Aesthetics & Politics of Verticality

The Dronie seems not only to combine two of the punchiest buzzwords of the last years (which might be a preliminary hint to understand its virality), but also the contradicting features of the “selfie” and the “otherie”. As a first step to understand the Dronie I think it is useful to discuss it in contrast to its two ‘older siblings’. Dronies are insofar a media practice similar to Selfies as they are representations of the self with the purpose to share it with others. However, they introduce a perspective of verticality to Selfies, which it shares with the Otherie. But unlike the Otheries taken by military drones, Dronies usually do not employ a perpendicular perspective. They use a less steep angle commonly associated with aerial photography of landscapes for aesthetic purposes.

At first, the Dronie’s aesthetics of verticality has the effect that the actual depiction of  a person usually lasts just a few seconds and is not detailed enough to really recognize facial expressions. This means that the surroundings of the represented person come much more to the fore than in the composition of Selfies. Of course, the location of a Selfie is not irrelevant which becomes particularly evident in the debate on the Auschwitz Selfies. But it usually gets its significance in relation to the depicted persons, telling: “Look. I am here at this place.” It seems that the significance of a Dronie’s location is an aspect of its own right. This is emphasized on the one hand by the naming that normally includes the location where the Dronie was shot (e.g. Bernal Hill or Dronie over the roofs of Chur, Switzerland), on the other hand by the fact that Dronies are often accompanied by music, which relates their depiction of landscapes to cinematic aesthetics.

A second aspect of the Dronie’s aesthetics of verticality that differs from the Otherie is that it actually depicts its verticality. In the short videos (rarely longer than a minute) the capturing drone descends towards or ascends away from the depicted persons, creating an effect of zooming in or out. Some even increase this effect by creating a montage of the drone’s video and a Google Earth sequence suggesting the drone is approaching from space—hence its name Space Selfie:

Thus, the verticality is made transparent and at least partly situated since it has a fixed point in the video’s ‘subject’ that mostly includes the person handling the drone’s remote control (the drone itself is usually not seen maybe except for a shadow on the ground). This is a different form of verticality than the Otherie’s almost god-like disembodied “view from nowhere”—which functions in fact as a view from everywhere on everything ^₁. That’s why I suggest that the Dronie employs different politics of verticality than the Otherie ^₂. The Otherie’s perpendicular perspective flattens the surface below and thereby abstracts from the individuality of things and peoples alike. This totalizing view penetrates the life on the ground. Thus air power could be understood as police power ^₃ or, more pointed, as atmospheric terrorism ^₄.

The optics of the Dronie

Of course the Dronie is not apolitical. Since the beginning of aerial photography in mid 19th century the view from above has been a powerful means of vision and the ‘airminded’ vantage point has been considered a position of strategic advantage and strength. Following the German Cultural Anthropologist Burkhard Fuhs, the view from above thereby literally reflects the Dialectics of Enlightenment: The German word “Aufklärung” (Enlightenment) could mean both reconnaissance and education ^₅. Hence the view from above always compounds aesthetics, epistemology, and power—but not in equal shares. This actual ratio can be understood as the specific “optics” of the particular phenomenon ^_6,7. As shown above, Dronies seem not to focus to the same amount on the representation of the self as it is the case in the Selfie. It abstracts from the self but not in the same way the totalizing view of the Otherie does. But how could the specific “optics” of the Dronie be described? From a cultural studies perspective I find this difficult to answer without further empirical material on how the people taking Dronies relate themselves to their media practice and the people they share their media product with. Since my research on Dronies is still on the beginning. I want to end this essay by waging just a random guess.

The pilot and his drone

An important clue for the optics of the Dronie might be the fact that the people sharing their Dronies often give further information on the drone and the camera used which gives it an air of tinkering, similar to model flight cultures. Thus, the specific focus of Dronies might be the technologically performed and mediated relationship between drone and pilot. It depicts the pilot’s mastery of the technology and its aesthetic potential. That shooting “Dronies” is indeed considered a media practice that has to be learned journalist Nick Bilton explains in his how-to take a Dronie article (he is one of the three guys in the Bernal Hill Selfie). Of course the Selfie also is a media practice needing specific skills and knowledge but thereby other technologies of the self are important. The self of the Selfie is the self trying to sovereignly manage the authenticating view on itself. The self of the Dronie is the self trying to sovereignly manage the aerial view. In this sense, air power could also be understood as cultural capital.