Remote visions, threatened ecologies, and the 'community drone'

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The remote viewing and spectral analysis capabilities of aerial UAVs (Unmanned Autonomous Vehicles), or 'drones', are increasingly appearing re-articulated by communities threatened by land dispossession or incursion. This project explores the emergence of 'community drone' interventions within the geo-traumatic 'geophysics' of extraction networks, through a postcolonial critique of the technology's capacity to both claim and digitally archive material cultures and ecologies, made inaccessible in dispossession and industrial encroachment.The increasing affordability and inherent friendliness to conditions of high atmospheric interference and time-sensitivity have encouraged a rise in utilisations of the technology by indigenous communities in particular, as communities facing outsize cases of land dispossession and encroachment. Unfortunately, much like the material dispossession enacted at the edges of these networks, the aerial renderings of the 'community drone' are often transmitted beyond communities post-production, fed outwards across networks of transmission for valuations, environmental monitorings or legal-cartographic claims. A doubled dispossession then occurs in the loss of these digital productions. When held as community archive, I wish to explore how they may offer, beyond practical utility, a futurity to indigenous lands and ecologies that may resist total eclipses of the 'colonial imaginary', reaching past 'viewing' or 'claim' and towards an emergent geopoetics and geopolitics activated in digital reproduction from above.