Dronomation

Post-Civil Drones and Artificial ‚Intelligence‘ in War Zones

December 3, 2024, on-line, 12.00–20.00 CET

– Video doc­u­men­ta­tion of the talks appears in February/March 2025 –

The one-day online con­fer­ence looks to present con­tem­po­rary cri­tiques of drone-tech­nolo­gies, their scop­ic regimes and increas­ing reliance on so-called AI sys­tems. Instead of fetishis­ing the pre­sumed auton­o­my of these weapons, this con­fer­ence looks at the logis­tic depen­den­cies, the oper­a­tional chains of humans, and the infra­struc­tur­al lay­ers that enable them; as well as their rela­tion to cin­e­mat­ic tech­nolo­gies.

The first trend we observe is a par­al­lel devel­op­ment to the expen­sive, large, long-range, remote con­trolled mil­i­tary drones. Inexpensive, small, and short-range drones were adapt­ed from their civil­ian pre­de­ces­sors, such as the DJI Mavic 3, for recon­nais­sance and grenade drop­ping. Today, a num­ber of post-civil­ian small drones are pro­duced in Ukraine from bulk parts. First-per­son-view drones even serve as a com­ple­ment to bal­lis­tic artillery, as they fly remote-con­trolled into their tar­gets.

A sec­ond Dronomation trend is the bureau­cra­ti­za­tion and accel­er­at­ing automa­tion of killing in war zones. In this sce­nario drones pro­duce visu­al and geospa­tial data for data­bas­es and machine learn­ing pro­cess­ing. Automation appears increas­ing­ly as an excuse for a per­mis­sive pol­i­cy of tar­get­ing, where respon­s­abil­i­ty is deferred to a seem­ing­ly objec­tive machine.

Numerous artis­tic works have inves­ti­gat­ed drones in the past, but the devel­op­ments of the recent mil­i­tary con­flicts, as well as the growth of drone use in the con­sumer area, demon­strate the need for an update.

An event by the class for Emergent Digital Media at the AdBK Munich.

Abstracts

Savaş Boyraz: Verbal bombs and sonic resilience

Since their inven­tion in 1906, fly­ing machines have become indis­pens­able to the mil­i­tary appa­ra­tus. They were inte­grat­ed into the mil­i­tary machin­ery as tools of obser­va­tion, intel­li­gence, trans­porta­tion and attack. This talk will focus on the use of fly­ing machines in psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare and pro­pa­gan­da, in the spe­cif­ic case of Kurdistan in the 1930’s. An archival image depict­ing the innards of a pro­pa­gan­da plane will be used to illus­trate the scale and nature of son­ic war­fare. At the same time, an audio record­ing of a song from the 1930s will pro­vide an alter­na­tive read­ing of the events of the time. We will look into a par­tic­u­lar polit­i­cal and tech­ni­cal scene through these visu­al and son­ic arte­facts. 

The work is part of an ongo­ing artis­tic research project, inves­ti­gat­ing the eco­log­i­cal impact of colo­nial mil­i­tary prac­tices and how nature re-appears in var­i­ous modes of resis­tance.

Olga Danylyuk: Combat at Gamer’s Pace. No Pause nor Reset Button

The bat­tle­field in Ukraine is a com­bi­na­tion of World War I style trench­es, the counter ter­ror­ism com­mand cen­ters and fleets of adapt­ed com­mer­cial drones vir­tu­al­ly wired togeth­er by every­day inter­net tech­nol­o­gy. The wide use of ‘wed­ding’ drones DJI Mavic on Ukrainian bat­tle­field blurs the line between the type of drones used to fight wars and to film wed­dings. What hap­pens when the under­ground world of DIY drones build­ing, and drone rac­ing is co-opt­ed by the mil­i­tary? The reg­u­lar pres­ence of small, recon­nais­sance drones over con­flict zone sow con­fu­sion, fear, and ter­ror among sol­diers.

The small drones, the eyes in a sky, induce the feel­ing of expo­sure and lethal voyeurism wher­ev­er they are on the ground. Small drones are not clas­si­fied as mil­i­tary hard­ware, although with mil­lions of those already in cir­cu­la­tion and the tech­nol­o­gy to build them freely avail­able, the army of drones are on the bat­tle­field for good. There are uncon­firmed reports of Russia and Ukraine exper­i­ment­ing with drones that can iden­ti­fy and attack tar­gets with­out human input, using arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. Needless to say, the ful­ly autonomous killer drones are chang­ing the think­ing about rules of war and demand new modes of diplo­ma­cy to pre­vent esca­la­to­ry threat.

Ayham Ghraowi: Walk Cycles

The moments lead­ing up to a drone airstrike can be dis­turbing­ly banal. Before a brief flash fills the inter­face with fly­ing debris and smoke, unarmed indi­vid­u­als are seen casu­al­ly walk­ing side-by-side down a road in con­ver­sa­tion with one anoth­er. Across the way, anoth­er civil­ian is met with a sim­i­lar fate as they step into their fam­i­ly home. 

AI-assist­ed weapon systems—such as Lavender, Gospel, and Where’s Daddy, used by the Israel Defence Forces in their war on Gaza—generate auto­mat­ic tar­get rec­om­men­da­tions based on a series of vari­ables that include loose con­nec­tions to mil­i­tant activ­i­ty. The inac­cu­ra­cy of this infor­ma­tion gleaned by recon­nais­sance drones cal­i­brat­ed on the human fig­ure is deter­mined by pat­terns from loca­tion mon­i­tor­ing and what can be “seen”: a per­son walk­ing. The equiv­o­cal nature of walk­ing may deter­mine the para­me­ters with which an algo­rithm ulti­mate­ly decides that a civil­ian is to be killed. Can the seem­ing­ly innocu­ous act of a walk define a sub­ject as a civil­ian and not a tar­get? 

This talk will present “Walk Cycles”—a film that fol­lows char­ac­ters who end­less­ly cycle through var­i­ous man­ners of walk­ing in order to try and per­suade the con­fir­ma­tion bias of drone oper­a­tions.  

Sophia Goodfriend: Cult of Lethality

Militaries often invest in algo­rith­mic war­fare in the name of human­i­tar­i­an­ism, to min­i­mize civil­ian casu­al­ties and save sol­diers’ lives. Yet Israel’s war in Gaza exem­pli­fies a shift to necro­tac­tics, years in the mak­ing. AI-pow­ered tar­get­ing sys­tems have been inte­gral to this devel­op­ment, allow­ing mil­i­tary heads—in Israel and beyond—to parse oper­a­tional suc­cess in terms of Silicon Valley’s met­rics.

Rather than days with­out vio­lence, mil­i­tary gains are cal­i­brat­ed by the quan­ti­ty of tar­gets gen­er­at­ed, the per­cent­age of assas­si­na­tions real­ized, and the num­ber of arrests car­ried out. Rooted in tes­ti­monies pro­vid­ed from intel­li­gence vet­er­ans and an analy­sis of Israeli and American mil­i­tary strat­e­gy over the last decade, this talk out­lines how tech­nolo­gies and ide­olo­gies import­ed from Silicon Valley tan­gle with dis­tinct cul­tur­al shifts in mil­i­tary insti­tu­tions to ratio­nal­ize an embrace of lethal­i­ty. 

Francis Hunger: Consumer off-the-shelf drones

The video essay Consumer-off-the-shelf Drones inves­ti­gates the use of civil­ian drones as a means of war and pro­pa­gan­da in the cur­rent con­flict in Ukraine. What is new is that it is no longer only very expen­sive mil­i­tary equip­ment that is being used, but cheap con­sumer drones that were orig­i­nal­ly devel­oped for YouTubers, influ­encers and doc­u­men­tary film­mak­ers.

Using mate­r­i­al from YouTube, Telegram and Twitter, the video essay exam­ines how influ­encer aes­thet­ics and oper­a­tional images, as described by Harun Farocki, over­lap. The sev­er­al chap­ters  of the 20 min video essay dis­cuss: music, influ­encers, the „army of drones“, the panoram­ic view, the top-down view, the first per­son view, oper­a­tional images and con­tents for clicks.

The 20 min video screen­ing is fol­lowed by an Q & A.

Svitlana Matviyenko: Synthetic Battlefield in the Time of Dynamic Maps

Maps of the war in Ukraine – and we know a good num­ber of such tools from the ISW inter­ac­tive map to liveuamap.com, deepstatemap.live and more – are typ­i­cal­ly not con­sid­ered syn­thet­ic images in the same sense as com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed sim­u­la­tions or visu­al­iza­tions as they are based on real-world geo­graph­ic data, satel­lite imagery, intel­li­gence reports, and oth­er sources of infor­ma­tion.

However, as they promise to pro­vide an accu­rate rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the war’s dynam­ics by mutu­al aug­men­ta­tion to increase the over­all val­ue or qual­i­ty of an inter­ac­tive map, these maps con­sti­tute a par­tic­u­lar type of oper­a­tional syn­thet­ic images. The use of AI tech­nol­o­gy also impacts the capa­bil­i­ties of inter­ac­tive maps of war by automat­ing data analy­sis and pro­vid­ing per­son­al­ized user expe­ri­ences.

Thus, these maps serve as cog­ni­tive tools for relat­ing to and under­stand­ing the evolv­ing sit­u­a­tion on the ground, includ­ing ter­ri­to­r­i­al con­trol, troop move­ments, and key strate­gic loca­tions. Despite the promise, the dynam­ic maps posit sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenges in terms of data accu­ra­cy and reli­a­bil­i­ty, secu­ri­ty con­cerns, mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tion and bias, lack of con­text, tech­ni­cal lim­i­ta­tions, and eth­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tions. This pre­sen­ta­tion will dis­cuss the syn­thet­ic nature of dynam­ic maps in terms of their truth-val­ue, evi­den­tial capac­i­ty, and sur­plus val­ue of aug­ment­ed data.

Dani Ploeger: A low-cost flight beyond the dialectic of post-digital warfare

Western media reports on the Gulf War (1990–91), aka The First Space War, were char­ac­ter­ized by a focus on high-tech dig­i­tal sys­tems such as satel­lite nav­i­ga­tion, so-called ‘smart bombs’ and night vision instru­ments. While the actu­al mil­i­tary rel­e­vance of some of the fea­tured tech­nolo­gies remains ques­tion­able, the conflict’s media rep­re­sen­ta­tion marked the begin­ning of wide­spread per­cep­tions of con­tem­po­rary war waged by “the West” as a pre­cise, high-tech endeav­our, cleansed from the phys­i­cal hor­rors of ear­li­er forms of war­fare.

This image changed in the 2010s with the online emer­gence of video doc­u­men­ta­tion of ground war­fare pro­duced by mil­i­tary per­son­nel of vir­tu­al­ly any affil­i­a­tion. The dai­ly prac­tice of war on the bat­tle­fields of Afghanistan, Syria and Ukraine now actu­al­ly appeared to be in many ways very sim­i­lar to mid-20^th cen­tu­ry con­flicts. This implo­sion of the high-tech imag­i­na­tion of war­fare due to the omnipres­ence of advanced con­sumer elec­tron­ics on the bat­tle­field may be called the dialec­tic of post-dig­i­tal war­fare.

The recent emer­gence of con­sumer grade drones as weapons of war­fare on a large scale has changed this par­a­digm though. Aerial per­spec­tives, nar­ra­tives of pre­ci­sion and gameifi­ca­tion have now inter­twined with trench war­fare and medi­a­tized bod­i­ly destruc­tion. Have we entered the era of Space War 2.0?

Elke Schwarz: Crimes of Dispassion – Autonomous Weapons and the Moral Challenge of Systematic Killing

Systematic killing has long been asso­ci­at­ed with some of the dark­est episodes in human his­to­ry, includ­ing admin­is­tra­tive colo­nial vio­lence, eth­nic cleans­ing, and geno­cide. Increasingly, how­ev­er, it is framed as a desir­able out­come in war, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the con­text of mil­i­tary AI and lethal auton­o­my. Autonomous weapons sys­tems, defend­ers argue, will not only sur­pass humans mil­i­tar­i­ly, but moral­ly, enabling a more pre­cise and dis­pas­sion­ate mode of vio­lence, free of the emo­tion and uncer­tain­ty that too often weak­ens com­pli­ance with the rules and stan­dards of war.

We con­test this fram­ing. Drawing on the his­to­ry of sys­tem­at­ic killing, we argue that lethal autonomous weapons sys­tems repro­duce, and in some cas­es, inten­si­fy the moral chal­lenges of the past. Autonomous vio­lence incen­tivis­es a moral deval­u­a­tion of those tar­get­ed and erodes the moral agency of those who kill. Both out­comes imper­il essen­tial restraints on the use of mil­i­tary force.

Lucy Suchman: The criminal imprecision of algorithmic warfare

Investments by the U.S. Department of Defense and the Israeli Defense (Offense) Force’s cur­rent oper­a­tions in Gaza exem­pli­fy the pro­mo­tion of algo­rith­mic sys­tems as means of accel­er­at­ing the pro­ce­dures through which per­sons are des­ig­nat­ed as tar­gets for the use of lethal force. This talk will ques­tion the frames of war that jus­ti­fy algo­rith­mi­cal­ly enabled killing, from tar­get­ed assas­si­na­tion to aer­i­al bomb­ing in the name of self defense.

I will argue that while data-dri­ven warfight­ing is pro­mot­ed on a promise of greater pre­ci­sion, actu­al prac­tice reveals the crim­i­nal impre­ci­sion of tar­get­ing based on pre­sumed guilt and on cat­e­gor­i­cal pro­fil­ing. Rather than accel­er­a­tion law­ful warfight­ing requires de-esca­la­tion, to open spaces for account­abil­i­ty and to advance the labours of cre­ative and sus­tained diplo­ma­cy.

Concept: Hito Steyerl & Francis Hunger

Organisation: Francis Hunger

Design: Devious Design Division