drone selfies visualize technology's vanity in times of peace

while the term ‘selfie‘ has casually crept its way into almost every aspect of mainstream contemporary culture, we didn’t imagine we’d be hearing about ‘drone selfies’ quite so soon. IOCOSE are a group of italian artists who are popularizing this new wave of social picture sharing as it relates to technology, hitting some poignant marks regarding peace, politics and the potential ‘life’ of these devices along the way.

the drone snaps a self portrait in a domestic living room setting
photography by matteo cattaruzzi

the ‘drone selfies’ series imagines the hovering machines ‘in times of peace’ — the title of IOCOSE’s ongoing project which intends to explore the life of a drone after war. ‘what would a drone do if terror were over?’ the artists ask, ‘what is the creative potential of a drone, a part from the things we could do with it? indeed, drones do not have such a thing as a ‘life’. but what if?‘ once these devices are deprived of their main reason to exist — whether they’re employed for tactical military operations, snapping photos of otherwise uncharted spaces or delivering packages from the sky — their sense of purpose becomes obscured. IOCOSE hypothesizes that in this case, the high-tech gadgets would conform to today’s ubiquitous social scenario of selfie-snapping and ‘point their built-in cameras to mirrors in an act of vanity.’

a selfie snapped by a drone

filippo cuttica of IOCOSE recently told the creators project about the project’s intention to recreate ‘the feeling of those sorts of selfies on instagram […] in this scenario, the drones act like regular people. they are banal as much as the average human being. they could fly pretty much anywhere, and yet they like to take photos of themselves in domestic contexts, replicating existing paradigms for the ‘selfies’ genre. it is this non-imaginative aspect of the selfies that we wanted to capture. after all, we believe that if drones were left free to roam, they would behave like birds grown up in captivity. they would always try to come back home, to their cage.’

the domestic settings build a story around the ‘life’ of the gadgets