A Masterclass with Bradley L. Garrett.

In recent urban research, scholars have turned their attention to vertical structures and infrastructures. Urbanists Graham and Hewitt (2012: 72-73) have suggested that cartographic, Cartesian and planar ontologies have led to a ‘flattening of discourses and imaginaries [that] tends still to dominate critical urban research in the Anglophone world’. However, where vertical architectures have become sites of discussion as a result, little has been written about how consumer and prosumer drone (unnamed aerial vehicle) technologies are altering structures of access, supply, knowledge and power, broadly conceived, despite the fact that according to the webzine Drone Life more than one million drones were sold worldwide in 2015 alone. A connected consideration, as futurist Adam Rothstein (2015: 75-76) writes, is the fact that ‘if we look at what are commonly called drones, there is one feature we see in almost every situation - the presence of a camera.’ While it is certainly the case that most drones ‘see’, sight is just one component of their multi-sensorial capacities, which, from a post-phenomenological perspective, are prompting fundamental reconfigurations of human experience. In other words, ‘the aerial gaze is many; it is multiplied and situated in different contexts. It is also a vision that is practised and touched. It is not simply ocular or visual, but an assembly of practices and materials’ (Adey 2010: 145).

This talk will focus on how new aerial sensing technologies are reconfiguring structures in experiential, legal, commercial, social and political demesnes. Through a post-phenomenological lens, I seek to better understand how architectures are systematised around a set of assumptions about what bodies are capable of and how drones, as extra-sensory appendages, destabilize those structures. This is playing out, for instance, in urban areas as aviation authorities negotiate the extent to which property extends into the sky as they attempt to establish aerial traffic ‘lanes’ – moves that echo the establishment of sea lanes in the mid-19th-century. Capacities to act through the drone are clearly outstripping our capacities to think about what they are capable of, creating improbable socio-technological turmoil, all of which remains undertheorized.

This paper situates drones within human/technology/environment assemblages that are fundamentally altering municipal and national systems of infrastructure (transport networks, urban design, visualisations). However, as an ethnographer and social geographer, I am also interested in how ‘droning’ activities are structuring new critical art practice, heuristic interventions and enthusiast communities. Drones change our capacity to understand structures and are altering representational creative forms, scientific representations, and ultimately knowledge systems. Thinking through to speculative vertical futures (in which autonomous drone swarms may become infrastructure, for instance) is not just timely but socially and politically critical. If ‘the social context is vital to understanding the new visuality forming in relation to the drone’ (McCosker 2015: 6), then thinking through the drone as a (re)structuring tool or emerging (infra)structure is a powerful proposition.

RSVP: sociology.events@anu.edu.au

References:

Adey, Peter (2010) Aerial Life: Spaces, Mobilities, Affects, Wiley-Blackwell, London.

Graham, Stephen and Lucy Hewitt (2013), Getting off the ground: On the politics of urban verticality, Progress in Human Geography, 37(1): 72-92.

McCosker, Anthony (2015) Drone Media: Unruly Systems, Radical Empiricism and Camera Consciousness, Culture Machine, 16: 1-21.

Rothstein, Adam (2015) Drone, Object Lessons, Bloomsbury, NY.