Drone Studies

This body of work interrogates drone technology as a contemporary extension of imperial vision—a tool whose origins and operations are entangled in the history of settler colonialism, cartographic violence, and capitalist extraction. Drawing on Nicholas Mirzoeff’s White Sight and Benedict Anderson’s analysis of the “imperial grid” in Imagined Communities, these aerial studies explore how visual mastery over land has long been a mechanism of colonial control: to map, to possess, to aestheticize.

The drone’s aerial gaze reenacts the colonial fantasy of omniscience: a god’s-eye view that abstracts terrain into surveyable space, rendering ecosystems into textures and bodies into coordinates. These images are not neutral. They participate in a lineage of visual technologies—military, cinematic, cartographic—that legitimize power through distance, converting lived geographies into governable surfaces.

In Puebla, Mexico, where the historic center was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1987, drone imagery traces the logics of beautification and aesthetic regulation enacted through preservation regimes. Under the guise of cultural heritage, colonial architectures are revived and staged—painted in curated hues, adorned with ornamental talavera, and cleansed of their historical complexities. Here, restoration operates not as recovery but as re-inscription, aligning built surfaces with global expectations of authenticity and touristic appeal. The drone, in this context, reveals how vertical surveillance facilitates the management of historical narrative and visual order.

Meanwhile, in Louisville, Kentucky, the Falls of the Ohio emerge as a site of settler infrastructure and racial capitalism. Once a life-sustaining corridor for the Shawnee, Miami, and Chickasaw nations, the Ohio River was violently transformed into a conduit of commerce and control. The canalization of the river in 1830 embedded colonial logic into the terrain, enabling the expansion of trade—including the domestic slave trade—under the veil of infrastructural progress. Today, drone imagery renders visible the scars of this transformation: the portage zones, levees, locks, and altered riverbeds that constitute a geography of erasure.

Together, these projects ask: Can the drone be retooled—not to surveil, but to mourn? Not to dominate, but to unmap? By foregrounding the visual logics of coloniality embedded in both historic preservation and infrastructural development, Drone Studies mobilizes aerial imagery as a counter-surveillance strategy—one that exposes the gridlines of imperialism while gesturing toward practices of refusal, memory, and decolonial possibility.