A comprehensive overview of how civilian drones sense the world and how they build the aesthetic imaginaries of our communities. Drone technology has garnered critical attention across many fields, from engineering to the humanities. While the first wave of drone scholarship was key in initiating the debate on drones, it also privileged the idea of the “scopic regime”—a militarized regime of hypervisuality—in its analyses of the connection between vision and power. The Sensorium of the Drone and Communities broadens the drone’s spectrum of perception by acknowledging its creative, life-affirming possibility with the notion of the sensorium. The sensorium of the drone is a multimedia, synesthetic sensing assemblage in which the human agent is enmeshed with the drone. Drone sensoria can sense in many more ways than the scopic regime—with sound, touch, smell, temperature, and movement. In The Sensorium of the Drone and Communities, Kathrin Maurer shows how drone sensoria can change our understanding of human communities by constructing imaginaries of social communities based on decentralized and fluid sensing processes. Maurer takes an aesthetic approach to technology, working with two understandings of aesthetics. One understanding refers to aesthetics as a way of experiencing, and it explores how the drone-human assemblage perceives the world. The other refers to aesthetic mimetic representation, and focuses on how aesthetic drone imaginaries in literature, popular culture, visual arts, and films negotiate the sensorial technology of the drone. Bringing together key ideas in technology studies, studies of aerial views, visual and aesthetic studies, posthuman sensing, machine–human interaction, and communities, The Sensorium of the Drone and Communities sheds a welcome and necessary light on this technology’s creative potential as well as its dangers and risks.

In 2010, 60 states had a military drone program. Today at least 113 countries and 65 non-state actors now have access to weaponized drone technologies. Alongside this, established ‘drone powers’ – the U.S., China, Turkey, and Iran – have expanded their own use of military drones, increasing the sale and deployment of drones around the world. In the De Gruyter Handbook of Drone Warfare, drone expert, policy adviser, and historian, Dr James Patton Rogers, brings together 37 of the world’s leading voices on the growing issues of commercial and military drone technologies. From the origins of military drones in the early 1900s and the resurgence of drone use during the War on Terror, through to the global proliferation of drones across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, this handbook explores the moral, ethical, technological, legal, military, geopolitical, social, and strategic issues at the heart of drone warfare. The first handbook of its kind, the volume also addresses Russia’s offensive war against Ukraine, the rise of Iranian and Houthi drones, and provides a focused analysis of the future of drone warfare and the opportunities and perils of AI, autonomy, and swarming technologies in the coming Third Drone Age.

There should no longer be any doubt: drones are here to stay. In civil society, they are used for rescue, surveillance, transport and leisure. And on the battlefield, their promises of remote protection and surgical precision have radically changed the way wars are fought. But what impact are drones having on our identity, and how are they affecting the communities around us? This book addresses these questions by investigating the representation of civilian and military drones in visual arts, literature, and architecture. What emerges, the contributors argue, is a compelling new aesthetic: ‘drone imaginary’, a prism of cultural and critical knowledge, through which the complex interplay between drone technology and human communities is explored, and from which its historical, cultural and political dimensions can be assessed. The contributors offer diverse approaches to this interdisciplinary field of aesthetic drone imaginaries. With essays on the aesthetic configurations of drone swarming, historical perspectives on early unmanned aviation, as well as current debates on how drone technology alters the human body and creates new political imaginaries, this book provides new insights to the rapidly evolving field of drone studies. Working across art history, literature, photography, feminism, postcolonialism and cultural studies, Drone imaginaries offers a unique insight into how drones are changing our societies.

Turning Inward comprises a selection of texts by international artists, critics, and curators, which aims to renegotiate the relationship between centers and peripheries in contemporary art worlds. In the context of advanced globalization, the distributed agency of networked power structures can hardly be localized any longer in geographical terms. Yet, if we are to turn our attention away from geographical--that is, horizontal--relations, we can conceive of the central and peripheral as vertical phenomena that can coexist spatially in the shapes of social constructions, genealogies, or epistemic formations. Against this backdrop Turning Inward provides a heterogeneous range of critical reflections upon contemporary art and its modes of production, distribution, and consumption. Reaching far beyond the spatial metaphor, the positions assembled in this volume touch on fields such as art history, philosophy, economics, gender studies, urbanism, language, and education. Contributors John Beeson, Svetlana Boym, Marta Dziewanska, Philipp Ekardt, Felix Ensslin, Orit Gat, David Joselit, William Kherbek, John Miller, Reza Negarestani, Matteo Pasquinelli, Dieter Roelstraete

How the world—and the world of visual culture in particular—creates itself in a creative act that knows no economic return. How does the world form itself? How does it create itself as a world? And how do we understand the role of the visual in this regard? Most responses to these questions within cultural theory and visual culture refer to the rise of globalization, thus highlighting the acceleration of exchanges, the proliferation of information and communication devices, and the multiplication of globally circulated goods and images that characterize the world we live in. Visual Cultures as World Forming takes a different approach by focusing on the taking place of the world, a creative act that knows no economic return. This taking place does not lead to more proliferation of goods, additional financial exchanges, further communications, or an increase in the distribution of visual material, but leads to the continued “worlding” of the world. This approach is predominantly, but not exclusively, inspired by the work of Jean-Luc Nancy. Through a reading of his work and of some of his contemporaries both inside and outside of the Western canon, Madani and Martinon attempt to expose how the world—and the world of visual culture in particular—creates itself and the ways in which each one of us is embodying this creation without economy. Copublished with Goldsmiths, University of London

Canvases and Careers Today brings together contributions from the eponymous conference organized by the Institut für Kunstkritik, Frankfurt am Main. Its goal is to provide deeper insights and more complexity to current debates on the relationship between criticism, art, and the market. “It was especially interesting for us to watch a kind of transatlantic divide happening. While the US-American participants mostly declared criticism as obsolete while hoping for turning its weakness into a strength, most European participants departed from the opposite diagnosis: that criticism has never been as strong as it is today, since it is now part of a knowledge-based economy.”—Isabelle Graw/Daniel Birnbaum Contributors George Baker, Johanna Burton, Merlin Carpenter, Melanie Gilligan, Isabelle Graw, Tom Holert, Branden W. Joseph, John Kelsey, André Rottmann, Julia Voss Institut für Kunstkritik Series

An illustrated exploration of fandom that combines academic essays with artist pages and experimental texts. Fandom as Methodology examines fandom as a set of practices for approaching and writing about art. The collection includes experimental texts, autobiography, fiction, and new academic perspectives on fandom in and as art. Key to the idea of “fandom as methodology” is a focus on the potential for fandom in art to create oppositional spaces, communities, and practices, particularly from queer perspectives, but also through transnational, feminist and artist-of-color fandoms. The book provides a range of examples of artists and writers working in this vein, as well as academic essays that explore the ways in which fandom can be theorized as a methodology for art practice and art history. Fandom as Methodology proposes that many artists and art writers already draw on affective strategies found in fandom. With the current focus in many areas of art history, art writing, and performance studies around affective engagement with artworks and imaginative potentials, fandom is a key methodology that has yet to be explored. Interwoven into the academic essays are lavishly designed artist pages in which artists offer an introduction to their use of fandom as methodology. Contributors Taylor J. Acosta, Catherine Grant, Dominic Johnson, Kate Random Love, Maud Lavin, Owen G. Parry, Alice Butler, SooJin Lee, Jenny Lin, Judy Batalion, Ika Willis. Artists featured in the artist pages Jeremy Deller, Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski, Anna Bunting-Branch, Maria Fusco, Cathy Lomax, Kamau Amu Patton, Holly Pester, Dawn Mellor, Michelle Williams Gamaker, The Women of Colour Index Reading Group, Liv Wynter, Zhiyuan Yang