James Bridle on the Canon Drone
James Bridle was artist in residence for the Visible Futures lab at the School of Visual Arts, and is interested in all things drone. He looked into the most widely seen image for drone (#1 result on Google searches) and determined that its a photoshop job:
from One Visible Future
The Canon Drone does not exist, it never has. It is computer generated rendering of a drone, a fiction. It flies over an abstracted landscape - although perhaps the same one as another canonical image, thisPredator in flight, which, while unmarked, at least appears worn enough to be believable.
Where does the image originate? As the default drone photo, it is endlessly reproduced without attribution. It appears in Google Image searches for 2009, but not for 2008 - although I’m unsure how reliable this dating is. I’ve hit a wall in finding out more.
I think: the Canon Drone is emblematic of the liminal, self-obfuscating essence of the UAV, and all of our noumenal infrastructures. The most widely reproduced image of this most illegible of our contemporary technologies is itself a dream.
![Unmanned and computer-controlled drones, with no ‘man in the loop’?
William Hennigan via LA Times
The X-47B is an experimental jet — that’s what the X stands for — and is designed to demonstrate new technology, such as automated takeoffs, landings and refueling. The drone also has a fully capable weapons bay with a payload capacity of 4,500 pounds, but the Navy said it has no plans to arm it. The Navy is now testing two of the aircraft, which were built behind razor-wire fences at Northrop Grumman Corp.’s expansive complex in Palmdale, where the company manufactured the B-2 stealth bomber. Funded under a $635.8-million contract awarded by the Navy in 2007, the X-47B Unmanned Combat Air System Carrier Demonstration program has grown in cost to an estimated $813 million. Last February, the first X-47B had its maiden flight from Edwards Air Force Base, where it continued testing until last month when it was carried from the Mojave Desert to Naval Air Station Patuxent River in southern Maryland. It is there that the next stage of the demonstration program begins. The drone is slated to first land on a carrier by 2013, relying on pinpoint GPS coordinates and advanced avionics. The carrier’s computers digitally transmit the carrier’s speed, cross-winds and other data to the drone as it approaches from miles away. The X-47B will not only land itself, but will also know what kind of weapons it is carrying, when and where it needs to refuel with an aerial tanker, and whether there’s a nearby threat, said Carl Johnson, Northrop’s X-47B program manager. “It will do its own math and decide what it should do next.”
As Dashiell Bennett observes, doing its ‘own math’ raises many questions:
It [X-47B] could also revolutionize military and international law, as leaders must decide if they can authorize machines to make “lethal combat decisions” — and if anyone back home can be held be responsible when they do. We all saw the Terminator movies, so we know that usually turns out.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lygdxtI0X01qcz5rmo1_500.jpg)
