Non-human Sensing: New Methodologies for the Drone Assemblage

Abstract

Consideration of the drone as a component of an audio/visual methodological assemblage prompts post-phenomenological questions about how bodies act with technologies. Piloting a drone through a live video stream appears to create a sensory extension. Yet the increasing autonomy of the drone, facilitated by exponential innovation in sense-and-avoid technologies, point towards future amalgamations that are increasingly more-than-human. In the context of a plethora of work on the ‘terror’ of the drone, where operational autonomy is politically non-negotiable—for autonomous machines cannot yet be held to account—we suggest here that the non-human, multi- and extrasensory visuality of the drone are more plentiful than terrible, more evasive than invasive, and create practical and imaginative space for experimentation. Here, we first think through the relationships between bodies, ex-bodies and objects in the imaginaries and practices of drone piloting. Then, we suggest that where drones—as aerial avatars—are reshaping methodological imaginations through the unique sensual amalgamations they afford, future drone bodies will be less stringently tethered to the hand and the eye of a human host as the drone flies off on its own, in swarms or alone.

Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.

-Donna Haraway (Haraway 1991, p. 152).