Back in March, a group of undergraduates at Bard College set out to create a piece of drone performance art that reflected the current public debate about drones and meditated on the issues that they were formally studying in our seminar. The result is “Drones.”, a student production for the Center for the Study of the Drone. What the video captures best of all is the enormous influence that drones play on our imagination. Except for the name, the video makes no overt references to drones. And yet, the name alone frames the video so that every image, every movement, is connected in the viewer’s mind to UAVs, targeted killing, aerial bombing. Because of the context, the video becomes parody, dialogue, debate, and protest. The piece exercises a kind of restraint and subtlety that is absent from much of the public discourse; and yet, “Drones.” forcefully demonstrates the impact of the idea of the drone on aesthetic vocabularies.
“Drones.” was created by Rose Falvey, Riley Destefano DeLuise, Julia Wallace, Christina Miliou-Theocharaki, Eamon Goodman, Megan Snyder, and Catalin Moise.