Dronomation
Post-Civil Drones and Artificial ‚Intelligence‘ in War Zones
December 3, 2024, on-line, 12.00–20.00
Zoom Link here: https://generativemedia.net/event/dronomation/
The one-day online conference looks to present contemporary critiques of
drone-technologies, their scopic regimes and increasing reliance on
so-called AI systems. Instead of fetishising the presumed autonomy of
these weapons, this conference looks at the logistic dependencies, the
operational chains of humans, and the infrastructural layers that enable
them; as well as their relation to cinematic technologies.
The first trend we observe is a parallel development to the expensive,
large, long-range, remote controlled military drones. Inexpensive,
small, and short-range drones were adapted from their civilian
predecessors, such as the DJI Mavic 3, for reconnaissance and grenade
dropping. Today, a number of post-civilian small drones are produced in
Ukraine from bulk parts. First-person-view drones even serve as a
complement to ballistic artillery, as they fly remote-controlled into
their targets.
A second Dronomation trend is the bureaucratization and accelerating
automation of killing in war zones. In this scenario drones produce
visual and geospatial data for databases and machine learning
processing. Automation appears increasingly as an excuse for a
permissive policy of targeting, where responsability is deferred to a
seemingly objective machine.
Numerous artistic works have investigated drones in the past, but the
developments of the recent military conflicts, as well as the growth of
drone use in the consumer area, demonstrate the need for an update.
12.00 Hito Steyerl and Francis Hunger – Introduction
_Algorithmic Warfare and Drones_
12.20 Svitlana Matviyenko (CAN): Synthetic Battlefield in the Time of
Dynamic Maps
13.00 Elke Schwarz (UK): Crimes of Dispassion – Autonomous Weapons and
the Moral Challenge of Systematic Killing
13.40 Sophia Goodfriend (US): Cult of Lethality
14.20 Ayham Ghraowi (US): Walk Cycles
14.50 Break
_Post-Civil Drones_
15.30 Dani Ploeger (NL): A low-cost flight beyond the dialectic of
post-digital warfare
16.00 Olga Danylyuk (UA/UK): Combat at Gamer’s Pace. No Pause nor Reset
Button
16.30 Francis Hunger (DE): Consumer off-the-shelf drones
17.00 Savaş Boyraz (SE): Verbal bombs and sonic resilience
17.30 Break
_Evening Lecture_
The evening lecture takes place in situ at the AdBK Munich,
Auditorium/New Building, Akademiestraße 4 and is also streamed online.
18.30 Lucy Suchman (UK):
An event by the class for Emergent Digital Media at the AdBK Munich.
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