<nettime> Dronomation – Online Conference – Announcement

[Francis Hunger via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

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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