Sky Views: Drones - killing fields to art galleries

Tom Cheshire, Technology Correspondent

Hellfire missiles or hashtags: what's your favourite type of drone? Few technologies leave as much room for interpretation as unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs.

Over the last few months, I've been gawping at the "dronestagram" hashtag on Instagram. It's a compendium of engrossing photos, all taken from the unique elevation - top down or angled - of a drone. After the selfie, it's surely the defining aesthetic of the 2010s.

Scroll through and you'll see a quiltwork of multi-coloured containers sitting at the port of Shenzhen. A top-down shot of a humpback whale in Iceland. A verdant green football pitch in the middle of the dry Dubai desert.

Dronestagram was also the name of a project by artist James Bridle. From 2012-2015, he posted images of the landscapes of CIA drone strikes in the Middle East and Horn of Africa to Instagram, Twitter and Tumblr.

Bridle wrote: "Drones are just the latest in a long line of military technologies augmenting the process of death-dealing, but they are among the most efficient, the most distancing, the most invisible." #instagood!

Drones contain multitudes, embodying our uncertain, contradictory attitudes to technology. UAVs have had a quick journey from the killing fields of Afghanistan in the 2000s where they still lurk, of course, to easy likes on photo sharing sites.

They are symbols for surveillance, paranoia, consumerism, creativity, imperialism and extreme sports. In it for the Insta, but also in it for the extrajudicial killings.

Like many delightful technologies, including the internet itself, UAVs were a military innovation. The first remotely piloted aircraft actually flew more than a century ago: the Automatic Airplane, was developed in the US in 1916 as an aerial torpedo. It looked like an airplane but acted more like a cruise missile.

The Afghanistan War, starting in 2001, was the UAV moment and the Predator was its posterboy.

The Predator had been operational since 1995 when it carried out reconnaissance missions during the Balkan War. In 2001 it was fitted with Hellfire missiles and didn't look back.

Many technologies make the journey from military to consumer but drones have done it at a head spinning speed.

In 2007, it was joined by the Reaper. Together, they took on an increasing part of the allied air war, both official and unofficial. Last year, there were 1,071 drone strikes in Afghanistan, killing at least 1,389 people, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

The names Predator and Reaper echoed the uneasiness of this new type of warfare: an operator sitting at a desk, looking at a screen in a shed in Nevada, could kill people on the other side of the world. Video games made real. And then video games like Call of Duty started including Predators.

That anxiety shaped how we talked about and reflected on drones. Along with Dronestagram, Bridle also created Under the Shadow of the Drone. He painted full size outlines of drones onto city pavements, visualising the invisible eye-in-the-sky. Until you stand inside the work, it's hard to appreciate just how big a drone is.

Or take Laura Poitras, the filmmaker who worked with Edward Snowden to release top secret NSA documents. Her exhibition at the Whitney in New York last year was genuinely unsettling.

In one room, you can lie on the floor and watch the night sky in Yemen. In the final room of the gallery, though, you see an infrared video of people in the previous room gazing up. You now share the drone's view. Drones became a powerful visual symbol of the anxieties of the surveillance age.

At the very same time, though, the consumer UAV boom was beginning: very quickly, drones went from weapon to toy.

In 2010, the first Parrot quadcopter was shown at CES in Las Vegas. The DJI Phantom had a name as sinister as a Predator or Reaper, but it kickstarted a market which Goldman Sachs says will be worth $100bn by 2020.

And those toys have, in turn, become useful. Life-saving drones fitted with defibrillators now patrol beaches in Italy. A company called Zipline uses drones to deliver medical supplies to hard-to-reach parts of Zambia. Another uses drones to search for landmines buried in Bosnia.

They're used in agriculture, energy, infrastructure and many other industries. UAVs have changed newsgathering, too: they're standard kit at Paste BN. In particular, they've offered a different perspective on the migrant crisis, whether at borders or at sea.

Now, we're in the late stage of the commoditisation of drones. Drone racing is emerging as an inane sport, with over-the-top marketing and energy-drink sponsorship. #Dronestagram, for all its allure, reduces a challenging technology to another artfully-curated Instagram feed. Drone images become indistinguishable and uninteresting: the symmetry is always perfect; the colours all pop.

Many technologies make the journey from military to consumer. Just think of GPS. Drones have done it at a head spinning speed, though. As a result, they're useful as a miniature for how we think about innovation. We can interrogate technology or we can scroll through it instead.

Sky Views is a series of comment pieces by Paste BN editors and correspondents, published every morning.

Previously on Sky Views: Katie Stallard - Hope and heroism amid horror