IOCOSE art group is proud to present Drone Selfies, the second chapter of In Times of Peace concept. The artwork, that consist in a photographic series of drones taking selfies of themselves, will be exhibited at “030_2.0 arte da Brescia”, curated by Dario Bonetta and Fabio Paris.
With Drone Selfies, IOCOSE imagines an alternative present where war is over, and drones – once surveillance devices par excellence – are deprived of their main reason to be and point their built-in cameras to mirrors in an act of vanity. In Times of Peace intends to explore the life of a drone after war and terror.
What would a drone do if war and terror were over? Magazines such as Wired, or websites such as diydrones.com, would probably argue that drones can be used in everyday contexts. Drones can be used to check the roof of a house or to deliver Amazon orders. However, this is still a very instrumental perspective on drones, one where drones are used for a specific purpose. Instead, IOCOSE intends to ask a different question: what is the life of a drone in times of peace? What is the creative potential of a drone, a part from the things we could do with it? Indeed, drones do not have such a thing as a ‘life’. But what if?
The expression “in times of peace” is a reference to Paul Virilio’s “theory of logistics” (in Paul Virilio and Sylvere Lotringer, Pure War, 1983, Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents). Virilio, quoting a text by the Pentagon from the late ’40s, notes how logistics was there defined as the procedure following which a nation’s potential is transferred to its armed forces, “in times of peace” as in times of war. But what does it mean to live ‘in times of peace’? and what does it mean for a drone?
This is indeed a difficult question to answer, as we have no clue on how we would live in times of peace ourselves, and how those times could possibly look like.