Abstract
Camera-fitted drones are now easily affordable to the public. The resulting proliferation of the aerial gaze raises a series of critical issues, ranging from the changing regimes of visibility across urban and rural space to the novel risks and dynamics of control implied by current drone developments. In addressing these issues, the role of space must be placed centrally: fitted with imaging capabilities, drones combine various geographical scales and spatial logics of vision and visualization from above and afar; they offer flexible and mobile ways of monitoring, following and orchestrating flows of people and objects on the ground; and they allow the administration of wider urban areas and border regions. It follows that the drone gaze is in practice highly specific and selective, focusing on some portions of space rather than on others, which in turn produces novel forms of spatial differentiation and hierarchization. The chapter studies critically the articulations, logics and implications of the drone gaze as it “falls” on the ground, opening up an analysis of the associations and tensions between punctual, linear and planar spatial logics of vision and visualization from above.
Hereby, the terminology of points, lines and planes is deployed as a series of spatial metaphors, whose understanding is grounded in the theoretical work of Wassily Kandinsky on the graphic composition of abstract painting (Kandinsky, Point and line to plane. Cranbrook Press, 1947). In distinguishing between the three elementary graphic forms, Kandinsky aims at a discussion of the interacting punctual, linear and planar forces and logics inherent in, and developing from, the artistic composition of the space of painting, as a specific form of spatial practice. Points, lines and planes are thereby approached not as incorporeal mathematical abstractions, but as differing forms of extension that necessarily assume a certain proportion when used in painting. Likewise, the objective of the chapter is to capture and question the interacting forces and logics through which the drone-mediated aerial gaze today relates to and shapes the spaces of the everyday. This investigation also leads to a wider discussion of the terminological grounds on which to make sense of today’s IT-mediated encounters of visibility and space.
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Acknowledgment
The chapter draws upon and further develops from a drone-specific perspective a more general discussion of the punctual, linear and planar logics of surveillance, drawing upon Kandinsky theoretical work, developed in Klauser, 2017.
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Klauser, F. (2023). Wassily Kandinsky and the Aerial Gaze: Questioning the Punctual, Linear and Planar Forces Inherent in the Politics of Visibility Conveyed by Police Drones. In: Bratchford, G., Zuev, D. (eds) Vision and Verticality. Social Visualities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39884-1_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39884-1_10
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