Embodied Sensing and Cyborg Communities
The MIT Press eBooks · 2023
For a long time, I thought that drones had nothing to do with bodiesexcept that they could kill.Aside from this cruel relation to the body, for me a drone was an apparatus that flew in the sky, detached from and remotely controlled by a disembodied pilot: an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV).But then, in 2017, I went to the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum in New York City, where I visited an exhibit on drones.And there I encountered Volantis, Lady Gaga's monumental drone dress.Volantis is a remote-controlled flying dress.It is powered by six lifting rotor units mounted in hexagonal formation, which give it the ability to hover above the ground.The white drone dress includes a small platform for Lady Gaga to stand on, shielded by a curvy female silhouette made out of light carbon-fiber plastics, which serve as a body piece and safety harness.Video materials at the exhibit documented Lady Gaga's spectacular performance as she wore (or better, flew) the dress during the 2013 artRAVE opening in Brooklyn.(Lady Gaga seems to have a knack for drones: think about her Super Bowl LI Halftime show with drones in 2017.)As I stood in front of her excessive dress, the following thoughts raced through my mind: this Gaga drone is all about the body, and the pop star and the drone merge into a technosensual body assemblage.A baroquestyle dressed-up cyborg gone feminist.Gaga is queering drone tech.Her drone dress engages with the body as a way of displaying and sensing, and this floating and hovering drone no longer peers down from the sky with a verticalized scopic gaze.I am not sure what Lady Gaga saw from her futuristic helmet, but I think it is safe to say that she did not have an experience of aerial omnivision.Likewise, the pilot who stood behind the drone dress did not see downward but, rather, merged with the drone in a first-person view. Chapter 2The Gaga drone leads right into this chapter's key questions.In what ways does the body play a role in the drone sensorium?How can we understand the drone as a technology of nonscopic embodied sensing and telepresence?How do hobby dronists and artists negotiate this embodied sensorium of the drone?What communities do these technobodies of the drone envision?Can they shed light on alternative symbiotic human-machine communities?Or do they naturalize their capitalist legacies, namely, the surveillance power of tech companies and the military industry?In order to find answers to these questions, I first explain the idea of embodied sensing and its telepresence effects in a media-historical context.By focusing on the nineteenthcentury panorama and telephonoscope, I establish the drone as a member of the telepresence media family.I then proceed to discuss dronies, drone racing, and the work of contemporary drone artists.I show that the drone as an embodied sensorium can evoke effects of telepresence, and in doing so can create new imaginaries of machine-human communities. Embodied Sensing and the Effects of Telepresence: A Short Media HistoryEmbodied sensing suggests a way of experiencing and perceiving the world as a process that embraces the whole body as an organism.It refers to the idea that besides the visual dimension, there are somatic, haptic, and sensor-motoric experiences that shape the human process of perception.In addition, the mode of embodied sensing rests on the idea of a body schema.This refers to how the body's position emits prediscursive sensory impulses that then inform further cognitive processes.Technology plays an important role in relation to embodied sensing: technological media can channel, facilitate, enhance, and substitute embodied sensing as they directly interact with our bodily positions, surfaces, and movements.Embodied sensing connects with Don Ihde's postphenomenological observations of how technology mediates, constitutes, and shapes human-world relations.1 Technology is a medium that can embrace the materiality, situatedness, and relationality of experiences.In this respect, drone technology acts as a sensorium that is not detached from the outer or inner body or world, but rather is entangled and enmeshed with them.It matters not only how the drone as an object is held, touched, and steered, but also how it can merge with the viewpoint and affectivities of the pilot.The first-person view subsumes the pilot and Downloaded from http://direct.mit.