ABSTRACT
The proliferation of camera drones in the past 10 years heralded a new production tool and interface for mobile media art, remediating the classic cinematic art of virtual flying via moving pictures. The flying camera complicates the already contested terrain of what constitutes mobile art. The unique combination of aerial visuality, vertical mobility, and robotic autonomy opens up questions about how artists and audiences engage with aerial mobile media, and how this reshapes emerging media environments. This chapter interprets drone-generated films by speculative architect Liam Young (“Where the City Can’t See” and “In the Robot Skies”) along with examples from the New York City Drone Film Festival, within the longer history of aerial art forms using balloons, satellite cameras, and cinematographic apparatuses. How does drone art challenge our ways of relating to technology, movement, visuality, and space? We draw from the literature in mobilities research and media ecology, particularly, Sheller’s (2014) notion of “mobile mediality” and McLuhan’s (1997) understanding of art as “anti-environments […] that enable us to perceive the environment.” In light of the emerging practice of robotic drones creating art autonomously, we also consider the implications of media with the capacity to move and create independently by developing the concept of “motile mediality.”
