drones | MUSEUM FATIGUE

And a Drone Shall Be the Sign

February 22, 2020 by Museum Fatigue

A few weeks back when the COVID-19 Coronavirus really hit the news, I was fascinated to see an outbreak in the news of drone stories coming from China. Over the past few years the drone has become a kind of, pardon the pun, a floating signifier for all that is rational, automated and “unmanned” about modernity in China. Never mind that drones loaded with disinfectant chemicals flying around “fighting the Coronavirus” are of limited value and probably not too good for […]

Categories: Surveillance • Tags: Coronavirus, COVID-19, drones

Keep Your Drones At Home

December 14, 2015 by Museum Fatigue

A few days ago some students stopped by my office to ask me about an email that they had all just received from the Dean of Students Office. The message announced a ban on the use of drones on campus. The sudden appearance of the all-campus message suggested that there had been an incident that precipitated the response. The students knew that my Digital Anthropology class has been doing some unusual final mini-projects this semester and were curious if the […]

Categories: Books, Play • Tags: drones, email, safety, security

Museum Fatigue Reads, July 12, 2014

July 11, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

The Origins of Office Speak The Affective Economy: Producing and Consuming Affects in Deleuze and Guattari The Case Against the Sharing Economy Laurie Taylor on the endangered art of ethnography Sidney D. Gamble Photographs How China’s Selden Map Rewrote History Digital Resources for Sinologists 1.0 Future Islands MET Museum Collection Online Brazilian Man Becomes Korean After 10 Plastic Surgeries We Are All Made of Stars How Did We Get Here (University Hall) at this Point of Time (the “Anthropocene”)? The […]

Categories: Museum Fatigue Reads • Tags: bodies, China, drones, ethnography, faculty, higher education, internet, jobs, language, Photography, rolling coal, sharing economy, virtual life

The Playtime of Surveillance

March 23, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

“Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society—not that machines are determining, but because they express those social forms capable of generating them and using them.” —Gilles Deleuze “All play means something.” — Johan Huizinga When I was growing up, a boy in the upper midwestern United States in the final decades of the Cold War, I loved spies, secrets and the gear that when along with them. I locked what childhood secrets I had in a small […]

Categories: Gear, Play, Random Reflections, Surveillance, Toys • Tags: AR Drone, brookstone store, drones, johan huizinga, Jumping Sumo, Parrot Drones, Rolling Spider, Rover Spy Tank