New Ways of Reading Drones in Art: Drones as Existential Technologies

Abstract Scholars of drone technologies have focused on how consumer drones are regularly exploited for surveillance and violence. But the emphasis on how consumer drones are associated with brutality and reconnaissance narrows drone research and remains unfair to those who have used these technologies differently. This article studies consumer drones in Korakrit Arunanondchai’s video installation Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names 3 and the documentary film Human Flow by Ai Weiwei. It argues that reading these drones as existential technologies helps us see how these artists use them in ways that undermine putative assumptions of human vision and knowledge, gesturing toward a more meaningful coexistence with these machines.