)

6 Augmented voyeur. Visual economy of drone gaze in Drone boning [2014] and The Drone [2019]

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 symptomatic of contemporary media and technospheres that rely on omnipresent, networked and increasingly automated instruments of tracking and targeting.

As drone technology becomes widespread, visual culture imagery is increasingly engaged in appropriating, reframing and defamiliarising drone vision thus enabling critical exploration of its aesthetic, ideological, and unconscious dimensions. In my presentation I will inquire about the visual economy of drone gaze critically discussing a short experimental video Drone Boning [2014] and a feature comedy horror The Drone [2019]. Despite their differences in genre and form these works share a central theme as they emphasize the relationship between drone gaze and sexual objectification. By closely analyzing visual and narrative strategies, I will examine how these works render the act of observing the other through a drone eye to grasp the dynamics of technologically mediated voyeurism. The intention is to explore the libidinal dimension of drone visuality and to inquire how the moving images explore it by engaging cliché of passive-active dichotomy.

In the works I examine, drone gaze is enacted as objectifying and satisfaction-seeking, which corresponds to Jonathan Beller’s observations about its phallic nature [2]. In my analysis, these problems at the nexus of media technologies, power and phantasms, will be discussed drawing on psychoanalytically oriented visual and media studies. I will employ the notions of scopophilia [3] and visual pleasure [4] to explore why in the examined films the economy of drone vision is expressed by sexually charged imagery.

Speaker: Ms Paulina Dudzińska (Unversity of Warsaw)

7 The “Bando”: Unlocking New Perspectives in Urban Exploration with FPV Drones.

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 remote-controlled drones equipped with cameras that provide live video feed to users wearing headsets, allowing them to incorporate the drone's trajectories.For this reason, FPV drone enthusiasts have transformed Bandos into dynamic exploration sites.The presentation will explore the phenomenon from a transdisciplinary perspective. From an urban exploration and architectural perspective, FPV drones enable access to previously unreachable spaces and viewpoints, fundamentally altering how they document and experience abandoned structures. Furthermore, the practice raises compelling questions about perception and aesthetics, particularly regarding embodiment—how pilots experience and internalize new perspectives through their drones’ cameras, creating a unique form of mediated spatial awareness.I will also examine how bandos explorations are disseminated and promoted through social media platforms, creating viral content that attracts new practitioners. Finally, sociologically, these abandoned structures function as aggregation points for emerging communities of practice, where FPV pilots share knowledge, techniques, and experiences. The bando phenomenon thus represents a convergence of technology, urban space, and social practice, demonstrating how recreational activities can repurpose the exploration of abandoned infrastructure while fostering new forms of community and aesthetic experience. This phenomenon highlights the potential of drones not merely as objects of study but as media that incorporate (Ihde, 1990) and extend human perceptual faculties (McLuhan, 1964), reshaping relationships with the environment. Through “aerial play” with drones and first-person viewing, users inhabit new spatialities and incorporate new mobilities (Sheller, 2011) and aerial acrobatic perspectives that extend and multiply the scope of the senses (Andrejevic, 2015).

Speaker: Lucrezia Pozzi (USI (Academy of Architecture), SUPSI (Institute of Design))

8 Fragile Vision: Nausea, (Dis)Embodiment, and Drone Subjectivity

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 dizziness, disorientation, and nausea. This proposed research approaches such symptoms not as physiological malfunctions to be corrected, but as critical indicators of the subject’s reconfiguration within post-cybernetic environments.
Nausea (Virtual Motion sickness/ Visually Induced Motion Sickness) emerges when visual input and bodily orientation diverge, when agency is distributed across human operators and automated systems, and when situational awareness is stretched to its cognitive and sensory limits. By examining these moments of sensory misalignment, I argue that drone operations disclose a broader tension between human vision/reason and neocybernetic environmentality: the subject is simultaneously extended, overloaded, and diminished within a dense apparatus - on one hand, it promises an agential disembodied, risk- and responsibility-attenuated/exempted mode of engagement; on the other, it exposes an inherent fragility and potential for breakdown. The aesthetics of drone vision, far from neutral mediation, are structured by this fragility—an unstable choreography of amplification and breakdown.
Methodologically, the paper draws on historical accounts of motion sickness and vision overload in early pilot training, simulators, and FPV sporting practices, and aims to genealogically analyze how visual regimes of drone redistribute the embodied subject, create new vision and reason, and forms a new kind of environmentality. Through this angle, drones are not only vehicles of surveillance or spectacle, but also ecological dispositifs that generate new modes of subjectivation and existence—modes defined as much by nausea and disorientation as by enhanced vision or control.

Speaker: Mr Qiaodan Liu (School of Creative Media, CityUHK)

3:30 PM Coffee Break

Session 3: Performing Drones

Drone Hall and Drone Arena Walk
Presentation Performing Drones Project

Conveners: Matthias Wieser (MK), Raffaela Mori (University of Klagenfurt)

7:00 PM Networking Dinner

Fri, January 30

Film Screening and Discussion: The Method to the Madness of Crash Theory: Why Failure is Meaningful in Drone Piloting

Convener: Adam Fish (University of New South Wales)

10:00 AM Break

Session 4: Civilian Drone Performances: Israel, China, Greece

Keren Tsuriel & Anat Ben David (Open University of Israel)
Drone Choreographies of Protest: Materiality, Visibility, and Collective Performance in Israel’s Anti-Government Demonstrations

Le Cao (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg)
Drone Delivery as Everyday Performance in China: Aesthetics, Mediation, and Politics of the Low-Altitude Economy

Orestis Kollyris (University of Utrecht)
Monumentality Without Value: Quotidian Drone Performances as Gimmicks

Conveners: Anat Ben David, Keren Tsuriel (Post-doc), Orestis Kollyris, le cao

9 Drone Choreographies of Protest: Materiality, Visibility, and Collective Performance in Israel’s Anti-Government Demonstrations

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 performances staged for the drone’s gaze. Groups of protesters arrange bodies, props, and movements into aesthetic shapes, words, or tableaux that are embedded in specific sites such as beaches, intersections, and plazas, and crafted to convey protest messages. In this sense, drones do more than record; they become integral to how protest is imagined, staged, and circulated, shaping the visibility and meaning of collective action.
We analyze these practices through Tali Hatuka’s (2018) typology of protest choreography (spectacle, procession, and place-making), while extending it to account for drone-specific attributes. Based on interviews with drone operators and protest organizers, on-site observations, and analysis of drone images, we trace how performances are co-produced by material practices, infrastructures, and aesthetics. The choreography depends on assembling heterogeneous elements including bodies positioned in space, costumes, and music, as well as organizational infrastructures such as batteries, Google Sheets, and ground-air communication. Together these practices co-create images designed specifically for the drone’s vertical and horizontal gaze.
Theoretically, we bring Karen Barad’s notion of diffraction (2007) and Donna Haraway’s concept of situated knowledge (1988, 2016) into conversation with protest studies. From this perspective, drones are material-discursive actors that diffract protest, reconfiguring relations between protesters, publics, and power. Rather than reducing protest imagery to Debord’s alienated spectacle (1967/1994), we argue that drone-oriented protest performances can motivate further participation, transforming demonstrations into immersive, aesthetically resonant experiences. Drones thus mark a shift in repertoires of contention, showing how art, technology, and activism converge to generate new regimes of protest visibility.

Speaker: Dr Keren Tsuriel (Post-doc)

10 Drone Delivery as Everyday Performance in China: Aesthetics, Mediation, and Politics of the Low-Altitude Economy

Abstract
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 Theory (SCT) and the Goal-Directed Behavior Model (GDBM)—where knowledge and intrinsic motivation shape attitude, and attitude drives intention—we attach three contextual strands: aesthetics (visibility/noise atmospheres), mediation (app interface and flight-path visualization), and politics (airspace governance, privacy, and labor). We hypothesize that these strands condition the SCT+GDBM pathways and differ across urban and rural China. Using seven-point scales, we conduct city–county comparative surveys and test the model with Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and multi-group Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) (AMOS). Results show: knowledge and intrinsic motivation significantly increase attitude; attitude strongly predicts intention; the path from willingness-to-pay-more to attitude is non-significant overall and negative in rural samples. The aesthetic–mediational strand enhances visibility and trust, while the political strand activates fairness and privacy concerns, jointly moderating the backbone relations. We argue that the "everyday performance" of drones in China depends as much on interface-driven visibility as on county-level rules for airspace, privacy, and platform labor; consequently, price fairness and subsidy alignment—not simple surcharges—are pivotal for rural deployment and broader public acceptance.
Keywords
drone performances; Social Cognitive Theory; Goal-Directed Behavior Model; structural equation modeling; aesthetics–mediation–politics; low-altitude economy; urban–rural China; privacy and labor governance

Speaker: Dr le cao (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg)

11 Monumentality Without Value: Quotidian Drone Performances as Gimmicks

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 object[s]” (1) that induce affective responses of simultaneous marvel and distrust. In this analysis, the swift incorporation of a futuristic technology to corporate and everyday uses has short-circuited the passage from aesthetic marvel to familiarity, turning drone performances into ambivalent objects that lie between “a wonder and a trick” (54). Applying the aesthetics of the gimmick to the incident in Athens, I will show how the juxtaposition of a corporate drone performance and the Acropolis produced the aesthetic experience of a monumentality without value. Analyzed through Ngai’s theory, this experience opens up a space of association between awe-inspiring objects, value and labor. Specifically, the outrage that followed the performance hints, first, to a judgement on the amount of labor that should accompany the experience of the spectacular or the monumental, as labor is considered to be absent from the drone performance but ingrained in the Acropolis monument. And second, it points to a felt misplacement of value, from a socially important history that is rendered material to an affectively captivating entrepreneurial happening. In that sense, the analysis of drone performances as gimmicks suggests a way of approaching the aesthetic character of the former, while contributing to discussions on the social relevance of aesthetic judgments.

Speaker: Orestis Kollyris

11:45 AM Coffee Break

Session 5: Drone Performances in Military Conflicts

Conveners: Jens Hälterlein, Prof. Laeed Zaghlami (Algiers University), Belkacem Iratni (Algiers University)

12 The ambivalent agency of military drone swarms

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 developed and deployed in a way that is compliant with international humanitarian law as well as ethical principles such as human accountability and responsibility. In my contribution, I will show how both the technoscientific promises and problematizations of robotic drone swarming relate to transformations in the way wars are cognized and conducted. Firstly, the presentation traces how a new understanding of life, established by complexity sciences, has enabled entanglements and translations between different forms of life and how these have informed the military imaginaries and design principles of military swarming. Secondly, I will stress that the problematisation of robotic drone swarms as potentially running out of human control can be reinterpreted in terms of this re-conceptualising and appropriation of a more-than-human life. My central argument is that a biomimetic robotic drone swarm, not only inherits the desired properties of a natural swarm but also its inherent risks. On the one hand, the emergent behaviour of a robotic drone swarm enables a higher level of autonomy, adaptability and, ultimately, effectiveness in achieving complex operational tasks. On the other hand, emergence challenges the predictability of swarm behaviours. Hence, even from a military perspective, drone swarm agency is ambivalent.

Speaker: Jens Hälterlein (Paderborn University)

13 Drones: From Visual Aesthetics to Feared Weapons in Conflict

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 Republic, the use of drones is completely changing the geopolitical and military dimensions of the conflict.
In my article, I will briefly describe the historical background of the disputed territory, and then highlight the problem of introducing drones into the conflict for the first time, and how this is likely to aggravate the situation. I will explain why Morocco has changed its military strategy by using drone technology in their war and which third party has provided the drone technology. I will also ask whether drone technology is turning what was a low-intensity conflict into a high-intensity conflict. More importantly, will the use of drones prevent and deceive Sahrawi military forces from making incursions into Moroccan territory and subsequently limit their attacks, or will it open up space for the entire region for further military escalation. What are the political, strategic and military implications of drone technology for the future of conflict in North Africa and beyond?
Recently, Royal Moroccan forces have used drones to attack and kill many civilians in parts of the liberated regions of Western Sahara. These attacks have caused anger, indignation and discontent among the Sahrawi people, neighbouring countries and international community. As a result, it seems that the conflict will be dragged by drones into a technological race and a fierce war under different facets, far from the fair use of drones for hobby, fun and pleasure.

Speaker: Prof. Laeed Zaghlami (Algiers University)

30 01 Drones From Visual Aesthetics to Feared Weapons in Western Sahara Conflict.pptx

1:00 PM Lunch @ UniWirt

Closing Session

Convener: Katharina Kinder-Kurlanda