Aerial Politics of Visibility: Actors, Spaces, and Drivers of Professional Drone Usage in Switzerland

Abstract

This article draws upon a large-scale survey of professional (public institution and private company) drone usage in Switzerland. The authors argue that professional drone usage includes a wide range of applications and objectives and, thus, logics of vision and visibility. Instead of being systematic and predictable, the visibilities created by professional drone usage are punctual in occurrence, highly varying in spatial logics and articulations, and, therefore, often unpredictable. This raises important questions and problems with regard to the power dynamics unfolding from the visual and visualising capabilities of the technology that reach far beyond the usual focus on surveillance in current academic engagements with the topic.

Drone views: a multimodal ethnographic perspective

“…For many drone users, the vertical angle ‘expands the visual sense people have’ by creating ‘abstractions’ and ‘striking visual patterns’ that grab viewers’ attention when they look at it. While objects of sight cannot be removed from embodied contexts or situated point of views (Haraway, 1988), drone hobbyist top-down shots have the potential to reframe the relationship between the ground and sky, constructing illusory experiences that transcend familiar visual hierarchies and establish an alliance between power and visibility that constantly provides opportunities for ‘reaction, redistribution and resistance’ (Pauschinger and Klauser, 2020: 463).…”

Domestic drone futures

“…Alongside methodological interest in how the drone sees, scholars have also explored how the drone is seen, namely how it both perceived and represented. Here, scholars have undertaken interviews and surveys with commercial, police, agricultural, and conservation drone users (Klauser and Pauschinger, 2021;Millner, 2020;Pauschinger and Klauser, 2020). Turning attention to how the drone is represented, building upon work exploring military drones (Maurer, 2017;Stahl, 2013;Van Veeren, 2013;Jackman, 2021), scholars have explored how more-than-military drones are represented in both popular culture and commercial promotional videos and patents (Graae, 2020;Jackman and Jablonowski, 2021).…”

Between monitoring and surveillance: Geographies of emerging drone technologies in contemporary conservation

“…This is certainly not what political ecologists are concerned about when writing of green securitisation, or what political geographers mean when they raise concern with drone volumetrics. Surveillance studies, a sub-discipline long concerned with the power relations established through visual technologies such as CCTV, offers to enrich and clarify such dialogues, due to its longstanding interest in surveillance as a banal activity with complex power dynamics (see for example Ball and Wood 2013; Browne, Klauser and DM 2022; Pauschinger and Klauser 2020; Schnepf 2019). Like those reviewed in the previous two sections, surveillance studies scholars work to explore the politics embedded across forms and technologies of looking, but they are above all concerned with the composition of visuality itself, via technologies, discourses, and practices.…”