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

评论家们注意到了无人机创造世界的力量(Stubblefield 2020)，但这个哲学术语对这项新兴技术的政治含义，以及创意经济人物对其发展的回应和塑造方式，还有待深入研究。《无人驾驶的生活》是跨学科学术的交叉学科，其团队横跨英语、政治、计算机科学和数字媒体。它调查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，以及想象力和美学如何促进侵入性技术的广泛和越来越多的使用。它是由一个重要的研究问题--无人机的美学是什么？--驱动的，美学被定义为艺术、体现(Aissis)，以及是什么使政治可感知和常态化(Rancière 2004)。美学如何影响与无人机有关的假肢政治--例如，在反恐战争中的“定向杀戮”中，或者在希思罗机场国产无人机造成的安全漏洞中？鉴于无人机在执法和监视中的使用日益普遍，无人机的审美维度如何有助于促进更邪恶的目的，例如将人体客观化为以安全和方便的名义拍摄、跟踪和瞄准的物品；或将人的生命转化为数据，用于监测和汇总预测趋势和集体行为？无人机美学如何帮助打破军事和民用的界限，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，并日益成为日常生活的地方病？为了回答这个研究问题，这个FLF项目借鉴了创造世界的理论(Goodman 1978，Nunning 2015)，研究无人机创造了什么新的感性、法律和地缘政治世界。一方面，无人机创造了新的世界，因为它们中介并创造了独特的、体现的虚拟体验。无人驾驶飞行器(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肢。另一方面，无人机创造了世界，因为它们确立了自己的政治理由，即使是在强化自己的政治理由的同时。例如，军用无人机利用图表符号的实时循环来确定一个可能的、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，商业街的无人机占据了飞机和玩具之间的有限空间，它们继续扰乱与隐私、安全和公民自由有关的直接边界。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，而且因为它们在人类和机械机构之间创造了交叉，无人机对象与支撑它的文化和解释实践之间存在共谋。本次FLF将通过：1.对与无人机有关的四个审美艺术领域--文学、电影、视觉艺术和游戏设计--的实证研究，以及2.通过与非学术合作伙伴共同设计的一系列知识交流活动，审视无人机如何成为我们世界的一部分。它关注三个合作者及其各自的方法：数据激进主义(与非政府组织无人机战争英国)，虚拟和身临其境的技术(与图形公司Human Studio)，以及博物馆策展(与帝国战争博物馆)。随着无人机、传感器、人工智能和模拟技术的结合，在过去十年里产生了新的世界创造模式，重要的是反思正在创造什么世界，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.