dances with drones: MIA and Eleven Play (Japan)

Two more examples of drones in pop culture:

MIA has just released a new, self-directed video, of her song "Double Bubble Trouble" from the album Matangi. It's another one of MIA's patented full-of-radical-gestures and a wild stew of images. The main issues she seems to raise are "violence" -- and the danger that this might proliferate as guns are made with 3D printers -- and drones -- which in the vid seem to be both agents of surveillance and targeted killings. (There is a quick shot of a poster on a wall that says: "Drone Survival Guide.") The drones that circle above the dancers at the end of the video are in the shape of peace signs. And MIA warns us that "1984 is Now." Go watch it, see what you think, MIA puts these things out there to raise controversy and discussion, as far as I can tell.

And then there's this beautiful and much more easily read drone dance from the Japanese troupe Eleven Play (courtesy Dangerous Minds). And I think Dangerous Minds says it all: [the troupe] manages to utilize drone technology for art and beauty, while simultaneously depicting all of its potential insidiousness. At first the dancers interact cautiously and experimentally with the drones, then the machines become more active and more threatening. With no control over the increasingly volatile technology, the women flee the stage in fear. In the end, the only ones left dancing are the drones themselves. 

And the Palestinians in Gaza who live with Israeli drones constantly in the air call them: zanana. 

Meaning variously, "a wife’s relentless nagging", or "to nag with drone-like talk."

drone life Gaza: zenana

By Jonathan Cook, via Richard Falk, on the "unfolding tragedy of Gaza."

Drones are increasingly being used for surveillance and extra-judicial execution in parts of the Middle East, especially by the US, but in nowhere more than Gaza has the drone become a permanent fixture of life. More than 1.7 million Palestinians, confined by Israel to a small territory in one of the most densely populated areas in the world, are subject to near continual surveillance and intermittent death raining down from the sky.

There is little hope of escaping the zenana – an Arabic word referring to a wife’s relentless nagging that Gazans have adopted to describe the drone’s oppressive noise and their feelings about it. According to statistics compiled by human rights groups in Gaza, civilians are the chief casualties of what Israel refers to as “surgical” strikes from drones.

 An unmanned aerial vehicle (Photo: Israel Aerospace Industries)

An earlier post on Israeli drones over Gaza and surfing as a way to avoid them stated that "zanana" translated as mosquito.

Ha'aretz wrote in 2010 that Gazans "have begun using the slang word zanana to also refer to those Gazans who report to the Hamas authorities what people say and do, with whom they meet, who visits them, and whose brother has gone to Ramallah."

The Washington Post in 2011 wrote this: "Roughly translated, zenana means buzz. But in neighboring Egypt, a source of Gaza custom and culture, the term is slang used to describe a relentlessly nagging wife."

I guess it could be all those things. And deadly. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.