Julia M. Hildebrand - Aerial Play: Drone Medium, Mobility, Communication, and Culture

The exit of former Cheiron Studios at Fridhemsplan is getting smaller, as we slowly ascend into the Stockholm sky. Reaching an altitude of about 120 meters (i.e., about 400ft), we not only look back at the Swedish urban landscape, but at arguably the most significant hub of pop cultures global music industry. In Songs from Sweden, the fourth volume of our Geographies of Media series, Ola Johansson argues about cultural and economic interconnections that are largely enabled by digitalization. Without broadband internet, tracks of vocals, instruments, and audio loops would still be shipped physically to collaborating music producers. Without broadband internet, we would not be able to listen to the finished product via streaming services from radio stations (Peters 2018). Like music, audio from the remote control and video from our consumer drone, still hovering over Stockholm, can be streamed live to a range of media platforms. Thus, drone operators become content creators, may it be for a serious production or ludic fun.

Sarah Barns reminds us in Platform Urbanism (2020) that it is not only our content that is the message, but the platform itself. The platform does not only impact our ability to publicize our files but it changes the very places where we live, like Stockholm. In Inhabiting Cyberspace and Emerging Cyberplaces (2017), Tobias Boos provides a compelling link to Aerial Play: the merging of physical presence and media presence. Just like Sienas contrade which not only exists inside the citys borders but spreads into cyberspace, the drone imagery allows us to leave our body through external digital extensions of our senses while sitting still in our living room. The Cyberpunk culture of the 1980s might think of the Rigger, who is almost symbiotically bound to the vehicle he/she is operating.

In Julia M. Hildebrands book, the drone is provided agency in a manner that both acknowledges and recognizes the machinic and emotional entanglements derived and generated from engaging with it. More than just for ludic enjoyment or for surveillance capabilities, the drone becomes a discursive concept that not only embodies and disembodies humans but also reorders and reassembles individual and collective encounter with the emotional, the corporeal, and the imaginative.

In Alex Riveras neo-noirish sci-fi film Sleep Dealer (2008), the military drone that was responsible for the destruction of a subaltern community in Mexico became embodied as an exterminating angel that rebuilt the same community it destroyed. This liaison with a human-maneuvered machine, at once destructive and ultimately restorative, speaks to the hybrid space occupied by drones when viewed from its entanglement with humans, institutions, practices, and relationalities.