Consumer Drones and Artificial ‚Intelligence‘ in War Zones
December 3, 2024, AdBK Munich and online, 9.30–17.00
The one-day hybrid 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.
We currently observe a trend towards the increasing mass use consumer-off-the-shelf drones in war theatres. This trend includes a shift from expensive, large, long-distance, remote controlled, military drones towards inexpessive, small, and closely-remote civilian drones which were adapted for reconnaissance and grenade drops. First-person-view-drones today even serve as replacement for ballistic artillery.
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.
Program
Intro, Welcome, Moderation: Francis Hunger, Hito Steyerl
Consumer off the shelf drones
Dani Ploeger (DE)
Olga Danylyuk (UA)
Francis Hunger (DE): Consumer off the shelf drones
Response
Break
Algorithmic Warfare and Drones
Svitlana Matviyenko (CAN): Ukraine and Algorithmic Drone Warfare
Lucy Suchman (UK): Algorithmic warfare and the reinvention of accuracy
Elke Schwarz (UK): Crimes of Dispassion – Autonomous Weapons and the Moral Challenge of Systematic Killing
Response