Drone vision, zones of protest, and the new camera consciousness

Protest is well understood to have moved beyond the material limits of city streets and squares through global media networks via mobile camera phones and social media platforms. But we do well to consider the complex integration of signal, image, and distributed networks with the materiality of devices, streets, squares, and bodies. This integration is captured in signature visual content of contemporary protest, in the camera phone held above the crowd relaying image and experience and which, by nature of being recorded in situ and often in fluid and volatile social environments, conveys a visceral sense of the danger and violence that implicates the body as a body at risk or in some way 'on the line,' as Judith Butler puts it.1 Behind the mobile device a body stands 'face to face with those they oppose, unprotected, injurable, injured, persistent.'2 Now camera-mounted drones traverse protest sites, and as they have done in other contexts-most notably in militarized zones of conflict and surveillance-alter both the optical field and material assemblages through which protest takes place.