James Bridle is the creator of bold artistic interventions into the contemporary drone debate. He is perhaps best known for his Drone Shadows, 1:1 scale paint outlines of U.S. military drones, which he has painted on sidewalks, roadways, and parking lots in the U.K., Turkey, Norway and the U.S. His …
While the public conversation about drones is dynamic and vibrant, it has often failed to represent the voice of industry beyond the single soundbyte. The likely reason is that industry figures often resist the very word “drone,” which hapens to be the definitive, unifying piece of vocabulary around which the …
Daniel Klaidman is the author of Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency, which has become a seminal text on the inner workings of the Obama administration’s covert drone war. Klaidman is an investigative correspondent for The Daily Beast/Newsweek, writing about the intersection …
When Does an Animal Become a Drone? By Austin Considine Call it a sign of our weird times: Last month, around the same time Iran claimed to have captured a small American spy drone, officials in Sudan captured a strange flying thing of its own: a living vulture, outfitted with …
Trevor Paglen is a photographer, writer and investigator. His work takes aim at the U.S. government’s network of secret facilities and programs that have burgeoned since September 11; as he puts it, this means that “there is very little evidentiary material in the images that I create.” His interest in …
Nobody outside of the U.S. government knows exactly how many drone strikes have happened in the War on Terror. But we do know a great deal more than we would have known if it hadn’t been for the work of Alice K. Ross. Ross heads The London-based Bureau of Investigative …
For the latest on Iran’s drone program, see The Drone Databook. By Arthur Holland Michel Last week, Iran unveiled its newest lethal drone. It’s called the Fotros, and, according to Hossein Dehghan, Iran’s Defence Minister, it has a range of 2,000 km and can remain aloft for between 16 and …
At the Center for the Study of the Drone In an in-depth interview, artist and environmentalist Natalie Jeremijenko explains why we should completely re-think our relationship with drones. “There’s a fascination about the capacity we have to take other points of view, which I think is very intellectually productive, and …
Adam Rothstein is an interdisciplinary artist and freelance writer. This past June, he co-curated Murmuration, a month-long online festival of drone art and culture. Adam has become an influential voice in the efforts to consider the drone from cultural and artistic perspectives. Rothstein recently visited Bard College to meet with …
By trade, Natalie Jeremijenko is an engineer, an environmentalist and an activist. But everything she does also achieves the condition of art. In a 1997 project called BIT Plane, she flew a camera-equipped remote control plane over Silicon Valley, capturing grainy, black and white footage of a number of large …
By Arthur Holland Michel, @WriteArthur and Dan Gettinger, @GettDan Aerial drones are media superstars; they tend to hog the spotlight. In their shadows, a whole ecosystem of ground based drones is evolving at an equally fervid pace, with equally significant implications for both the military and civilian spheres. The lowly Unmanned …
Dr. Julie Carpenter is a leading expert on robot-human relationships. She made headlines in early October when she released her groundbreaking new study on the emotional ties between military personnel and military robots. As a result of the study, which revealed that soldiers often name and even fall in love …
