Droned Life: Data, Narrative, and the Aesthetics of Worldmaking

批评者已经注意到无人机的“世界制造”力量（Stubblefield 2020），但这个哲学术语对这种新兴技术的政治影响，以及创意经济的人物如何回应和塑造其发展，还有待深入研究。“无人驾驶的生活”坐在跨学科奖学金的横截面，与位于英语，政治，计算机科学和数字媒体的团队。它探讨了无人机及其物理和数字基础设施如何产生解释和体验世界的新方式，以及机器人和美学如何促进侵入性技术的广泛和越来越多的使用。它是由一个首要的研究问题驱动的--无人机的美学是什么？美学被定义为艺术，体现（aisthesis），以及使政治可感知和规范化的东西（Rancière 2004）。美学如何告知与无人机有关的假肢政治--例如，在反恐战争中的"定点清除"中，或者在国内无人机在希思罗机场造成的安全漏洞中？鉴于无人机在执法和监视中的使用越来越普遍，无人机的美学维度如何有助于实现更邪恶的目的，例如以安全和便利的名义将人体客观化为拍照，跟踪和瞄准的对象;或者将人类生命转化为监测和汇总的数据，以预测趋势和集体行为？无人机美学如何帮助消除军事和民用界限，帮助建立我们目前所知的“世界”-数据，算法和人工智能已经成为私人和公共安全的地方病，并且越来越多地进入日常生活？为了回答这个研究问题，这个FLF计划借鉴了世界制造理论（古德曼1978年，纳宁2015年），以研究无人机创造了什么样的新感知，法律的和地缘政治世界。一方面，无人机创造了新的世界，因为它们媒介化并创造了独特的体现，虚拟体验。无人机（UAV）可以在距离无人机飞行员数千英里的地方操作，创造新的空中视图，并通过数字屏幕作为感知体验的假体。另一方面，无人机创造了世界，因为它们建立了自己的政治理由，即使在加强的同时。例如，军用无人机利用图形标志的实时循环来确定可能的而不是预先确定的目标;这种先发制人的逻辑对国际法产生了深远的影响。与此同时，高街无人机占据了飞机和玩具之间的一个界限，它们继续破坏与隐私、安全和公民自由有关的直接界限。由于无人机涉及叙事、视角、视觉框架和多媒体阅读方面的操作，并且由于它们在人类和机器机构之间创造了交叉点，因此无人机对象与支撑它的文化和解释实践之间存在着共谋关系。对文学、电影、视觉艺术和游戏设计等四个美学艺术领域与无人机相关的实证研究;通过与非学术合作伙伴共同设计的一系列知识交流活动，研究无人机如何成为我们世界的一部分。它侧重于三个合作者及其各自的方法论：数据行动主义（与非政府组织Drone Wars UK合作），虚拟和沉浸式技术（与图形公司Human Studio合作）以及博物馆策展（与帝国战争博物馆合作）。随着无人机、传感器、人工智能和模拟在过去十年中结合起来产生了新的世界制造模式，重要的是要反思正在创造的世界，并围绕它们进行干预。

Critics have noted the 'worldmaking' power of drones (Stubblefield 2020), but the political implications of that philosophical term for this emerging technology, and for the way figures from the creative economy are responding to and shaping its development, have yet to be scrutinized in depth. 'Droned Life' sits at the cross-section of interdisciplinary scholarship, with a team situated across English, Politics, Computer Science, and Digital Media. It investigates how drones and their physical and digital infrastructures produce new ways of interpreting and experiencing the world, and how imaginaries and aesthetics facilitate the widespread and increasing use of intrusive technologies. It is driven by an overarching research question--what are the aesthetics of drones?--with aesthetics defined as art, embodiment (aisthesis), and as what makes politics perceptible and normalized (Rancière 2004). How do aesthetics inform the politics of prosthesis in relation to drones--seen, for instance, in the 'targeted killings' in the War on Terror, or in the security breaches made by domestic drones at Heathrow airport? In light of the increasingly common use of drones in law enforcement and surveillance, how do the aesthetic dimensions of drones serve to facilitate more nefarious purposes, such as the objectification of human bodies into things to photograph, track, and target in the name of safety and convenience; or the transformation of human lives into data to monitor and aggregate for anticipating trends and collective behaviour? How have drone aesthetics helped to dissolve military and civilian boundaries to help establish the 'world' as we currently know it--where data, algorithm, and artificial intelligence have become endemic to private and public security, and increasingly, to everyday life?To answer this research question, this FLF programme draws from theories of worldmaking (Goodman 1978, Nunning 2015) to examine what new perceptual, legal, and geopolitical worlds drones create. On the one hand, drones make new worlds because they mediatize and create uniquely embodied, virtual experiences. An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can be operated thousands of miles away from the drone pilot, creating new aerial views and functioning as a prosthesis for perceptual experience through the digital screen. On the other hand, drones make worlds because they establish, even while reinforcing, their own political justifications. Military drones, for instance, employ the real-time circulation of diagrammatic signs to establish a possible, rather than pre-identified, target; this logic of pre-emption has profound consequences for international law. High-street drones, meanwhile, occupy a liminal space between aircraft and plaything, and they continue to disrupt straightforward boundaries in relation to privacy, security, and civil liberties. Because drones involve manipulations in narrative, perspective, visual framing, and the reading of multimedia, and because they create intersections between human and machinic agency, there is a complicity between the drone object and the cultural and interpretive practices undergirding it. This FLF will examine the worldmaking dimensions of drones through: 1. the empirical study of four areas of the aesthetic arts--literature, film, visual arts, and game design concerned with drones, and 2. through a series of co-designed knowledge exchange activities with non-academic partners to examine how drones have become a part of our world. It focuses on three collaborators and their respective methodologies: data activism (with the NGO Drone Wars UK), virtual and immersive technologies (with the graphics firm Human Studio), and museum curation (with the Imperial War Museum). With drones, sensors, AI, and simulation all combining to produce new modes of worldmaking over the past decade, it is important to reflect on what worlds are being created, and to stage interventions around them.