Today we’re featuring an interview with Olivia Rosane and Adam Rothstein, contributing editors for The State and the minds behind Murmuration, June’s month-long festival of drone culture. Given this blog’s close ties to that project, it seems appropriate to dig a little deeper into the thinking and aims behind it. Olivia and Adam were kind enough to sit down and answer some questions to that end.

Where did the idea for Murmuration come from?

Olivia Rosane: The idea for Murmuration grew out of a series of blog posts Adam and I wrote for the State back in January. A blogger on another site had negatively reviewed Teju Cole’s “Seven Short Stories About Drones,” by basically arguing that fiction was not a good tool for dealing with the reality of drones. Adam and I took issue with this for different reasons. Adam pointed out that since our ideas about drones are already so influenced by fiction and formed in a fictional way, we needed more fiction to understand not just the technology itself, but our idea of it. I argued more from the perspective that fiction can free us to empathize with people we wouldn’t normally give ourselves permission to empathize with, and so that fiction could be a powerful tool for exploring the effects of drones on those who operate them and live under them. After we had written posts basically calling for more art and fiction about drones, we thought we should do more than just nebulously argue for its existence, we should do something to generate more of it. That’s how we came up with the idea of an online festival. We wanted to inspire others to create around the idea of drones and then post all the work on the same site during the same time frame so that the stories and art pieces could speak to each other and together give readers a sense of what people are thinking about drones.

Adam Rothstein: To what Olivia aptly said I would just add that there is something of Bakhtin’s “carnivalesque” to the festival, as we noted in our introduction. This is not a military parade, but more of a counter-cultural festival. Drones are not typically ours to talk about, unless we build them ourselves. The “festival” was definitely conceived in this sense, as a location for satirical worship, for reversals of roles and ludic experimentation.

Also, we are trying to develop a digital archive of all the posts, as well as a printed document of the festival. Anyone interested in helping make these archives a reality (and receiving copies) should back our Kickstarter campaign, which will enable these productions, as well as pay all of our contributors for the month.

What do you think are the most significant aspects of the conversation around drone culture?

Adam Rothstein: Overall, the significant thing to me about drone culture is that it continues to evolve. It’s largely (but not entirely) culture within digital mediums, and so it is subject to digital sharing, remixing, mimetics, and so on. I would not say that it is therefore “virtual” in a non-real sense, but it is stimulated by technology and politics that are very much occurring in reality, and therefore, it allows itself the freedom to twist reality and respond to it in its mediums.

This is something similar to what might have been termed “street art” in the past–reacting to the reality of a new urban architecture by painting on the wall, in a creative act that is less permanent and from a certain point of view, destructive. But there is more to graffiti than writing on walls, of course. Graffiti has been conceived as one of the “four elements of hip-hop”, the others being DJing, MCing, and break dancing. All of these are art forms that react to the urban environment. This is how you dance on concrete, this is how you paint without canvas, this is how you make music and write when your only instrument is a radio or turntable and the only bookstore that can’t kick you out is a public park. I’m not saying this is what hip-hop is (I wouldn’t be in the position to provide any such definition), but in a certain way this is what it perceives itself to be, when it articulates itself this way. So, we can’t afford any technology above a cell phone and a laptop, we have no more political agency than a free social media account, our sense of security exists on the wrong side of stop-and-frisk and a NSA database, our image of the earth is a potential targeting grid, and our sense of our own bodies is somewhere between the smooth, seamless paint of a radome and burned flesh at the site of a drone strike. Do we perceive the creativity arising from this situation as “drone culture”? I’m still not sure. But both of us found it fairly easy to apply this label, and so we did–to see what happens as a result of that.

Olivia Rosane: What first caught my attention when beginning to think about “drone culture” is just how fascinated people seem to be by drones. Whether that’s enthusiastic hobbyists teaching us to make DIY drones or protestors in Yemen burning drones in effigy, everyone seems to agree that the drones themselves are worth paying attention to. There are protests that target the use of drones specifically, not just wars that they are used for. So one thing that’s important about the conversation is simply that there is one, and it’s a pretty loud one. And I think it’s worth getting to the bottom of that fascination. Should we be so focused on drones? Are they a game-changer? Or merely a distraction?

On the one hand, I think it’s very important, very significant, that you can now have one person in one place control a machine that can kill another person in another place. And the person with his or her finger on the trigger is entirely safe from physical harm. While a fighter pilot dropping bombs might have less visual contact with his or her targets, he or she still risks getting shot down. So the scary thing about drones is that they make foreign entanglements more appealing to wealthy democracies, because politicians can do what they want to abroad without dealing with the voter-displeasing videos of flag-draped coffins.

On the other hand, one thing that’s significant but incorrect about drone culture is that we talk about them as if they’re already robots. They’re not, yet. They’re not autonomous, as Nathan Jurgenson pointed out in an essay for Murmuration. They are remote-controlled machines, but they’re still controlled. And sometimes I think we are too eager to see them as the realization of so much of the science fiction we’ve seen and read in the past 50 years, when in fact they are something different. We need to remember when talking about drones that the controller is just as important as what he or she controls. The technology is much more about the relationship between user and machine than about the machine alone.

What do you see as the primary features of drone culture itself, as it currently exists?

Olivia Rosane: I think there are probably multiple drone cultures, as opposed to a single drone culture. There’s the military-industrial-imperialist culture that created the drone, which seems to be all about maintaining power with as little consequence to yourself as possible. Drones are a way of making sure that all your wars will be fought “over there.” Then there’s a culture of fascination, perhaps fetishization? that surrounds drones themselves as a new technology. The bright colors of Drones of New York. The enthusiasm of DIY Drones  or Drones For Peace. Videos like the one of mini-drones playing the James Bond theme song. Finally there’s a culture of resistance. Beyond protests, there are also artworks like Adam Harvey’s Stealth Wear line of anti-drone fashion, or AJ Kohn and Hiba Ali’s “Shura City,” which we published for the festival, which is a proposal for a city designed to defend inhabitants from drones. Now perhaps these are all just different facets of a larger drone culture, drones being the one thing that link otherwise disparate groups, which is something they do physically. So why not conceptually?

Adam Rothstein: There is a sense in which all of this is “dancing about architecture”, or “doing art about technology”. But there has always been art about technology, and drone culture seems to be drawn to a particular node of technology, even if it is more fiction than reality. It is a bit of fetishization, as Olivia said. But we fetishize interesting things: ruins, container ships, guns, telephones, cars, denim, rockets. No one decided, “hey, let’s freak out about cars, just because”. Cars were significant. We were already doing car culture to ourselves. We write songs about cars, even as we kill ourselves in them. We’re already doing drone culture to ourselves. Now we arm our cars with cameras so we can upload those crashes to a social network monitored and analyzed by the government. And so we write poems about drones.

Any ideas regarding where the conversation is going? Where would you like to see it go?

Adam Rothstein: I think it was very illuminating to see the positive feedback to Murmuration, and that we got so many submissions. People seemed to say, “yes! this is a thing!” As far as what this thing is, there is probably critical work to be done, to look at all of these responses, and see what is common and uncommon. I hope that those who submitted got a chance to see the other work, and were able to relate that to their own practice, and that was helpful in some way. This was the tangible goal. As far as any direction beyond that, there’s no way we could expect it or guide it. The choice of Tumblr for the original publication medium was deliberate. Others create, we collect, others see and perhaps re-share. And then? Tumblr’s usefulness as a theory-object goes only that far, and that’s the point.

Olivia Rosane: One thing I was rather shocked to read and have been working to remind myself of ever since is that the vast majority of Americans support drone strikes. So I think it is very important to keep stating and restating that it is not good or fair to be able to fight a war in which the casualties are all on one side, even if it is “easier” and even if the death count ends up lower.

That said, I really don’t think that drones as a technology are inherently evil. Having the ability to control something remotely doesn’t have to be bad if you’re using it to take (non-surveillance) photographs or monitor forest fires. Drones are different from other weapons like guns or nukes because they don’t have to be used to kill. They’re more like airplanes, which have been used to kill because that’s the world we live in, but can be used to do many other wonderful things as well. So I think an important conversation to have is what do we want to use drones for? Who do we want to use them and how? I know I wouldn’t trust the NYPD with drones, but I wouldn’t mind if the MTA used them to check out the safety of flooded subway tunnels, for example.  This is all rather outside the purview of Murmuration, which is really just about trying to get to the bottom of the emergence of drones on the scene. Art isn’t there to direct policy; it’s there to help us make sense of the world.

What were you hoping to see out of the submissions you got?

Olivia Rosane: I personally was hoping to get as many different perspectives on drones as possible in as many different media as possible, and so far I’ve been very pleased with the results. We’ve had stories, essays, drawings, audio files, videos, even a video game! And we’ve seen drones explored from the perspective of targets, controllers, drones themselves, and observers of this strange moment we’re living in. Overall, I’m very proud of what we’ve posted and am excited to present the last week and a half of the festival.

Adam Rothstein: What we received was uniformly excellent, because much of it I didn’t expect. We were hoping to get a range of mediums, but I didn’t expect how awesome drone music would be, drone architecture, or a drone video game. To see what other people do with an idea as complicated as drones, and to be surprised by unexpected and beautiful takes on it is a very powerful thing. Secretly, I was hoping to get more submissions with a sexual component. There’s a lot to say about drones and the gaze, about the sexualization of bodies, and the eroticization of our actions, about experimentation with sex and violence. But that’s just me. I suppose that’s something I’ll have to work on myself.

Have any primary common themes emerged that we can expect to see in the work this month?

Adam Rothstein: A particular image of the drone is very evocative. Mostly embodied by a MQ-1 or MQ-9 sort of visage. The down-turned elevators and stabilizers, the smooth, bumped out radome. It has an uncanniness, almost like an animal head without eyes, mouth, or ears. This isn’t the only image we’ve seen repeating, but it is there.

In the prose and poetry we’ve received, there is a tendency to existentially anthropomorphize the drone, to give it some sort of being, but also to question that being or with it, question our being. I used to think this was a bad thing–I don’t like anthropomorphizing machines generally. But I think the drone, in fiction, is a necessary character. It’s a monster. It’s an angel, a ghost, a leviathan, a thunderbird, a mythically powerful weapon. It has a relationship to our deep hopes and fears. It projects parts of ourselves, in many ways.

Another interesting trend is drone culture that involves sound. Music, recordings, noise. I’m not sure what to think about this, but it is delightfully unexpected and interesting. Maybe, the unseen aspect of drone technology draws people to portray them through a medium that is itself unseen.

Olivia Rosane: I think that, while there has certainly been a lot of anthropomorphizing going on, an interesting and rather unexpected theme that’s emerged has been the relationship between drones and humans, and how our reaction to and understanding of drones says as much about us as they do about the drones. There was your piece imagining drones in therapy, and how the drones actually ended up being better therapists for their therapists than vice versa, and of course Nathan’s point that drones are very much not autonomous no matter if we call them UAVs. But beyond that there was Matt Gulley’s piece that imagines a man trying to keep himself from entering into an affair by hiring a surveillance drone to follow him and shame him out of it. And of course any work that focuses on the effects of drone strikes, like Molly Crabapple’s drawing “Shakira” or Angbeen Saleem’s poem “Vestiges,” is about a very different sort of relationship between drones and people. One of the things this festival has made me realize is that the way we, as a culture, talk about drones ties in very much with the work you do at Cyborgology on Digital Dualism. We talk about drones as if they are separate when in fact they are much more like the smart-phones or computers we use; they are machines that augment, rather than challenge, our will. What is frightening about them is not actually that they would rebel and turn on us, but what they already enable us to do to ourselves.

Olivia Rosane graduated from Barnard College in 2009 with a degree in English Literature and Creative Writing. Her work as appeared in YES! Magazine, A Tale of Four Cities, Lapham’s Quarterly’s “Roundtable” blog, and The New Inquiry. She currently lives in New York, where she writes and shelves books at the Strand bookstore. She blogs at Fiction on Foot. → @orosane

Adam Rothstein is an insurgent archivist and researcher, who writes about media, technology, and politics wherever he can get a signal. He is on Twitter as @interdome