| dc.description.abstract | The word “drone” once evoked primarily a bulbous, space-gray Predator. The drones we see now look different, and they are small, up close, out in the open, and unarmed. Drones are now everywhere and used for nearly everything, like disaster recovery, land surveying, shopping delivery, wedding videography, and sheep herding. Amazon, Walmart, and Target sell them to the average consumer, and the footage from these consumer drones is everywhere in the culture—in movies and television shows, on the news, and on social media. Yet most scholarly engagements with drones and drone vision have focused on military drones and their lethal function: surveilling and bombing enemy targets, especially in the Global War on Terror. How, though, are we to interpret what we might call the new drone vision produced by consumer drones? And how are we to do it without assuming a military lens? This thesis contends that the definitions of “drone vision” so far do not account for the newer generation of drone technologies, or the visual tropes that have become part of the zeitgeist since hobby drones and later commercial drones were legalized in the mid-20-teens. Warfare is no longer the only or even the most common subject of the drone’s eye, and distance and detachment are no longer the most prominent qualities of drone vision. I probe the diversity of drone technologies and the seemingly unlimited access they yield to previously inaccessible spaces, events, and vantages, and I attempt to theorize a new drone visuality that encompasses drones in their multiplicity. The essay looks at films from three different genres—war movies, YouTube travel videos, and wedding videos—that feature the new drone visuality, attempting to capture the breadth of unmanned aerial technology and its ubiquity and impact in the culture. Each genre demonstrates both the indelible intimacy of drone vision and the commercialization of intimacy in the West. | |
