How does a human drones gaze look like?
Following up on todays lecture and discussion on ‘the road not taken’ (Sartoris & Warglien), the groups are encouraged to ponder potentially alternative forms of organizing that arise from a different perspective on technology.
How might we reframe our theme from a perspective based on the recognition of the agency of living entities as a component of alternative technological developments?
Regarding our topic the drone there are some perspectives which might be interesting to keep in mind. On the one side there is the individual being surveilled. Which takes the agency of the human away, because they can’t really decide if they want to or not, so the agency is getting taken.
Another aspect is the perspective of nature, the relation between drone and nature. There is nearly no research on how drones flying around have an impact on nature in the city. But what is clear to say is that there are some areas where it is officially forbidden to fly with drones to take care of the wildlife. So it is clear that in this example the human is taking responsibility for nature because using a drone is the agency of natural entities
Today after the morning session of lecturers’ speaking I decided to go outside for taking some pictures about the gaze of a drone and some inspiration about the tasks that we had to face with. Unfortunately none of my attempts allows me to reach a very high place where I could take those pictures, so I had a very mad and crazy idea. I decided to switch my perspective, and instead of trying to record people with my phone, I filmed insects, ants in particular. So, as you can see in the pictures and videos that I added on this blog page, the ant becomes the person who walks around the city and I am the drone who follows him or her.
As you can see, ants, like many humans, haven’t tried to get away from me, to hide from me, to get away from the drone who was fliying above them. They never stopped walking, and weren’t trying to resist against the gaze of the drone, the human drone. I found this “crazy” experiment very interesting because I think that you can use drones to study in detail animals or other natural creatures or event without disturbing them. So, in my opinion, it could exist a form of interaction between drones and nature.