Lisa Parks: research, idea of the project

Miha Vipotnik: concept of the project, visualization

Elie Mouhanna: Crocheted human body from nickel-plated copper wire (4.70 m long)

Tadej Fius: interactive programming, visual mapping

Marc Abou Farhat: montage and multiple layered video

Lone Drone (as I call this piece) explores the vertical politics and mediated materialities of drone warfare. How long does it take to make a body? How long does it take to destroy one? As it hovers in mid air, the wiry surface of this colossal corpse turns translucent as multiple media projections made from leaked military-industrial complex video flicker around and upon it. These projections envelop the silvery drone body within the luminous footprint of world history and militarization, cycling through a series of spectral suspects, framed targets, and aerial strikes. As the Lone Drone soars above, it not only senses light and heat waves from afar; it reconfigures and remediates life on earth. Circumnavigating the earth on an endless flight path, the Lone Drone alters our disposition to the sky, the ground beneath our feet, and how we feel in our skin.

Lisa Parks

Lisa Parks, Ph.D., is Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara, where she is currently the Director of the Center for Information Technology and Society. Parks has conducted research on uses of media and information technologies in different national contexts, most recently in Zambia. Her work is highly interdisciplinary and engages with fields such as geography, international relations, communication, and art. Parks is the author of Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Duke UP, 2005), Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror (forthcoming), and Mixed Signals: Media Infrastructures and Cultural Geographies (in progress). She is co-editor of: Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (U of Illinois, 2015), Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries and Cultures (Rutgers UP, 2012), and Planet TV: A Global Television.

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