What happens when a drone enters a gallery or appears on screen? What thresholds are crossed as this weapon of war occupies everyday visual culture? These questions have appeared with increasing regularity since the advent of the War on Terror, when drones began migrating into civilian platforms of film, photography, installation, sculpture, performance art, and theater. In this groundbreaking study, Thomas Stubblefield attempts not only to define the emerging genre of "drone art" but to outline its primary features, identify its historical lineages, and assess its political aspirations. Richly detailed and politically salient, this book is the first comprehensive analysis of the intersections between drones, art, technology, and power.

About the Author

Thomas Stubblefield is Associate Professor of Art History and Media Studies at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. His book 9/11 and the Visual Culture of Disaster was awarded the NEPCA Rollins Book Award.

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Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Perverse Symmetry of Drone Art

1. Signature Strikes and World-Making

2. How to Photograph a Drone: The Nesting Logic of
Vertical Empire

3. From the Ground Below: Spotting Industries, Smartphones,
and the Post-Panopticism of Drones

4. The Animal Remainder: Excavating Nonhuman Life from
Contemporary Drones

5. Showing Sensing: Drone Space and Postmedia in Film
and Theater

Conclusion: Supersymmetry, Capital, and War

Notes
Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Index

Reviews

"In Drone Art, [Stubblefield] ruminates on the profound implications of a technology that can, by cross-referencing historical patterns, provide ‘limitless temporal parameters.'"
— London Review of Books

"Stubblefield manages to masterfully intertwine art criticism and critical theory with some remarkably lucid explanations of the actual operations of drone warfare."
— Cultural Critique

"Do representations of drones that circulate in contemporary media reinforce or subvert the logic of distance warfare? Stubblefield takes a brilliantly nuanced approach in a text replete with stimulating examples to argue that 'drone power' in such media is always 'distributed and elusive' yet open to reimagination and, therefore, critique."—Caren Kaplan, author of Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above

"Stubblefield’s book is a groundbreaking study of the role of drones in contemporary visual culture. In a series of dynamic analyses of emerging platforms, he shows how drone art's intimate relationship with the hegemonic networks of power is creating a new kind of politicized aesthetic."—Jan Mieszkowski, author of Watching War

Awards

Institute for Humanities Research (IHR) Book Award Shortlist 2022 2022, Institute for Humanities Research, ASU

About the Book