Droned Attractions

Beryl Pong

In the early autumn of 2024, as part of China’s 75th National Day celebrations, over 10,000 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), known commonly as drones, took to the sky in Shenzhen. The show, called “City of Sky… Maybe Shenzhen,” broke two world records: first, for the “largest number of drones flying simultaneously under the control of a single computer,” and second, for “the most drones forming an aerial image.” Moving together and drifting apart in a slow dance, they created complex, three-dimensional tableaux which included silhouettes of figures performing Wing Chun martial arts, Shenzhen’s metropolitan skyline re-imagined as a floating island, and, in a self-reflexive mode, the outline of what appears to be a large military drone displaying a jumbotron screen, accompanied by smaller quadcopters. The record came just three weeks after 8,100 drones flew over Shenzhen in an earlier event that had then taken the Guinness World record for the largest number of drones flying simultaneously. As one might expect from the repeated smashing of world records, Shenzhen is the global drone capital, with more than 600,000 multirotor operations in 2023 alone. Thanks to the dominance of DJI, China is the largest manufacturer of consumer drones in the world.

This kind of drone art is very different from the way “drone art” is often studied and theorized. In Drone Art: The Everywhere War as Medium (2020), Thomas Stubblefield analyzed a range of visual and multimedia artworks critiquing the use of military drones in the Global War on Terror. Based on this corpus, “drone art,” as he comes to define it, appears as essentially apolitical in that it “avoid[s] explicit condemnation of its subject” and “refuse[s] the expectations of protest art more broadly,” often deploying the motifs and tropes associated with drone use themselves, like aerial views or the network aesthetics which link militarism with digital infrastructure such as GPS (2020: 1). The reason for this lack of critique, Stubblefield argues, has to do with this art’s assumption of the reality of accelerationism: a theory grounded in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari that recognizes that “there is no longer any outside to capitalism” and that the opportunity to intervene begins with “amplifying [capitalism’s] own powers for deformation and self-destruction” (Stubblefield 2020, 6). Accelerationism’s aim is to undo capitalism’s immanent logic by following that logic to its conclusion, and by making that journey visible and legible. For Stubblefield, drone art has an accelerationist approach to drone power: it internalizes and reproduces the latter’s structures to find alternative iterations of its functioning and its politics.

If one kind of “drone art” attempts to turn the tools of power back onto itself, how ought we to think of this other kind of drone art, the mass spectacle light show? If anything, the latter uses civilian drones to corroborate state power and capitalist power. Drone light shows have been around for well over a decade: the first performance was in 2012 in Linz, Austria, where 49 LED-equipped quadcopters lit the skies in a display designed by Ars Electronica Futurelab. Since then, drone quadcopters have performed alongside Lady Gaga in the Superbowl Half-time Show (2017); become staples at the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics Games, including in PyeongChang (Winter 2018), Tokyo (Summer 2020), and Beijing (2022); and become mainstays of New Year’s Eve celebrations in lieu of traditional fireworks across the globe.

Against this backdrop is a larger move towards domestic drone integration and acceptance more generally. The 2020 pandemic was a boon in this respect; it was then that the UK police force started to use drones for surveillance and the enforcement of lockdown rules. Proponents at the time saw drones as offering a plethora of potential solutions to pandemic problems – for instance, by supporting contactless COVID test distribution (Kunovjanek and Wankmuller, 2021), delivering medical supplies, and even aiding the rapid construction of hospitals – although we now know that many of the proposals eventually failed to actually materialize (Jackman, Richardson and Veber, 2024). The pandemic did, however, contribute towards a growth in the global drone light show market which continues today. As one of the event producers of the 2020 Hogmanay in Edinburgh said: “people emerging from Covid are going to be sick of wearing masks… We want to offer them the pleasure of a full-on sensory experience” (Campbell-Johnson, 2021). At a time when social distancing measures prevented the event’s traditional ceilidhs and torchlit processions from taking place, Hogmanay organizers commissioned a light display from Celestial, which helped to cement the widespread popularity of drone light displays for mass celebrations.

Intended to offer unique sensory experiences, drone light shows recall Tom Gunning’s idea of “attractions” in relation to late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century cinema. Drawing from Sergei Eisenstein’s use of the term, where attractions subject the spectator “to sensual or psychological impact,” Gunning recuperates the vaudeville culture of early cinema, arguing that cinema began as a medium for and of the senses and the body, rather than a medium for narrative: as a form for enabling “exhibitionist confrontation rather than diegetic absorption” (2006: 384). Cinema eventually became widely accepted as an art form that experimented with linear narrative, but its early life was about “newness” and the ability to solicit affects of immediacy and impact. This quality of attraction held promise for the avant-garde, who saw film as an emergent form of mass culture because of its “freedom from the creation of a diegesis, its accent on direct stimulation” (2006: 385).

As Gunning notes, early cinematic experiences are closer to the experience of being at a fairground than to the traditions of theatre (2006: 383). And drone light shows, in many ways, seem to be the fairgrounds of the twenty-first century. China’s National Day drone display, for instance drew tens of thousands of spectators to the waterfront of Shenzhen Bay Park for each of the seven nights it ran, and social media, particularly TikTok, have continued to share and amplify the spectacle for audiences around the globe. As is the case with fairgrounds, economic and corporate interests are never far away with drone light shows: the opening ceremonies of the Tokyo Olympics celebrated the achievements of Intel as much as it did the Games’ theme of togetherness in diversity, and Shenzhen’s show explicitly touted the city’s status as the country’s technology and innovation powerhouse.

Grounding aerial spectacles

Drones are a big business – for both defense and civilian industries – and as shape-shifting billboards, their light shows are pre-eminent forms of advertisement. Modern aerial spectacles, of course, have long been concerned with the commercial. For instance, when the Londoners of Virginia Woolf’s “skywriting scene” in Mrs Dalloway (1927) look to the sky, scrutinizing the letters written by expelled smoke from an aeroplane (to make out “A C E L,” “KEY,” “GLAXO,” and then “KREEMO”), Woolf is showing not only how both aeroplanes and skywriting were perceived as new and exotic developments – as attractions – in the 1920s, but that such attractions are typically enabled and motivated by capitalist interests. Glaxo manufactured dried-milk powder and it has since become part of the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline; Kreemo was the name of a popular brand of toffee. Historically, the first use of skywriting was in Derby in 1922, when the Daily Mail hired an aeroplane to write its brand name in the sky.

This scene in Woolf has been read variously as a commentary on modern advertising culture and consumerism and as a model of collaborative, modernist close reading, as it emphasizes how textual meaning is always only the sum of its relationship to a community of readers, and nothing more (Young, 2000). At the same time, it has been read as a reminder of Britain’s military and technological might in the early twentieth century – as the flexing of its emerging air power; crucially, it also offers an instance of air anxiety, with a civilian community looking up at the aeroplane that seems to have unprecedented power over them (Saint-Amour, 2015: 113-116). In the interwar period this resonated with the rise of fascism, as Europe lurched slowly but surely towards another World War.

These themes, with all their tensions and contradictions, still resonate today, as the realities and meanings of drones have become multiple and heterogeneous. There are now many types of drones – martial and commercial, fixed-wing and multi-rotor, long-range and short-range – and some fly at altitudes of over 5,000 feet, while others fly barely above our heads. More so than before, they confound boundaries between military and civilian realms. UAVs are both the whirring machines in the sky that survey and target infrastructure in conflict and the machines that support search and rescue operations and humanitarian crisis response; the DJI drone is both one of China’s most successful exports, the prosumer standard for aerial photography, as well as the cheap and accessible weapon of choice in the ongoing Ukraine-Russia war, improvised for various purposes from surveillance to “kamikaze-style” attacks (Jacobsen, 2023).

In the early years of the twenty-first century, drones were largely the purview of the military elite, the weapons that allowed American counter-terrorist operations to kill suspects while the operator remained physically invulnerable to attack or retaliation. Over time, the progressive use of small drones by non-state actors – and now, the recent military drone attacks against US bases in Iraq, Syria, and Jordan (which the US attributes to Iran-backed militant groups) (Doucet, 2024) – show that the valorized logic of technologically-enabled invulnerability is, for some, coming home to roost.

Drones, Benjamin Noys points out, have long inhabited a field of “theological metaphysics, embodying dreams of transcendence and destruction that have haunted the Western imagination” (2015: 2). Not unlike scholarship on military drone vision from scholars such as Gregoire Chamayou, who observes that drone operators describe their visual power as something akin to “the eye of God” (Chamayou, 2015: 37), Noys considers drones as part of a lineage of “sight machines,” to quote Paul Virilio, that are created for the purpose of situational awareness and developed with the goal of simulating an “all-seeing Divinity” – namely, in the case of the Global War on Terror, to “see” and anticipate threat and radicalization before they manifest and arise (Noys, 2015: 2). And yet, Noys warns, “the risk of engaging with this metaphysical resonance seriously is that we feed the technological fetishism that can impinge on the thinking of drones—giving a technological object or assemblage a philosophical dignity that it does not deserve.” The “metaphysics” of military drones have less to do with it being an actual eye of God, and more to do with the often unacknowledged human labour that goes into making any remote operation possible, such as the “kill chain” of drone operators, sensors, image analysts, and other military personnel who, along with machine learning and AI, facilitate a drone strike.

The flip side of celestial transcendence and destruction is bathos. Drones crash, glitch, and fail very frequently, and are, in the end, fallible things even if they are often thought of as inviolable devices. While drones and the views accorded by drones, in particular, can and have been considered in relation to the Kantian and Burkean sublime (Pugliese, 2019; Ackerman, 2021), they can also engender something of what Sianne Ngai called “stuplimity”: a “syncretism of boredom and astonishment” (Ngai 2000). Eugenie Shinkle has brought the concept of “stuplimity” to bear on the experience of military drone pilots who often go through long periods of boredom alongside bursts of affective overload (Shinkle, 2015: 203). When it comes to the civilian sphere, drone light shows are often captivating, but many people have also expressed that these spectacles can sometimes feel unstimulating and subdued. Several of my students who went to a recent drone light show told me how disappointed they were in what they actually saw: that the tableaux did not take shape in a clear way or in the way that they sense the producers had intended. Drone light shows are also often canceled due to adverse weather. And while environmentalists have said that they prefer drone light shows to fireworks because the former cause less pollution and are less likely to distress animals, for others, the lack of explosive sounds (now typically replaced by music soundtracks), and the absence of flashing lights and smoke, make the shows feel mechanical and sanitized, even if they are more accessible, especially for the disabled and those sensitive to sensory stimulation (Blakemore, 2024).

In fact, much of the experience of watching drone light shows involves the act of waiting for a recognizable image to appear. But rather than manifesting as suspense, the effect can be closer to that of uneventfulness, even exasperation. “Unlike the instantaneous or sudden defeat of comprehension instigated by [the sublime],” Ngai writes, “the stuplime belongs to a different temporal and emotional register, involving not an abrupt climax of excitation in terror, but rather an extended duration of consecutive fatigues” (Ngai, 2000: n. p.). A literary scholar, Ngai identifies a more redemptive aesthetics of the stuplime in modernist works of literature which experiment with different forms of repetition; but I think her broader understanding of “stuplime productions” as involving “an anti-auratic, anti-euphoric tedium” has resonance for everyday objects of contemporary culture as well, like drone light shows, which often sell themselves on the way they reach for the auratic and euphoric but can end up conveying failed affect instead (Ngai, 2000: n. p.).

This might recall that other meaning of the word drone, which seems far from its relationship to attraction: passivity or “droning.” Suggesting dullness and monotony, “to drone” is to go on for longer than seems appropriate or desirable. This definition intersects with ideas of automation or submission. In an essay titled “The Droning of Experience” (2015), Marc Andrejevic extends these ideas further. Although he begins with thinking about drones as automated weaponry, Andrejevic suggests viewing the drone “as a contemporary avatar for the logics of distributed networking at a distance, automated sense-making and automated response associated with interactive platforms more generally” (2015: 202). Focusing on the fantasy of “frictionless automation” projected onto drones, he finds a similar logic in many consumer applications using targeted algorithms, noting that all of these technologies turn humans into something like distributed, networked sensors themselves. Control is enacted “via the modulation of affect,” he writes, and this ultimately results in alienation (2015: 203).

Swarm politics

Returning to the record-busting drone light show in Shenzhen, we see the sublime and the stuplime come together through the sheer number of drones in a “droning” of nationalist sentiment. For spectators further afield, however, a racialized logic to droning also begins to emerge, and this is through the figure of not just the drone, but of the drone swarm. In many arenas, the idea of the swarm has negative connotations linked to threat in numbers; in anti-migration rhetoric, notably, metaphors including “swarm,” “flood”, and “invasion” are used to imply a sense of overwhelm by undifferentiated foreign “others” (Morrison, 2019). What was awe-inspiring for many in China was also fearsome for others, as the thousands of drones signified the takeover of the skies in another vein: not only for passive entertainment or even propaganda, but for international defense and war-making.

Almost as soon as videos of the show were posted on social media, Western media made a direct link to the event as a premonition of threat. “Chinese drone show sparks global admiration, military concerns,” one news headline reads (Taylor, 2024). The Daily Mail’s headline opines, “‘Impressive’ footage showing skies of China lit up with 10,000 drones sends social media into frenzy but some people are concerned,” highlighting predictably the most fearful comments from X (formerly Twitter) users: “Imagine that coming down on your city full of explosives. My gut tells this is inevitable”; “This is terrifying when you consider the future of drone warfare” (Campbell, 2024).

Drone light shows are not “true” swarms, in the sense that they are pre-programmed and they do not yet collaborate with each other without a central controller (Hambling, 2022). Also, when it comes to drone warfare, the most common forms of “fighting back” against drones currently involve more straightforward activities like hacking and jamming, rather than autonomous “drone-on-drone” combat (Sherman, 2023). We are starting to see more of the latter, though, and the integration of drones with AI is moving apace; many political scientists point out that this is not only the future but the present of warfare, as some countries have already been developing AI-guided combat drone swarms for the past few years (Kallenborn, 2024). The UK’s Ministry of Defense has been engaging in development work around drone swarms since at least 2019 (Drone Wars UK, 2024). More recently, in 2023, the United States’ Department of Defense declared the beginning of the Replicator programme, which focuses on innovating small, low-cost drones that are “attributable” (meaning they can weather attrition without compromising a mission) and producing them en masse with the explicit goal of deterring China: of “overwhelm[ing] enemies with drones” (Halpern, 2023; Dickerson, 2024). The point is not that the future of drone warfare does not involve swarms, but that the same countries who have “concerns” about Chinese consumer drone swarms are also those openly developing their own military drone swarms.

As with aerial spectacles, there are longer cultural and political histories at play. China itself has a long history of using mass spectacles for propaganda and nation-building, although that is hardly unique; many other countries do too (Schneider, 2019). But these fearful sentiments of Chinese drone swarms echo a longstanding racializing narrative of Chinese people as “swarm-like” and automaton-like: as drone-like. Lisa Lowe, in her book on Asian-American cultural politics, has critiqued stereotypes about Asians in the Western imagination, pointing out how Asians have embodied, sometimes all at once, “the invading multitude, the lascivious seductress, the servile yet treacherous domestic, the automaton whose inhuman efficiency will supersede American ingenuity” (1996: 18). In Model Machines: A History of the Asian as Automaton (2022), Long T. Bui traces a longer history of racialized thinking about Asian automatism from as early as the ancient world to the modern history of colonialism (“the natives of Asia are intelligent and inventive, but they are always wanting in spirit,” Aristotle wrote, “and therefore they are always in a state of subjection and slavery” (qtd. in Bui, 2022: 13)).

As Bui shows, for many centuries, Asians were often interpreted by Westerners as “almost machine and scarcely human,” particularly when it comes to their inexpensive yet often indispensable labor (2022: 25). This history undergirds contemporary invocations of the massified, nonagentic Asian “horde” in popular cultural forms like video games (Rivera, 2024). It also underpins, more broadly, fears of “Yellow Techno-Peril” in the so-called AI arms race, which draws upon older European and American fears of being overrun, overwhelmed, or controlled by the “mass” power of China to justify accelerated AI development and innovation (McInerney, 2024). As the editors of Techno-Orientalism (2015) write, “The discourse on China’s ‘rise’ in the US context, consistent with techno-Orientalist contradictions, has focused on constructing its people as a vast, subaltern-like labor force” (4). The threat that Chinese technological innovation presents to the West has long been tied to dehumanizing and massifying rhetoric.

At the same time, the editors write, China’s enormous purchasing power could also be one of the greatest benefits to America: it is a “giant consumer market whose appetite for Western cultural products, if nurtured, could secure US global cultural and economic dominance” (4). For this reason, the “mass” politics of Chinese drones is especially vexed, as China is not only the leading consumer but also the most significant producer of a technology that is being exported and sold to the West. “Replicator,” the US Deputy Secretary of Defense declared, “is meant to help us overcome the P.R.C.’s [People’s Republic of China’s] biggest advantage, which is mass. More ships. More missiles. More people” (Halpern, 2023). The fear of the threat of “more”, it seems, was triggered by Shenzhen’s celebratory drone light show, and no doubt the escalation of drone use in conflict zones like Ukraine-Russia and Israel-Gaza contributed to the jitteriness surrounding drone swarms. (Close to the time of my writing this, President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that Ukraine was now capable of manufacturing up to four million drones a year (Saballa, 2024)).

Given that the typical reader of this essay today is more likely to come into contact with drone swarms through celebratory light displays than through direct experiences of swarm warfare, are drone light shows emblematic of contemporary automatism, in the vein of what Andrejevic diagnoses as humans’ co-option into networked data infrastructures? Or, to go back to the avant-garde’s view of the promise of popular culture, could drone light displays somehow hold revolutionary potential through their focus on stimulation and exhibitionism? Shenzhen’s latest drone show indicates that these interpretations don’t tell the full story, but it does demonstrate that this kind of drone art does not make its own politics visible nor hold them to account, as Stubblefield had argued of “accelerationist” drone art. It is our job to develop the aesthetic literacy to make connections beyond the immediate constellations assembled by these quadcopters, particularly about the way they flit between the martial and the domestic, the violent and the entertaining, and between racializing and nationalizing narratives – at least until drone light shows mature beyond their status as an “attraction”. At the moment, however, that looks like a flight of fancy.

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