Aerial Play: Drone Medium, Mobility, Communication, and Culture

220 Pages·2021·8.3 MB·English

by  Julia M. Hildebrand

GEOGRAPHIES OF MEDIA
Aerial Play
Drone Medium, Mobility, Communication,
and Culture
Julia M. Hildebrand
Geographies of Media
Series Editors
Torsten Wissmann, Faculty of Architecture and Urban
Planning, University of Applied Sciences, Erfurt, Germany
Joseph Palis, Department of Geography, University
of the Philippines Diliman, Quezon, Philippines
Mediaisalwaysspatial:spacesextendfromallkindsofmedia,fromnews-
paper columns to Facebook profiles, from global destination branding
to individually experienced environments, and from classroom methods
to GIS measurement techniques. Crucially, the way information is
producedinanincreasinglyglobalisedworldhasresultedinthebridging
of space between various scalar terrains. Being and engaging with media
means being linked to people and places both within and beyond tradi-
tional political borders. As a result, media shapes and facilitates the
formation of new geographies and other space-constituting and place-
based configurations. The Geographies of Media series serves as a forum
to engage with the shape-shifting dimensions of mediascapes from an
array of methodological, critical and analytical perspectives. The series
welcomes proposals for monographs and edited volumes exploring the
culturalandsocialimpactofmulti-modalmediaonthecreationofspace,
place, and everyday life.
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15003
Julia M. Hildebrand
Aerial Play
Drone Medium, Mobility,
Communication, and Culture
Julia M. Hildebrand
Eckerd College
St. Petersburg
FL, USA
Geographies of Media
ISBN 978-981-16-2194-9 ISBN 978-981-16-2195-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-2195-6
©The Editor(s) (if applicable) andThe Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
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For my parents Magdalena and Albert Hildebrand
Series Editors’ Preface
THE SKY AIN’T THE LIMIT
The exit of former Cheiron Studios at Fridhemsplan is getting smaller,
as we slowly ascend into the Stockholm sky. Reaching an altitude of
about 120 meters (i.e., about 400ft), we not only look back at the
Swedish urban landscape, but at arguably the most significant hub of
pop culture’s global music industry. In Songs from Sweden, the fourth
volume of our Geographies of Media series, Ola Johansson argues about
cultural and economic interconnections that are largely enabled by digi-
talization. Without broadband internet, tracks of vocals, instruments,
and audio loops would still be shipped physically to collaborating music
producers. Without broadband internet, we would not be able to listen
to the finished product via streaming services from radio stations (Peters
2018). Like music, audio from the remote control and video from our
consumer drone, still hovering over Stockholm, can be streamed live
to a range of media platforms. Thus, drone operators become content
creators, may it be for a serious production or ludic fun.
vii
viii Series Editors’ Preface
Sarah Barns reminds us in Platform Urbanism (2020) that it is not
only our content that is the message, but the platform itself. The plat-
formdoesnotonlyimpactourabilitytopublicizeourfilesbutitchanges
the very places where we live, like Stockholm. In Inhabiting Cyberspace
andEmergingCyberplaces (2017),TobiasBoosprovidesacompellinglink
to Aerial Play: the merging of physical presence and media presence.
Just like Siena’s contrade which not only exists inside the city’s borders
but spreads into cyberspace, the drone imagery allows us to leave our
body through external digital extensions of our senses while sitting still
in our living room.The Cyberpunk culture of the 1980s might think of
the Rigger, who is almost symbiotically bound to the vehicle he/she is
operating.
In Julia M. Hildebrand’s book, the drone is provided agency in
a manner that both acknowledges and recognizes the machinic and
emotional entanglements derived and generated from engaging with
it. More than just for ludic enjoyment or for surveillance capabili-
ties, the drone becomes a discursive concept that not only embodies
and disembodies humans but also reorders and reassembles individual
and collective encounter with the emotional, the corporeal, and the
imaginative.
InAlexRivera’sneo-noirishsci-fifilmSleepDealer (2008),themilitary
dronethatwasresponsibleforthedestructionofasubalterncommunity
in Mexico became embodied as an exterminating angel that rebuilt the
same community it destroyed. This liaison with a human-maneuvered
machine, at once destructive and ultimately restorative, speaks to the
hybrid space occupied by drones when viewed from its entanglement
with humans, institutions, practices, and relationalities.
The affective aspect of drone engagement is given numerous exposure
in several chapters.The excitement can be palpable like in Chapter 4:
“... I have learned to understand unfamiliar places and my own mobili-
ties within them better once the drone extended my eyes into the sky...I
remotely witnessed 4th of July fireworks a few hundred feet away from
mydoorsteps.Asmyneighborswatchedthespectacleliveontelevision,I
felt a different sense of “liveness,” visual control over, and active engage-
ment with the event space from afar. My distant drone visuals were not
Series Editors’ Preface ix
nearly as compelling as the ones on television, but there was a sense of
emancipation.”
This “liveness” not only allows panoptical views of almost-
otherworldlyvisualdelightsbutthe“super-powerqualitywhenaccessing
vertical space” (ibid.). These are likewise echoed by Hildebrand’s infor-
mants who recount real experiences in imaginative and vividly captured
language. Drones facilitate a visually-cued astuteness of one’s environ-
ment. Like Boos’ study of Siena’s contrade, the borders may be real
but the gateways that cyberplaces allow, and in the case of drones from
Hildebrand’s accounts, transcend the ether and nether worlds.
Drones are also about cohabitation. The drone might be perceived
not only as technological equipment but as an emotional counterpart.
Thus, operating the drone equals walking the dog or even conversing
with another human. In this intimate companionship between operator
and drone, borders of environmental experience and self-conception are
blurred.Bothhumansandmachinecohabitthesamephysicalspherethat
also changes spatial awareness.
One of the more interesting provocations in the book is about aerial
gaze privileged from experiencing a vertical space point of view afforded
by drones. The unfamiliar is familiarized and the familiar is made
unfamiliar as map-reading and way-finding become enmeshed.
Ultimately, the drone is more than an optical toy that enables us
to view the world from another angle. Otherwise, we could just climb
the observation deck of any given skyscraper to reach a similar vantage
point. Hovering in the air 120m/400ft above the ground, the medium
becomes the message as we reach another conception of ourselves. Not
onlyregardinghuman-machineinteraction,buttheveryideaofwhatwe
might become once our senses are being separated from each other.
We cannot help but intuit that our perspective will get altered even
more, once the flight controls are no longer bound to our thumbs and
fingers. Given the progress in neural network research, we might look
back at Aerial Play as the ending of what we call reality today.
x Series Editors’ Preface
Or, asWilliam Gibson (1984: 3) puts it: “The sky above the port was
the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
Joseph Palis
TorstenWissmann
Works Cited
Barns,S.(2020).Platformurbanism.Negotiatingplatformecosystemsinconnected
cities. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Boos,T.(2017).Inhabitingcyberspaceandemergingcyberplaces.Thecaseofsiena,
Italy. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Cravey, A., J. Palis., & G. Valdivia. (2015). “Imagining the future from the
margins: cyborg labor in Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer”, GeoJournal, 80(6),
867–880.
Gibson,W. (1984). Neuromancer. London, Orion Publishing Group.
Johansson, O. (2020). Songs from Sweden. Shaping pop culture in a globalized
music industry. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Peters, K. (2018). Sound, space and society. Rebel radio. London: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Rivera, A. (2008). Sleep dealer. Los Angeles: Maya Entertainment.