10:00am-5:00pm on weekdays from Monday 24 March until Friday 11 April
Times shown are in GMT (UTC +0) up to the 26th March. For events on or after 27th March times are in BST (UTC +1).
Alison Richard Building, Groundfloor atrium space, Sidgwick Site 7 West Road, CB3 9DP
Timeline visualisations are increasingly prevalent in the public understanding of contemporary geopolitical issues, from the spread of COVID-19 to the numbers of forced migration, from the AI arms race to renewed nuclear proliferation. And yet all data visualisation conventions—whether bar graphs or line graphs, or 3D 'scrolly-telling' forms—shape how general users perceive and understand the topic being presented. Although visualisations are often presented as neutral, how data is engaged with may have consequential impacts on public perceptions, behaviour, and policy preferences.
Drawing attention to the underlying work that visualisations do—to the attitudes they may convey and impressions they may cultivate—this exhibit focuses on timeline visualisations of drone technology developments. Visualisations of emerging technologies tend to operate on an x-y axis of time and 'innovation', where a technology’s development is seen as linear, teleological, and progressive over time. However, this approach often suggests a kind of technological determinism or inevitability, potentially obscuring the many ways that a technology could have been otherwise and the way it is used for other purposes; drone technology, in particular, is marked by multiple experiments and failures which nuance its typical image as an all-powerful surveillant technology.
In this interactive exhibition, the Centre for Drones and Culture invites you to explore 3D 'volumetric' timelines of drone technology whose stories and histories change dynamically based on what data the user chooses to highlight. Exploring the technology's development across five strands -- war, regulation, technicities, humanitarianism and conservation, and civil and domestic 'integration' -- these unconventional timeline visualisations encourage open, playful, and pluralistic ways of thinking about and understanding our drone age. The interactivity also emphasises the fact that emerging technologies do not develop out of siloed sectors; user perceptions and attitudes to technology can and do shape how the technology is used, and where and whom it reaches.
