ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that the drone’s eye view and the god’s eye view work in distinctively cartographic ways, constituting modes of cartographic abstraction. The concept of the networked view also offers greater coherence to the theme of the removal of the drone pilot from the aircraft and drone fallibility. The withdrawal of the pilot and the expansion of the network contributes to the fantasies of invulnerability and perfectible vision. The drone appears as a distant and unknowable form, moving between appearance and non-appearance, visibility and non-visibility. James Bridle is a multimedia artist noted for his works on themes of surveillance, security, the network and technologies of seeing. James Bridle and Trevor Paglen’s artworks attempt, in their own terms, to enact a similar position of critical reflexivity. Where a drone deploys the buddy-lase system of laser targeting, it enacts the capacity to target remotely and to ‘call in’ a lethal strike that is enacted by other aircraft, whether manned or unmanned.
