For the official version of record, see here:

Hunger, F. (2025). Commercial-off-the-shelf: The Re-aestheticization of Operational Drone Videos During Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine on Social Media. Media Theory, 9(1), 225–254. https://doi.org/10.70064/mt.v9i1.1171

Commercial-off-the-shelf:
The Re-aestheticization of Operational Drone Videos During Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine on Social Media

FRANCIS HUNGER

Akademie der Bildenden Künste München, GERMANY

Abstract

Using drone video material of the Ukraine war, this text updates Harun Farocki’s thesis of the operationalization of images to include the re-aestheticization of images. The article therefore looks into how originally operational images re-enter the sphere of representational images as war propaganda on social media. It contrasts drone war videos made with commercial-off-the-shelf drones with the imagery produced using the same drones by influencers. At the threshold between operationality and representation the text discusses how the drone video image stream becomes montage again, how a new, closer form of remoteness emerged with commercial-off-the-shelf drones, how the images are used as propaganda and “proof of work.” Finally, the distinction between infrastructural and public media (Schüttpelz, 2017) is discussed with the distinction of operational and representative images.

Keywords

Drone, Operational image, Influencer, Drone aesthetics

In the 2000s, author and filmmaker Harun Farocki discussed military drones in several film and text essays (Farocki, 2001; 2004; 2009)[1]. He reflected on the targeting images produced by large military drones, such as the RQ-2 Pioneer, RQ-5 Hunter, or MQ-1 Predator, and developed the thesis of the operational use of drone images. “Operational” in his conceptualization means that the images are integrated into a chain of operations that pursue a goal.

The expensive and large, aircraft-like drones described by Farocki and other authors that produced grey-scale night-vision images under the premise of “killing from a distance” have undergone significant further development due to the miniaturization of microelectronic components (Chamayou, 2015: 114-115). Today’s consumer drones have not only become much smaller and cheaper, they have also changed from a specialist application to a widely used consumer product (Richardson, 2020: 862; Pong and Richardson, 2024: 13-14). Currently, in Ukraine’s’ defense against the Russian invasion, consumer drones and their successors have become “a makeshift solution aimed at ‘punching up’ against an overpowering opponent” (Bender and Kanderske, 2024: 146).[2] The effects of the operational images made with consumer drones are real, as Olga Danylyuk describes: “In one moment, a squad as a flicker of light, visible in thermal imaging, is captured by a drone camera shared with the tablet of an enemy hiding nearby. In the next, the soldiers’ execution is filmed from above, captured in 4K resolution by a weapon available for sale at any Best Buy” (Danylyuk, 2025).

This consumerist shift raises the question of how image production under war conditions has changed. Observing the war in Ukraine, media scholars Hendrik Bender and Max Kanderske point out that the circulating videos on social media appear “less abstract and technical than the often desaturated or washed-out images of military drones” (2024: 150). They further describe that “the images of consumer drones are much more detailed and colourful,” with “bright and vivid colours, especially in the green and blue areas” (Bender and Kanderske, 2024: 150).

With the current re-introduction of consumer technology to the war field, Farocki’s thesis regarding the operationalization of images needs to be expanded to include the aspect of the ‘re-aestheticization’ of images. Usually, after their operational use, most operational recordings are disposed of, deleted and ignored. A small part of this image residue, however, is selected and post-processed in order to flow into the representative image regimes of today’s war propaganda that utilizes mass dissemination through social media.[3] Thus, a selected part of the consumed operational images migrates to the networks of “social” media, plat-formatting them through cinematic editing and montage. The editors often add an audio track, usually with popular music. Logos and subtitles decorate the inferior and long-winded shots from a cinematographic point of view. Sometimes video effects and animations get used to upvalue the imagery. I argue that these audio-visual additions serve to re-aestheticize previously operational images. On YouTube, TikTok and other video streaming platforms, violent drone images intersect with another kind of drone imagery: the aesthetic camera flights created by influencers—sublime landscapes, urban situations beautified by the soft glide of the camera-eye, and more generally, the setting in scene of objects or people to be valorized.

Figure 1: Mykhailo Fedorov, Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, presents 300 Mavic 3T drones, which are built with the help of donations to the Ukrainian bank Monobank and the blogger and influencer Igor Lachenkov and handed over to military units (Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, March 30, 2023. Public Domain).

This text discusses material from Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, as a result of which Ukraine became a laboratory for the use of consumer drones and began to produce both operational drone images for war operations and representational drone images to be published on social media.[4] Take for instance the comment of a Ukrainian soldier in a contested high-rise building in the city of Bakhmut: “The whole of Ukraine is already aware, what kind of Mavic [drone] we need. […] We are a country of pilots. We will have the best wedding, funeral, and childbirth [videos]” (Hromadske, 2023b: 33:06) This quote not only expresses the longing for the reestablishment of peace, but it also positions the figure of the drone pilot at the intersection between operational use in military operations and aesthetic use in weddings and funerals. It also demonstrates what violent labor includes: individuals who must redirect their subjectivity, expressed through labor, to the labor of war. The wedding photographer becomes an army drone operator—what greater contrast could there be? If you listen closely, the connection between labor and violence goes even further: The soldier rationalizes the violence of killing by using language borrowed from wage labor: “a job is being done”, “tasks have to be finished”, “work has to be assessed”, “the enemy is being worked on” (Hromadske, 2023b).

My text focuses on the question of what the use of civilian, commercial-off-the-shelf drones, originally designed for influencers, videographers and representational video creation, means under the condition of war. I compare the current war drone video shots with the aestheticization strategies of YouTube influencers. In this way, I develop the thesis of a re-aestheticization of operational images. First, I introduce the concepts of “operationality,” “representation” and “re-aestheticization” as a framework for discussing the material. This conceptual focus is followed by three examples of the representational use of drone images by influencers in a civilian context, with a focus on visual candy, overview, movement, and spectacle. Three further military examples concentrate on the visual aspects of overview and explosions, grenade drops, and drones as “flying eyes” and bombs. In the concluding section, I shape five theses to point out the military use of civilian, commercial-off-the-shelf drones and the resulting image production. These theses do not assume the separability of operationality and the representative but describe them as a threshold and transition between the two.

Operationality, representation and re-aestheticization

Operational images

Farocki conceptualized operational images as instrumental and processual. The instrumentality becomes most obvious in surveillance, simulation, behavioral analysis, infrastructural coordination and production control on assembly lines, but it also includes the targeting of enemies in war situations (Farocki, 2004). As art historian Andreas Broeckmann (2016) elucidates, Farocki was initially skeptical about the actual technical relevance of vision-based targeting systems. Instead, Farocki contested the ideological function to “create the myth of ‘precision-guided weapons’ and instill fear” and ultimately support the weapon industry’s requests for funding (Broeckmann, 2016: 129). Film historian Thomas Elsasser describes Farocki’s use of operational images as “excavating the industrial, scientific, bureaucratic and military uses of images,” as these images in addition to their traditional iconographic and referential function became instructions for machines and emerge as data(2017: 219). Aud Sissel Hoel (2018) points out that the concept of operational images too often verges on the problematic human-machine dichotomy. She suggests in a comparative review that existing concepts of operationality are “too ambiguous” from the perspective of art,  “too cultural” in new media theory, “too technical” in media archeology, and “too wide” in visual studies (Hoel, 2018: 27). By the 2000s, Farocki’s original skepticism towards the actual technological functioning of computer vision had dissolved, caused in part by an increase in practical applications of machine learning algorithms for object detection. Accordingly, with “platform seeing,” Anna Munster and Adrian Mackenzie provide a recalibration of understanding images not as single entities but as algorithmically intertwined information objects, accumulated in data sets, that are made accessible through the invisual mode of pointing to their “plat-formatted” operational qualities (2019: 9). Similarly, Jussi Parikka (2021), in On Seeing Where There’s Nothing to See,points to the existence of sensorial data beyond the visual spectrum; for instance, as used by LIDAR, a laser-based distance sensor. Sensor data is recorded in order to become computable and produce operative visualizations of the cityscape, leading to expanding photographic discourse with the notion of the “infrastructural image” (Parikka, 2021: 207). In Undigital Photography,Joanna Zylinska (2021) points towards imaging processes no longer primarily aimed at human eyes, but at creating correlationist stochastic models, using so-called Artificial Intelligence techniques. Diverging from this, in Operative Portraits, or How Our Faces Became Big Data, Roland Meyer (2023) discusses how large-scale image making, image annotation, image sharing and commenting in social media supports the argument against a pristine, machine-only conceptualization of operationality, as machine learning architectures build on the exploitation of human cognitive labor. He concludes that “Operative portraits are therefore still images—and not mere datasets—because and insofar as they are not fully integrated into automated chains of operations. […] Without human eyes today’s algorithms would still be blind”(Meyer, 2023: 38).

After discussing the concept of operational images as such, I will now focus on their specific relation with drone imagery. Reviewing drone attack video footage by the U.S. coalition in the first Gulf War in 1991, Farocki argued that these images were primarily used for operationalization, i.e. for the successful detection and destruction of the enemy. These images did not serve to entertain or inform—and they did not represent something, strictly speaking—but they enabled operations (Farocki, 2004: 17). According to Farocki, this happened from the perspective of a “subjective” camera, which describes the trajectory of the warhead (2009: 103). Media scholar Lila Lee-Morrison follows up on this analysis: “In its role through drone warfare, the image no longer functions as a representation but rather a construction of the site of engagement” (2015: 202). This construction of a combat landscape is characterized by the God perspective, which differs from the usual soldierly point-of-view on the ground. This flying camera, according to Lee-Morrison, is removed from topographical space to airspace. However, the flying camera is still permanently attached to a human actor because the first-person view expands the human reach with the drone as a medial extension to the body range. In addition to this body extension thesis, Jussi Parikka suggests that the pictorial operations for the construction of a “combat landscape” need to be tied back into a multi-layered logistical assemblage: “Operations speak to questions of logistics in massive technical systems that work through the ability to abstract and optimize” (2023: 31). Operations are embedded in practices of measurement, i.e. the translation of reality into discrete, digital units that can be processed by machines. In war, operational sensor data production with drones is not only used for surveillance and attack, but also for surveying; for example, by recording GPS coordinates that are made available for artillery target acquisition. Parikka describes this optimization of hits as “operations hitting the ground: such instrumental images work according to the onto-epistemologically effective apparatus of operations: guiding, putting in place, transforming into data, measuring, analyzing, diagramming, and so on” (2023: 48). Finally, Parikka characterizes operational images as “knowledge instruments” (2023: 48). They serve to link epistemic abstractions with site-specific impact “across a multitude of scales” (Parrika, 2023: 56). While Parikka already implicitly refers to the mediation of violence, Michael Richardson makes the connection more explicit: “the thermal camera of the drone sensing its environment entails violence within its mediating  processes, but also in the translation from sensing (thermographic camera) to imaging (decoding for optical display) to targeting (fixing of the reticule on an agglomeration of  pixels)” (2022: 44). Even further, the data abstracted from the various scales is synchronized as actions by being captured and processed in databases as transactions (Hunger, 2021). The raison d’être of the data is to identify anticipated threats. Lisa Parks conceptualizes this as vertical mediation: “Much more than a sensor, the drone is a technology of vertical mediation: the traces, transmissions, and targets of its operations are registered in the air, through the spectrum, and on the ground” (Parks, 2017: 136). In this respect, drones do not simply surveil but initiate a software simulation that anticipates the most effective violence against the enemy.

Drone image production can be described as a) operational, b) coordinating, and c) as spatio-temporal simulation, because the “flying eyes” serve specific operations, they coordinate the various human and machine actors, and as part of larger operational software they help to simulate the elimination of the enemy before the actual killing.

Representational images

To further differentiate the term “operational images,” I suggest marking its difference, using the notion of “representational images.” The representational production of images extends to the cave paintings of Lascaux and to painting as a whole, insofar as a representational image serves to constitute a pictorial object that is absent, i.e. located in a different place or time. In addition to painting, photography and film capture people, objects and situations, primarily oriented towards the needs of human perception (and not machine processing). The core of the representational is that 1) as a document, it either stands as exactly as possible for what it depicts, or 2) there is something beyond what is depicted, as in artistic depictions, which subsequently can be fathomed by the viewer.

In its capacity as a document, the representational is indicated through testimony. Artist and film maker Hito Steyerl characterizes this form of the representational as a “production of truth,” with the restriction that any witnesses would testify to “reality as it should have been,” as opposed to a “reality as it really was” (2008: 18-19).

In the artistic processes, image scholar Horst Bredekamp and philosopher Sibylle Krämer refer to the interpretability of representative images, which enable a “discursive-comprehending understanding of culture” (2003: 13). The authors contrast this cultural understanding of images with the everyday use of operative signs, which in turn “relieves” the images of differentiations and the difficulties of interpretation (Krämer and Bredekamp, 2003: 17). Meyer discusses representative images on the basis of artistic portraits: an important moment of the representational for him is the visualization of the physically absent: “At least since the early Renaissance, the individual portrait could thus function in European visual culture as a kind of proxy or double of the body” (2023: 22). The pictorial substitution of the “real” allows a visualization of the absent and also a proof of its existence (Meyer, 2023: 22).

Representative images thus not only represent the absent through indexicality, but they also open up a space of interpretation of complexity, multi-layered meaning, difference, and disunity. In difference to operational images, they favor an iconic and mimetic reading and allow for a wide variety of interpretation.

Re-aestheticization

To describe how operational drone images get re-introduced into a representational setting on social media, I use the concept of “re-aestheticization.” I develop this concept from a non-essentialist understanding of aesthetics, involving beautification, enhancing sublimity, playing on the auratic, and creating something moving.

Re-aestheticization must be conceptualized as a social process through which operational images get rendered more aesthetic and consumable. My particular argument explores the sociality of aestheticization through comparing influencer imagery as part of a consumer culture (compare Reckwitz, 2013; 2018) with war-related operational drone imagery. Re-aestheticization then becomes a conscious process of revalorization, reinvention and the activation of symbolic resources away from the operational towards the consumable. In wartime, the consumable intertwines with the propagandistic effort to create a directed reading of images in favor of one war party.

The notion of aestheticization used in this paper builds on and extends the skepticism and criticism towards consumer culture that has been formulated by Walter Benjamin as the aestheticization of politics to lure in the masses (1935: 35), by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer as an element of a critique of the cultural industry (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1947), or by Jean Baudrillard as the simulation and aestheticization of everyday life, establishing reality as hyper-reality (1983: 184-185) Beyond these positions, visual researcher Beryl Pong and media cultures scholar Michael Richardson suggest to read drone aesthetics through Jacques Rancière and interpret the “politics of aesthetics as the distribution of the sensible, in which the ‘sensible’ pulls double duty as both that which can be sensed and that which is made coherent through sensing” (2024: 16). They point out that drone aesthetics are closely tied to a logic of pre-emptive targeting, the yet-to-be-discovered, as an underlying operative logic. They further describe how the sensory logic, and the logics of the sensible, are enabled and limited through a modus operandi beyond human scale, a logic that is also known from other digital media, including satellites, cloud computing and machine learning data collections, for example.

But “re-aestheticization” here is not used as a philosophical concept. Instead, my praxeological use refers to the “emotional pleasures of consumption, the dreams and desires which become celebrated in consumer cultural imagery and particular sites of consumption which variously generate direct bodily excitement and aesthetic pleasures” (Featherstone, 2009: 13). With Featherstone, and to some extent Baudrillard, I assume that everyday life is already aestheticized, and there is no way around it (2009: 65–71). For drone videos to be consumable on social media platforms they need to be presented in an aestheticized form, to be given a specific, appealing aesthetical value aimed at consumer attention, hooking in with the rent-seeking attention economy of online platforms (Fuchs, 2015: 30–34).[5] In turn, as Bender and Kanderske have argued, the platform’s attention economy enables a “commodification of violence” (2024: 156). While the notion of drone aesthetics addresses both the visual and the invisual aspects, my approach focuses on only the visual output.

In a talk about the research project Drones in Visual Culture, media and communication scholarElisa Serafinelli outlined categories of drone visuals, which she gained from observing drone imagery on social media platforms: 1) “access to inaccessible places,” 2) “panoramic views,” 3) “top-down views,” 4) “defamiliarising the familiar,” and 5) the “classic landscape” (Jackman, Serafinelli and O’Hagan, 2021). These partly overlap with the categorizations that I’ve derived from the material, but they also differ as I put more emphasis on the embedding of visualities into social media platform economies: 1) visual candy, 2) overview and movement, and 3) spectacle.

In the examples below I describe the translation from an operational, visually reduced form to the formal language of branded newsreels, music videos, war movies and war documentaries. Returning once again to Harun Farocki for drone imagery aesthetics, he differentiated between an “aesthetics of commodities” and “machine aesthetics,” which he attributes to operational images (2009: 110). The latter is the aesthetics of the diagrammatic, of the moment when pixels become data. Andreas Broeckmann points out that the operational aesthetics is modulated “by the disavowal of what is not of importance. In order for it to work, the vision system has to reduce the complexity of the current image and compare certain stored patterns of a territory or an object to such a reductive version of the image” (Broeckmann, 2016: 129). Farocki observed that this reduced machine aesthetic creates a “strong counter-reaction” in viewers (2009: 110), as the visual form of the operational diverges from consumer aesthetics. Here the filmmaker provides a reason why it becomes necessary at all to re-aestheticize formerly operational images for public consumption.

“Re-aestheticization” in this text therefore marks the transversal from operative images to representational images using aestheticizing strategies. For drone images, I have observed re-aestheticization through three elements: 1) added branding, 2) pop cultural enrichment by adding music, 3) the shortening of the seemingly endless operational image stream and introduction of montage and cuts.

Civilian drones

To provide a contrastive foil, the following section discusses three visual strategies of civilian and representational, that is non-operational, drone image use: 1) visual candy, 2) overview and movement, and 3) spectacle. These categorizations are not exhaustive, but I have selected them as they are constitutive strategies to position video production aimed at maximum attention on social media platforms.

Consumer drone imagery

Compared to the overall narration, drone footage in social media, and especially as part of longer videos on vlogs and the associated influencer culture, but also in documentaries, has an aestheticizing function. For example, drone sequences often mark changes of location or the beginning of a new narrative part. They are accompanied by music and create an atmospheric difference to the speech—and action-heavy parts of vlogs or documentaries. They interrupt the torrent of words and create atmosphere. They serve as visual candy. “[D]rone vision [doesn’t] always reveal itself in the decidedly militaristic view from above, but registers in the uncanny smoothness of hillside unrolling or an oddly still perspective from an impossible vantage point” (Richardson, 2020: 858). Drone images occur in a wide variety of visual combinations but often associated with movement: the camera’s eye flies towards or away from an object, it hovers over a landscape, it moves parallel to objects or people in motion. Drone images get consistently used to aestheticize objects, people and landscapes. They show a majestic landscape, fly towards a person dancing on the beach at sunset, demonstrate the vastness of a desert and so on, directed by what was critically named the “tourist gaze” (Urry and Larsen, 2011). All three examples below are from active producers of the tourist gaze. Since the vloggers make a living out of travelling cityscapes and landscapes, their gaze is that of a professional tourist—they produce aesthetic views that other travelers can long for.

Effortlessly, this professional tourist gaze transverses from the vertical view-from-above[6] to horizontal level-flights. Long flights are shortened through slow motion instead of cuts, which accelerate and slow down the path. They can occur as “reveals,” because drones inevitably move towards a target object, which represents the visual climax or a narrative element. Compared to a traditional, fixed panorama shot, which gives the viewer’s eye time to let its gaze roam the fixed image, the camera apparatus itself moves in space and takes the viewer’s gaze with it. Media scholar Julia M. Hildebrand suggests that the “drone allows for seeing and accessing the world as a parkour” (2024: 171). Travelling, a theme that runs through all three examples that follow, is organized as adventure, “in which space is meant to  be corporeally experienced” (Hildebrand, 2024: 171). The corporal experience ties in with the drone’s ability to fulfil the human desire for flying, as it lifts the traveler visually and sensorially off the ground.

In addition to this aestheticization by creating an overview, drone images focus on individual people or individual objects. This is evidenced by numerous sports videos, skateboarders, or professional cyclists, whose main characteristic is to be on the move, followed by a drone camera. Three short examples explore the visual strategies in more detail:

Visual candy

Travel and family vloggers Sailing La Vagabonde (Riley Whitelum and Elena Carasu) use drone imagery to convey the atmosphere of a place. Drone flights interrupt the successive monologues, on and off camera, which tell their experiences and thoughts. Using the drone as “flying eye” combined with slow-motion video effects, they dynamize the flying through the pictorial space. While their narration usually focuses on the sailboat La Vagabond, the drone’s/bird’s eye view puts the viewer at a distance to this narrative center. Drone images also offer a solution to a cinematic problem: The sublimity and beauty of a landscape, for example, which can be scanned by the human eye roaming over it, but that cannot be adequately captured by a static panoramic camera image, can now be slowly scanned with the moving drone. The flight enables the visual richness to be spread over the flight time, and to capture a much larger landscape into the screen size. The vertically tilted view from a drone’s perspective creates visual dominance, from top to bottom; an authorial view by means of an aircraft.

Figure 2: Sequence of a drone flight from the sea over the harbor to the city, towards the sunrise (Carasu and Whitelum., 2017. Fair use, scientific quote).

Creating an overview and movement

In the introduction to Airport Freakout, vlogger Casey Neistat (2016a) shows a drone flight through the San Francisco skyline. As the image slowly moves past skyscrapers, the rising sun and the Oakley Bay Bridge become visible in the background. Then the title is displayed. Another video of Neistat (2016b), My Studio Destroyed, contains a longer monologue about the use of drones. Neistat notes that “knowing how to fly a drone is actually one third from that pie that is actually having meaningful footage from a drone,” (2016b) and goes on to say that drone images primarily create context so that viewers know where a scene is taking place. Subsequently, in order to demonstrate his theses in the image, Neistat shows a tracking shot that begins several hundred meters above the New York skyline, then shows a street canyon from a bird’s eye view, and dives into it in time-lapse. Then the perspective changes. The drone’s gaze now glides downwards along a brick house wall and finally ends with Neistat, who sits on a fire escape and then continues his monologue. Other videos make extensive use of an electrically powered skateboard that Neistat uses to travel the cityscape, accompanied by the drone. Hildebrandt provides a pointed, almost conclusive analysis to be applied to Neistat’s videos: “Via consumer drone systems, ‘seeing the world as a picture’ (Larsen, 2004) transforms into ‘seeing the world as a parkour.’ In a parkour, one traverses human-made or natural obstacles by running, vaulting, jumping, climbing, rolling and other acrobatic movements” (Hildebrand, 2024: 169-170). Neistat has perfected this genre.

Figure 3: Casey Neistat’s My Studio Destroyed. Left: Overflight over Skyline Lower Manhattan; Middle: Cut to top-down perspective, view into the street canyon; Right: The drone has descended in the street canyon and shows Neistat on the fire escape (Neistat, 2016b. Fair use, scientific quote).

Spectacle

In 2019, influencer Jay Alvarrez visited Ukraine, mainly Kyiv. The video Ukraine begins with a sequence that shows Alvarrez firing an anti-tank weapon at a wrecked car. The video is accentuated using the trap song Young Thug by Hot ft. Gunna & Travis Scott. A short drone sequence circling the burning wreckage (at 0:24 min) provides an overview of the shooting range. Afterwards, Alvarrez and some unnamed female models decoratively shoot at cars with rocket-propelled grenade weapons in an aesthetic Steadicam sequence. This sequence is concluded by a short drone ascent along the 62-meter-high Motherland Statue in Kiev, near the Dnieper River, which was inaugurated in 1981 by Leonid Brezhnev and shows a monumental, standing woman with a raised sword and shield in her hands. At the end of the video, the drone circling around the statue can be heard giving a warning signal, presumably the battery is empty, and then it tumbles down from a height of 63 meters.

Alvarrez appears here as the typical Western travel vlogger. Against the backdrop of Kyiv, which at this time had been in an ongoing conflict with Russia since at least 2014, he produced spectacular sequences of images that argued as aestheticization through drone flight and slow motion. Through the weapon use for recreational fun, the work of producing aesthetic images in order to create clicks repeats the valorization and aestheticization of violence as we know it from numerous television series and movies.

Figure 4: Left: Drone flight around the shooting range; Middle: An RPG is fired; Right: Drone orbit of the Motherland statue in Kiev (Alvarrez, J., 2019. Fair use, scientific quote).

Civilian drones in war

After these civil-life drone shots, the following section discusses exemplary cases of war image production and operationality. It is based on a personal collection of 50 video in March to October 2023, which I originally assembled for my artistic video essay Commercial-off-the-shelf Drones (2024). The videos stem from the social media platforms Twitter (today, X) and Telegram, where they have been posted either by citizens, often under pseudonyms, or by official and semi-official branches of the Ukrainian military. Russian videos have not been taken into consideration.

From this collection I identified three essential pictorial strategies, along which the following section is structured: 1) overview and explosion, 2.) “From above”—grenade drops, and 3) flying eye—flying bomb. All these cases linger on the threshold between operationality and representation, depending on the context of use.

Overview and explosions

This video of the Ukrainian 36^th Marine Brigade was professionally designed with opening credits and logo and originally published on their Telegram channel. It shows the combined use of surveillance drones and anti-tank “Javelin” missiles near Vodiane, Donetsk Oblast (Figure 5). Initially, the video shows a bird’s-eye view of an approaching column of seven Russian armored vehicles in a wide shot. The drone images are taken from a height of several hundred meters, the image of lower quality is of low-contrast and high brightness as if it was overlaid by a veil, supposedly due to the strong zoom. Then, a cut leaves the drone perspective and shows a Ukrainian soldier shooting a Javelin missile in a significantly higher contrasted picture. The camera follows the projectile for a brief time until the rocket is no longer visible. Then the video cuts back to the drone overview: little by little, the image zooms in on explosions that mark the hits. Further strikes and spectacular explosions follow. In the credits, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense is listed as the author. The video is accompanied by music that combines elements of hip-hop, hard bass and folk flute motifs, the track Нація (Eng. Nation, People) by the band project PROBASS ∆ HARDI[7] (36 ОБрМП, 2023). This video stands for professionally post-produced war videos of high quality, with numerous cuts and a clear dramaturgy. It differs from simpler clips, which shows combat actions only from a single camera angle, through the professional editing and the mixture of drone perspectives with the action on the ground.

Figure 5: Left: Approaching Russian tank column in a wide shot from a drone’s perspective; Right: Close-up diagonally above a burning armored vehicle and three fleeing soldiers (36 ОБрМП, 2023. Public Domain).

“From above”—Grenade drops

Figure 6: Left: Dropping a grenade on a Russian dugout; Right: The drone circles the target once (Aerobomber, 2023. Public Domain).

One of the more staged videos on the Telegram channel Aerobomber is combined with a request for donations towards the end. The exact place and time are unclear, but it was probably produced in winter 2023 (Figure ). It shows the orthogonal dropping of grenades into the trenches of the Russian aggressors. The opening sequence consists of an approach by flight reminiscent of influencer videos. Then the video shows a fleeing Russian soldier from an overflight perspective. The image quality is high, with sufficient contrast and sharpness. The pictorial events create a visual dynamic, as it is not only the drone that hovers in the air, monitoring the events, but its movement becomes an integral part of the overall aesthetic. For example, the drone circles around the target object, a dugout covered with a camouflage cover, before it drops the grenade, and an explosion can be seen after a cut. This video does not show any enemies killed (Aerobomber, 2023).

Figure 7: Left: Injured Russian soldier in the trenches looking at the drone; Right: Zooming in on soldiers killed or injured by grenade drops in the dugout (Adam Tactic Group, 2023. Public Domain).

In contrast to the former, numerous drone videos depict the bodies of the killed enemies. The Ukrainian Adam Tactical Group first shows the entire layout of a trench from a top view (Figure ). After a grenade is dropped, the view zooms in on a killed Russian soldier. It is also shown how a soldier from the trenches tries to get to safety from a drone and its grenades, looking up, possibly with a leg injury, then lies down in the trench due to simultaneous infantry fire. After a cut, the image zooms in on a makeshift shelter and then shows the drop of a grenade that falls into the shelter and explodes. An extreme close-up shows the motionless arm and hand of a Russian soldier as evidence of his killing (Adam Tactic Group, 2023).

These sequences of images create a high emotional density because they rely on the powerful motif of killing, as it is invoked in numerous fictional films as a “resolution” for conflicts. Together with the orthogonal, God-like perspective from above, they serve as a visual demonstration of power, because most of the time the drones fly directly above their target, where they then release the deadly grenades. Contrary to the remoteness that one would expect, these images bear a moment of intimacy as Bender and Kanderske argue: “By highlighting the suffering of individual soldiers, the footage produces a voyeuristic relationship between the viewing public and the victims of warfare.” They assert that the display of violence and vulnerability results in a view that is “intimate but not necessarily compassionate” (Bender and Kanderske, 2024: 152), comparable to the uncompassionate intimacy on online image platforms, where intimacy and violence are just functions of the attention economy.

Flying eye, flying bomb

Figure 8: Kamikaze FPV drone moving towards the destruction of the Russian visual surveillance system MUROM installed on a silo. Left: Approach phase; Middle: Approach to the target; Right: Last image before impact and cancellation of the image signal (Misyagin/ZSU, 2023. Public Domain).

In terms of war economy, the use of “kamikaze” drones is based on their high accuracy compared to artillery. They occurred more frequently as the Ukrainian army was constantly affected by a shortage of artillery shells in 2023 and 2024. Kamikaze drones are used both against moving targets, for example armored vehicles, and against stationary opponents, for example against dug-in positions in trenches. The footage from kamikaze drones shows the course of the flight until they hit the target.

Soldiers steer kamikaze drones remotely into the target to explode. For example, take a video that shows the use of a first-person view drone near Belgorod (Figure ). The specificity of first-person-view (FPV), originally a competitive sport for drone pilots, is that the pilots control the device from the camera’s point of view with Head-up-Display video glasses—a flying eye. The drones used are optimized for speed and maneuverability. The first part of the 31-second video shows the approach and impact of the drone on the target from the first-person view. This is followed by the footage of other, observant drones from a distance, which record the approach of the kamikaze drone in a long shot.

The videos produced in the process are the most like the drone images that Harun Farocki analyzed. An essential feature of these landscape overflights is the relative uneventfulness during the flight and often the absence of a visual climax: at the moment of impact, the video transmission breaks off. The visual testimony of the impacts of kamikaze drones is thus left to third parties: observers on the ground or surveillance drones that document the attack.

With these example videos, both civil and military, I can now analyze the commonalities and differences among them to carve out from the material the notion of “re-aestheticization” that transforms operational drone imagery into representation.

Re-aestheticization of operational drone imagery

From stream to montage

While drone flights by influencers focus on the aesthetic effect of natural and cultural landscapes, war footage aims at the sublimity of destruction: dark impact craters in agricultural landscapes that hint at the long-standing poisoning of the soil, half-shaved trees that result in metal-harmed stump landscapes, destroyed former cities that leave urban landscapes marked as uninhabitable mixed with the straight display of military violence.

A visual difference to the use of drone images by the influencers is the absence of cinematographic movement: The representatively designed influencer videos are about dynamics and movement, the traveler gaze, so that elaborate zooms and tracking shots are realized with drones. The drone videos of the Ukrainian army, on the other hand, mainly show static image sections in the mode of surveying streaming. The stream of images becomes an index of their operationality, as “the visual practices of drone crews are based on a continuous video stream” (Franz and Queisner, 2018: 122). This image stream is counteracted by adding post-recording cuts to zoomed views or by introducing background music: it is posterior montage as an add-on. Several staple music pieces contribute to the re-aestheticization, including tracks like Bayraktar, Fortezja Bakhmut, Druga Armija u Sviti—a soundtrack of war.

The often-abrupt changes between an overall overview and zooming in on individual (hostile) objects emerge as non-cinematic and indicate the operational origin. Video producers try to breathe cinematic life into these operational images by means of montage and often fail due to the limited availability of b-roll. Therefore, music selection and the use of logos become important audio-visual elements of the re-aestheticization.

From the visuals I deduct that the more elaborate and professional the production, the stronger the control over the material and the intended use for propaganda purposes. The visual bar for drone images has been set high by cinematographic travel vloggers and documentarists. It is hardly achievable with military-operational image material. Therefore, uncut, raw military consumer drone videos promise witnessing and “work results.”

Videos full of people

In 2005, Farocki still pointed out: “In these new images from Iraq in 1991, those with the crosslines in the center, there are hardly ever any humans to be seen. The battlefield is shown as deserted” (2009: 104). The drone videos since 2022, on the other hand, are full of people who are presented as targets. Today, the events of war appear to be anything but autonomous, as Farocki insinuated, because drone operators are always present, even when pattern recognition or machine learning methods are used in a semi-automated manner. As pattern-recognition assisted drone platforms are currently in the making, it is yet to be seen in what way the phantasy of automated drone swarms will play out.

The publication of drone videos on online platforms reveals new usage patterns that expand and change the previous media-theoretical reflections tied to the Iraq war and the years after 9/11. In the “War on Terror,” the use of drones was primarily characterized by the reconnaissance and engagement of singular targets; e.g. individuals identified as terrorists. For this purpose, expensive military drones with a long range were used, controlled from a long distance (Mayer, 2009). Today, ubiquitous drone practices using both military and commercial-off-the-shelf drones turn the theater of war into a condensed (albeit incomplete) data area.

Remoteness and closeness

With the ubiquity of commercial-off-the-shelf drones, the military scenario changes fundamentally. Whereas in earlier trench warfare, the soldiers kept an eye on the front line ahead of them, and where an insight into the enemy positions depended on their own terrain advantage, now the sky above, next to, in front of and behind their positions is a traitor.[8] Even more than satellites or fighter planes, drones become target acquisition devices, “flying eyes” from the sky’s perspective: “Optical manipulations, such as the ability to zoom in, help to reveal and ‘positively identify’ targets. […] The visual capabilities of the drone delineate the ‘events’ of war and constitute the production of drone data” (Lee-Morrison, 2021).

Compared to satellites and aircraft, and long reaching military drones, however, the use of off-the-shelf consumer drones is less “remote,” and almost “intimate.” Previous research describes drone operators as “remote,” as actors removed from the action who seek to gain situational control over a combat situation through sensors (Lee-Morrison, 2021) With commercial-off-the-shelf drones, “remoteness” is dwindling, as the smaller models are directly tied to the front line, for their communication only reaches up to 10 km distance. In the urban warfare of Bakhmut, for instance, the drone operators sat in opposite blocks of houses that were directly on the front line (see Hromadske, 2023b). Remoteness is relative and can tip over into prosthetic closeness, which immediately expands and cyborgizes the soldier’s body.

Propaganda and “proof of work”

The previous media-theoretical theorizations of drones pointed out that automation removed the targeted humans from view. Today, and different from Farocki, masses of videos can be seen that visually prove and exploit the killing of opponents. Drone video evidence is not a by-product of military actions but is re-produced as propaganda and “proof of work.” I suggest this approach is like the anti-corruption procedure in which the delivery of packages or the work of painting a wall by contractors are documented through photography as proof of work. Compared to Farocki, this change also suggests a shift in military attitude to image control. The former strict censorship of violent images through restriction is replaced by a semi-controlled media spectacle that aims to draw attention to depictions of violence in the form of clicks and views.[9] Propaganda image production adapts to the requirements of the attention economy of social media and of mass media: “videos of graphic violence spill over into mainstream social media and video platforms like Reddit, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube on an unprecedented scale” (Bender and Kanderske, 2024: 152).

Our witnessing as viewers of the videos generates a specific form of recognition: it is reconfigured along the attention economies of social media platforms. In this way, the witnessing of the viewer undergoes a shift: Whereas it used to be aimed at “[bringing] distant and often unimaginable violence to the domestic sphere,” today the testimony of the images is more entangled than ever in a spectacle-induced logic of attention exploitation in online-platforms (Richardson, 2022: 40). Violence and the depiction of it has become part of content and clicks and its logics. And even if Richardson argues that “to witness is to become responsible to the event,” it is now more likely that the sheer volume of imagery produced—the stream of operational imagery that became a stream of aestheticized propaganda—overwhelms the witnesses and drowns their “responsibility” (2022: 40).

Conversely, the war propaganda described here raises the question of the status of the drone images produced by influencers: To what degree do they constitute propaganda as well?

Infrastructural and public media

Against Russia’s open invasion of Ukraine since February 2022, commercial-off-the-shelf drones were used and adapted towards military needs as a replacement for missing ammunition or military war drones. This slowly changed when Ukrainians learned to adopt civil drone technology into military models and increased their own production of military-grade drones, making civilian drones the second weapon of choice from mid-2024 onwards. Hendrik Bender and Max Kanderske called modified consumer drones “chimeras,”  because they were “blurring the lines between military/non-military, supportive/combat  roles” (2024: 147) and summarize for the wider media practices, including social media, of the Ukraine-Russian war: “As warfare has become part of people’s day-to-day lives, it seems only natural that quotidian media practices, technologies and aesthetics inscribe themselves into war and vice versa” (155).

The use of converted civilian drones has been part of a development that I suggest reading as the condensation of information in armed conflicts. Because it is not the drones alone that changed the scenario, but the combination of information based on database software and pattern recognition methods, so-called Artificial Intelligence. Through real-time imaging drones and satellites, smartphone photos of soldiers and civilians, and real-time logistics using digital mapping systems, the information field is condensed compared to previous conflicts, not only at the front, but also at the back-stage where strategic decisions are made. This “infrastructuring” of war information asks for a fresh look at the question, what kind of media drones are. For the media scholar Erhard Schüttpelz, operational images of the drone videos constitute “infrastructural media.” They enable cooperation, in this case for the purpose of warfare. The representative use of the re-aestheticized material takes place in what Schüttpelz distinguished from “public media”: TikTok, Telegram, Twitter and YouTube. On the one hand, this distinction between “public” and “infrastructural” media creates conceptual clarity (Schüttpelz, 2017: 24; 34-37). On the other hand, the practical examples here demonstrate that public and infrastructural are not sharply separated from each other, but that they are intertwined, just as the threshold from operational to representative is crossed by means of re-aestheticization. With that I have described at least two modes of violent labor: First, the cycle of assessing, deciding, detecting and killing in the operational mode; and second, the posterior use of drone images as war propaganda.

Conclusion

This paper discussed elements of re-aestheticization at the transition from operational to representative images, from infrastructural media to public media. Future research questions need to investigate how political subjectivities are reshaped by consumer-drone images and how automation using “artificial intelligence”—actually pattern recognition—creates the operationality of images and image data. With the ongoing war, new uses derived both from military and commercial-off-the-shelf drones have been introduced within the short time-frame of only a few months: grenade dropping octocopters, drone on drone combat; cheap “Kamikaze” first-person-view drones, equipped with explosives, flying into houses, trenches and dugouts, targeting individual soldiers; using first-person-view war drones on expensive tanks or special equipment shaping new economics of material costs; so-called “Dracaris” thermite throwing drones; FPV drones with a speed of about 300 km/h; drones with a semi-autonomous targeting mode, and drones connected via fiber-optic cable to remote operators to counter electronic warfare measures; combined warfare with artillery, mines and drones as defense; far reaching small drones of up to 1000 km distance to destroy enemy rear logistics; and mine-dropping drones and demining drones.

The image production described above is one indicator of this ongoing change, but the repercussions may be larger than that: Assuming a trickle-down effect of applications that serve military force in a re-shaped form into society, one must anticipate their use of force in civil scenarios as well. The increasing use of drones by police forces, for instance at demonstrations or sport events, but also for civil engineering such as agricultural evaluations, speak to this thesis.

This text demonstrated that operationality is not linked to the specific apparatus itself, but to the media practices involving the ‘chimeric’ war/civil commercial-off-the-shelf drones. The motive for re-aestheticization is the dissemination on social media platforms for their attention logic, aestheticizing deadly violence. The drone videos of the war share the same attention economy as the influencers’ spectacular drone footage of landscapes and cities. A comment by the Ukrainian drone operator ‘Tourist’ illustrates this point: “Before the war I used to shoot videos from vacations and various entertainments, now I post videos from the war” (Tourist (pseud.) and Signum Fighting Group, 2022).

Acknowledgement

The author thanks Ariana Dongus, Christian Heck, Vera Tollmann and Roland Meyer for their comments, and to Ksenia Rybak for the fruitful discussion. The author also thanks Yvonne Wilhelm, who initially pointed him to Casey Neistat.

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Notes

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[1] Artists have repeatedly addressed drone aesthetics, e.g. in the works Bit Plane (Jeremijenko and Rich, 1997); Drones (Paglen, 2010); 5000 Feet is the Best (Fast, 2011); Drone Shadow (Bridle, 2012); Plein Air (Tribe, 2014); Reaper, Predator (Chishty, 2015-ongoing), Killbox (Chishty, 2016); The Forbidden Zone: “Jerusalem” (Keysar and Brinker, 2018); Line of Contact (Ploeger, 2022); Death under Computation (Engelhardt, 2022); Hear/Fear/Ear (Schuppli, 2022). For a review of existing literature on drone aesthetics and an overview about further artistic projects see Introduction: Drone Aesthetics – An Open Proposition (Pong and Richardson, 2024).

[2] For military drone use, see e.g. From a View to a Kill – Drones and Late Modern War (Gregory, 2011); A Theory of the Drone (Chamayou, 2015); State of the Art Report on Drone-Based Warfare (Lee-Morrison, 2014); Life in the Age of Drone Warfare (Parks and Kaplan, 2017); Drone (Lee-Morrison, 2021); Drone Wars – Pioneers, Killing Machines, Artificial Intelligence, and the Battle for the Future (Frantzman, 2021); Drones as Mass Goods in the War of Attrition (Marischka, 2023).

[3] At the broadest, propaganda has been defined as an goal-oriented attempt to influence public opinion resulting in human action, often through the conscious manipulation of publications (Laswell, 1934). More recently, informed by a perspective of the sociology of knowledge and history of science, Thymian Bussemer extends this notion with a critical overview of the concept of ‘propaganda’, including the works of Emil Dovifat, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Harold D. Lasswell, Carl Hovland and Leonard Doob in Propaganda (2005).

[4] This laboratory situation did not just arise with the Russian escalation in February 2022, but dates back to at least 2014, see the blog post The Drone War Over Ukraine’s Trenches Foretells the Future of Air Combat (Peterson, 2020). For the use of DIY practices in adapting commercial-off-the-shelf drones in Ukraine, see Consumer Drone Warfare (Bender and Kanderske, 2024). About the laboratory character of the conflict between Israel and Palestine, see e.g. Contesting Post-Digital Futures – Drone Warfare and the Geo-Politics of Aerial Surveillance in the Middle East (Amin and Downey, 2020); ‘A Mass Assassination Factory’: Inside Israel’s Calculated Bombing of Gaza (Abraham, 2023); Crimes of Dispassion – Autonomous Weapons and the Moral Challenge of Systematic Killing (Renic and Schwarz, 2023); The Algorithmically Accelerated Killing Machine (Suchman, 2024).

[5] A critique of online platforms has been developed through a range of research in the studies of computing cultures, history of computing, and software studies. Infrastructural dimensions of embeddedness, membership, but also failure have been explored in the article ‘Steps toward an Ecology of Infrastructure – Design and Access for large Information Spaces’ (Star and Ruhleder, 1996). Platforms as cultural communities were discussed in Art Platforms and Cultural Production on the Internet (Goriunova, 2013). The political economy underlying online social media platforms was expanded on in the anthology Reconsidering Value and Labour in the Digital Age (Fisher and Fuchs, 2015), and further in Platform Monopolies and the Political Economy of AI (Srnicek, 2018). The platformatting of images as datasets was established in Platform Seeing – Image Ensembles and Their Invisualities (MacKenzie and Munster, 2019).

[6] The view from above has been studied in, among other things: Aerial Aftermaths – Wartime from Above (Kaplan, 2018); View from Above – Powers of Ten and Image Politics of Verticality (Tollmann, 2022); Co-Operative Aerial Images – a Geomedia History of the View from Above (Bender and Kanderske, 2022).

[7] The text takes up the image of a beehive defending itself against a bear that wants to steal the honey. The chorus then reads “Нація це захист” (The nation is the defense), see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PErW56oeMVM. The same band project also produced the iconic hard bass track ДОБРОГО ВЕЧОРА МИ З УКРАЇНИ which served as the musical accompaniment to numerous drone and war videos, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5RsQWm3rOY.

[8] For current documentation on the use of drones in Ukraine, see Hromradske: «Це найважчий місяць для нас» — репортаж з Бахмута (Hromadske, 2023b); Як «очі» в небі допомагають нищити окупантів (93 бригада Холодний Яр, 2023); Знайти та «помножити на нуль»: гайд від прикордонників, як ефективно демілітаризувати окупантів (Державна прикордонна служба України, 2023). On the military strategy: Ukraine’s Drone Academy Is in Session (Melkozerova, 2023). ‘No Comparison In World History’: Ukraine’s Comms Security Chief Shares Takes On Drone War (Roblin, 2023); Dumb and cheap – When facing electronic warfare in Ukraine, small drones’ quantity is quality (Freedberg Jr., 2023). A military analysis of the Russian use of drones is contained in the report Russia’s Use of Uncrewed Systems in Ukraine (Bendett and Edmonds, 2023).

[9] However, this does not mean that the publication of such images is completely uncontrolled: military units or the Ministry of Defense are often listed as the author, which speaks for controlled distribution. At least in comments on the videos, it is emphasized that operations security, military secrecy, is complied with by time delay or blurring of details (pixelation).

Francis Hunger combines artistic research and media theory with the capabilities of narration through installations, radio plays and performances and internet-based art. Currently he co-teaches at the Emergent Digital Media class at the Academy of Visual Arts Munich, and is co-editor of www.carrier-bag.net with Hito Steyerl. He is PostDoc at the Dataunion ERC project, researching about the European Union database interoperability initiative at VUB, Brussels. 2021–2023 he was researcher for the project Training The Archive at Hartware MedienKunstVerein Dortmund, critically examining the use of AI, statistics and pattern recognition for art and curating. He authored a.o. Unhype Artificial ‘Intelligence’! A proposal to replace the deceiving terminology of AI (2023) and How to Hack Artificial Intelligence (2019). His Ph.D. at Bauhaus University Weimar developed a media archeological genealogy of database technology and practices, a book is in preparation. In 2022/23 Hunger was guest professor at the Intermedia program of the Hungarian Academy for Visual Arts, Budapest. In 2022 he co-curated with Inke Arns and Marie Lechner the exhibition House of Mirrors – Artificial Intelligence as Phantasm at HMKV, Dortmund. http://www.irmielin.org

Email: francis.hunger@adbk.mhn.de

Conflicts of interest
None declared

Funding
None declared

Article history
Article submitted: 10/10/2024
Date of original decision: 10/10/2024
Revised article submitted: 7/4/2025
Article accepted: 18/4/2025