Join us in person at the INHA and online via Zoom for the eighteenth session of the Tele-Visions Seminar, on Tuesday, December 16, from 6:30 to 8:00pm, in Salle Vasari, Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (2 rue Vivienne, Paris 2e).
We are delighted to welcome Kathrin Maurer (University of Southern Denmark) for a session in English entitled “The Sensorium of the Drone: Rethinking Aerial Perception of the Earth beyond the Scopic Regime.”
🗓 Date: December 16, 2025, 6:30–8:00pm
📍 Location: Institut national d’histoire de l’art – Salle Vasari
📍 Also online: via Zoom

The Sensorium of the Drone: Rethinking Aerial Perception of the Earth beyond the Scopic Regime
In defining the drone’s visual spectrum, scholars have often emphasized the concept of the scopic regime—a militarized mode of hyper-visuality that enacts a vertical, hierarchical, and totalizing power dynamic between the drone operator, the drone itself, and the surveilled subject. While this framework remains central to understanding drone vision, this presentation seeks to expand the notion of drone perception by introducing the concept of the sensorium: a complex, multi-medial, and synesthetic assemblage of sensing technologies. This talk therefore focuses on the civilian drone’s capacity to sense the earth—registering environmental data, surface textures, and climatic conditions. Through close readings of artistic works that engage with earth-sensing drones, the presentation demonstrates how these technologies enable non-scopic modes of perception that prioritize flattening, touch, volumetric awareness, and sonic sensing. To contextualize these practices, media-historical perspectives on aerial technologies such as hot air ballooning, homing pigeons, and kite flying are discussed, offering alternative genealogies of aerial sensing.
Kathrin Maurer is Full Professor of Culture and Technology at the University of Southern Denmark and leader of the Center for Culture and Technology. She was the PI of Drone Imaginaries and Communities (a research cluster sponsored by the Danish Research Council) and is the current PI of The Aesthetics of Biomachines and the Question of Life (a research cluster sponsored by the Velux Foundations). She is the author of The Sensorium of the Drone and Communities (MIT Press, 2023, open access) and has published widely on drone warfare, visual culture, and nineteenth-century historicism and literature (Visualizing History: The Power of the Image in Nineteenth-Century Historicism, Walter de Gruyter, 2013; Visualizing War: Emotions, Technology, and Communities, Routledge, 2017; Military Drone Imaginaries and the Power of Vision, Manchester University Press, 2021).
