Drone’s-eye view

Drone vision is intimately uncanny, a technicity of perception that both escapes and extends the human. In this the drone is the paradigmatic figure of emergent perception in the contemporary networked world. A mediating technology of anxious ambivalence, the drone is bound up with witnessing in fluid ways irreducible to the content of images alone. Surveilling scenes of violence, activism and the everyday extraordinary, this chapter argues that the drone’s-eye view constitutes an emergent mode of affective witnessing, inseparable from the digital mediations of the social media age and yet uncannily beyond the human in its capacities of perception.