Interview: The Drone That Started It All

Richard Whittle knows a great deal about the Predator. Not the 1987 movie; rather, the General Atomics MQ-1 Predator surveillance and strike drone, which Whittle contends started the drone revolution. Indeed, the Predator’s distinctive profile has become a symbol for drones in general: ask the average person what a drone …

A Conversation With High & Low Bureau

High & Low Bureau is a curatorial duo comprised of Yael Messer and Gilad Reich. Their work explores how power, technology, and activism interact in the 21st Century. Their latest show, Decolonized Skies, explores the ways in which artists and activists have worked to reappropriate the aerial view from the surveillance …

Interview: Can Drones Save Namibia’s Wildlife?

In the span of less than two years, Joe Noci and his wife, Gisela, went from working in the aeronautical drone industry in South Africa to building conservation drones out of their home in Namibia. Their SurVoyeur drones, which the Nocis design and build from scratch, have proven to be …

Interview: Tomas van Houtryve

Tomas van Houtryve is a prolific photojournalist who explores conflict and state-sponsored surveillance. In March, Harpers Magazine published a folio of his photographs titled “Blue Sky Days,” the longest folio in the magazine’s 164 year history. The photos, which van Houtryve took with a small drone over everyday spaces and scenes in …

Interview: KATSU and The Graffiti Drone

Published in conjunction with Motherboard.- VICE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vZzqjKIBNc KATSU is an artist and vandal. His work pushes our idea of what can be achieved with the graffiti artist’s limited tool set. Having established himself as one of New York City’s most prolific and imaginative taggers in the 1990s, KATSU garnered admiration from …

Interview: AeroVironment’s Steve Gitlin

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 …

Interview: Daniel Klaidman

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 …