Data visualisations often appear neutral, but how they are created and engaged with has consequences on areas including, and not limited to, public perceptions, behaviour, and policy preferences. They are political by virtue of being productive of particular forms of knowledge and power. In this talk, I outline how my team and I at the Centre for Drones and Culture attempted to draw critical attention to the underlying work that visualisations of emerging technology do – to the attitudes they convey and the impressions they cultivate – through Dronotope, a creative “untimeline” of recent cross-sectoral drone developments. While dominant genres of existing drone timelines narrate either a history of drone warfare or a history of drone “integration” into civil society, our speculative design is messy and dynamic, and encourages pluralistic ways of thinking about the current drone age. Pulled between conflicting desires and readings of Dronotope as drone art and as a research tool, the untimeline’s conception and reception reflect some of the tensions underlying imaginaries of technological future-making.

About the Speaker:

Dr Beryl Pong is an academic and researcher with interdisciplinary interests in modern and contemporary war; AI ethics; aesthetics; philosophies of space and time; and literary, sound, and visual cultures. She is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow hosted by the Centre for the Future of Intelligence and the Institute for Technology and Humanity at the University of Cambridge, where she leads the Centre for Drones and Culture.

This event is part of the Department of Digital Humanities Research Seminar Series and is run in co-operation with the Digital Investigations Lab.