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 …
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 …
Raphael “Trappy” Pirker is the founder and front man of Team Black Sheep, a group of hobbyist drone pilots who have gained global renown, and infamy, for their aerial videos of landscapes and cityscapes from Rio de Janeiro to New Zealand. Trappy first came into the public spotlight when he …
Interview by Dan Gettinger Every month for the past year or so, new stories have emerged predicting that unmanned aerial vehicles could be used on farms across America. On Aug. 25, the Memphis Commercial Appeal wrote that drones could assist peanut farmers in Georgia to “pinpoint the optimal time to …
Medea Benjamin is an American writer and anti-drone activist. In 2002, she co-founded Code Pink, a women-initiated activist organization that has gained national attention for its protests against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and, more recently, drones. The group is known for their public protest actions in the United …
Heather Layton and Brian Bailey are activists, artists, and social interventionists based in Rochester, New York. Their exhibition Home Drone, at the Hampden Gallery at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, was a critically acclaimed exploration of what they considered the depravity—and inherent unfairness—of the U.S government’s targeted killing program. The …
By Arthur Holland Michel “I do this because it is fun,” Georgi Tushev told me as he loaded a lipo battery into his drone. We were in an enormous oval-shaped parking lot in the Rockaways, a slender peninsula at the southern end of Long Island. I was watching Georgi as …
