Close Enough: The Eerie Intimacy of Drone Surveillance (talk)

Close Enough is an installation about the eerie intimacy of drone surveillance: the pilot comes to know their target through sight alone, while the target comes to know the drone mostly by its sound. Drawing on her research into drone warfare, Ahnjili ZhuParris traces how this one-sided closeness has become ordinary as more and more of life moves onto screens. The talk addresses her drone research, the making of the installation itself from hobby drones and open-source computer vision, and the way these same off-the-shelf technologies are redrawing the landscape of war, where the gap between a consumer drone and a weapon has never been narrower. The talk includes a small live demo of the work.

Ahnjili ZhuParris, PhD (NL/USA), is an AI engineer, media researcher, and computational artist. Her media research examines internet discourses around specific topics, tracing how narratives form and circulate online. Her current computational art comprises research-based moving-image, drone, and installation works exploring how bodies are measured, optimized, and represented by AI systems.