micro air vehicles

Recent prototype of the Harvard Microrobotic Fly, a three-centimeter wingspan flapping-wing robot. (Credit: Ben Finio, The Harvard Microrobotics Lab)

The following "article" appeared on TerraDaily, a digest of ecology-oriented reports and snippets. While what and who is behind the website begs investigation, the entity and intentions behind this report are clear enough. It is reposted here as a social fact; critical reflection follows on in the next post.

Tiny MAVs May Someday Explore And Detect Environmental Hazards

by Maria Callier
Air Force Office of Scientific Research

Arlington VA (AFNS) Sep 16, 2010

Air Force Office of Scientific Research-sponsored researcher, Dr. Robert Wood of Harvard University is leading the way in what could become the next phase of high-performance micro air vehicles for the Air Force.

His basic research is on track to evolve into robotic, insect-scale devices for monitoring and exploration of hazardous environments, such as collapsed structures, caves and chemical spills.

"We are developing a suite of capabilities which we hope will lead to MAVs that exceed the capabilities of existing small aircraft. The level of autonomy and mobility we seek has not been achieved before using robotic devices on the scale of insects," said Wood.

Wood and his research team are trying to understand how wing design can impact performance for an insect-size, flapping-wing vehicle. Their insights will also influence how such agile devices are built, powered and controlled.

"A big emphasis of our AFOSR program is the experimental side of the work," said Wood. "We have unique capabilities to create, flap and visualize wings at the scales and frequencies of actual insects."

The researchers are constructing wings and moving them at high frequencies recreating trajectories similar to those of an insect. They are also able to measure multiple force components, and they can observe fluid flow around the wings flapping at more than 100 times per second.

Performing experiments at such a small scale presents significant engineering challenges beyond the study of the structure-function relationships for the wings.

"Our answer to the engineering challenges for these experiments and vehicles is a unique fabrication technique we have developed for creating wings, actuators, thorax and airframe at the scale of actual insects and evaluating them in fluid conditions appropriate for their scale," he said.

They are also performing high-speed stereoscopic motion tracking, force measurements and flow visualization; the combination of which allows for a unique perspective on what is going on with these complex systems.

The original article on TerraDaily.

drones of disaster (2): eco-erotics perverted

"A million technocrats are diligently plotting death and some of them even know it." (Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow)

The playful imitation of nature relates to nature without dominating it: mimesis, sublated in the forms and impulses of art, performs the promise of nature’s liberation. This idea is what Benjamin and Adorno tried to rescue from Romantic aesthetics. Adorno retains mimesis as an irreducible moment of play within negative dialectics, or thinking rigorously oriented toward non-identity. Mimesis becomes a principle guiding rigorous imagination, that attentive immersion in non-conceptuals, singularities and particulars that releases the social truth of objects without bombing and gassing them.

If astonishment at nature inspired early science, its modernist form, struggling to liberate thought from superstition, aimed to repress all traces of play within its own methods. Under capital, mimesis returns as one more means of domination. The dragon-slayers went to work for the dragons, and dragonflies droned airborne from the labs of engineers.

Over the skies of the walled border with Mexico no less than in the Afghan mountains and flooded valleys of Pakistan, we are seeing where this leads. The war machine has let slip its dreaming of bee-sized killer drones, and already some years have passed since we heard tell of strange dragonflies shadowing antiwar demonstrations. Knowing well how the Pentagon takes its dreams for reality, we can feel the chill in the warming air.

And as always, every leap in domination is sold to us as its opposite. In the aftermath of Hiroshima, the US state used the promise of the “peace atom” to mystify the terror of the “war atom.”

All these processes are legible in the short and glowing report that appeared on a remarkable website called TerraDaily (“news about planet earth”). It is re-posted in full above, minus the ads by Google. Are you worried about the biosphere? Have you been sensitized to the global threat? Be reassured, rare and gifted minds are at work at Harvard and Los Alamos. This little gadget, miracle of nano-science, epitomizes the good micro-robotics. This is “research on track to evolve into insect-scale devices for monitoring and exploration of hazardous environments, such as collapsed structures, caves and chemical spills.” Don’t be alarmed that the sponsor of this project and employer of the "journalist" is the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Science is humane, after all; it will rescue us from hazardous environments, whether or not it was instrumental in producing them in the first place.

Everything about this report betrays the perverting of eco-erotics, the channeling capture of the legitimate human longing to be reconciled with exploited and dominated nature. Militarized and capitalized, science forfeits its notion of truth as liberation; in its place is the correspondence between the means and end of domination. But the untruth of antagonism, which the given production produces at every level, remains the glaring truth about the global social process. In that process, nature is no less commodified and exploited than labor power, and with reverberations that are no less planetary. But even perverted, mimesis preserves a promise of reconciliation – freedom, sensual happiness and the liberation of inner and outer nature.

But only as a promise. Its realization is the real struggle from below.

drones of disaster (1)

From Sindh province, Pakistan, a report that the left bank of the flooding Indus River was deliberated breached, inundating a heavily-populated district and displacing millions - in order to protect the covert US terminator drone base on the right bank. So alleges writer, filmmaker and former UN Goodwill Ambassador Feryal Ali Gauhar on Democracy Now (13 September 2010). 

If this can be proved or supported with compelling evidence, the staggering cynicism it exposes would, one can only hope, irreparably discredit Obama's robotic "war on terror." Who knows about this allegation? Will corporate media "investigate" a military-social disaster within a "natural disaster" that has already disappeared behind the indifference of Northern spectators? Will those who know dare to speak, after Bradley Manning and Wikileaks? Will some independent filmmaker find support for such a perilous task? Sindh province, where enforcement holds sway, is after all a very dangerous place. And the danger is objective and specific: how to make enforcement accountable (and to whom?) precisely where it operates lethally with most minimal accountability? Make a fuss? Less complicated, to take the Pentagon's word for it, move on, put it out of mind. The obstacles to reaching and broadcasting the truth belong to the essence of state terror today.

Meanwhile, amid the distraction of Islamophobic episodes, 14 antiwar activists are going on trial in Nevada for holding a nonviolent protest vigil outside Creech Air Force base, the oldest in the rapidly expanding network of bases from which Predator and Reaper drones are flown by joystick...

GR

Transcript:

AMY GOODMAN: Feryal Ali Gauhar, welcome to Democracy Now! It’s interesting to go from Kathy Kelly in Nevada, who’s talking about this protest at Creech, where one of the drone programs is based, to your experience of the flooded areas in Pakistan. Can you talk about the connection?

FERYAL ALI GAUHAR: Well, yes, there is a very real connection, although that’s not the only element that we’re concerned about. But it is well known, if not acknowledged by — particularly by the state, that the base for the drones, where they’re housed before they are automated, is in Pakistan. The current government has literally gone blue in the face denying that.

But I just happened to stumble across a contractor — and that’s not the Blackwater contractor — the contractor who built the base, who inadvertently, actually, spoke about it. But he was speaking about it in a different context, and that context was the fact that he was there at the time of the flooding — and, you know, this is the worst catastrophe to have hit any state since apparently biblical times. So, he actually mentioned to me that the River Indus, which is one of the largest rivers in the world, carrying now a volume of water which has not been known in contemporary history, was breached on the left bank deliberately in order to protect the base, which is on the right bank. And the breaching caused, consequentially, the inundation of an entire district, which resulted in the displacement of millions, not thousands, but millions, because we have 170 million people in the country, and this particular district is one of the most densely populated. So, yes, there is a connect between, you know, what is considered to be a natural disaster, but then the management of that disaster is not natural at all.

AMY GOODMAN: And this is a base that is used, run by US military, to run its drone attacks?

FERYAL ALI GAUHAR: Oh, absolutely. In fact, it is a base where non-US military personnel are not allowed. 

beyond enforcement

Beyond Enforcement:

Traversing State Terror and the Politics of Fear

by Gene Ray

Crises arrive, as if from somewhere, fall like night, bear down, take hold, bite like jaws of teeth, squeeze like vises, break like storms or bubbles: effects ripple pitilessly, positions crumble, assets vanish in a spreading slippage, a sucking from below, an awful culling of the weak and exposed. Planetary meltdowns loom, impend.  Economies grow, and slow, but must grow, must be made to grow, to expand, spiraling incessantly, an immense entwining of flows, the dance of commodities, the “ever new production of the always-the-same.” And resources deplete, oil produced over millennia is turned to fume in two centuries, atoms are split, waste accumulates, like a darkening shadow, a hovering toxin, another ghost of capital. And still the frenzied racing, the rivaled eyeing, muscles flexing, markets judging, terminal arsenals still on fifteen-minute alert, a world awash in arms, skies filling with terminator drones.

    

Within a given social process, a field of forces and relations in motion, one generated tendency becomes a dominant, mastering logic. One antagonistic logic, a calculus of advantage, a mode of instrumental reason joined to a relation of domination, spreads, expanding its field, overtaking, overwhelming, deranging, pulverizing, liquidating whatever constrains it, consolidating, entrenching, and becomes global – the master logic of a global social process. And reason thereby recoils, becomes unreason, hostile and heedless, eating its own tail. Capitalist modernity and the social world, ours, it has produced: a world turned against its producers escapes all control, is seen finally to have been a terminal, omnicidal logic, busily, blindly undermining its own conditions, the ecological basis, biosphere, the condition of life on earth.

war porn (2): interpellation

An everyday massacre, the obscene reality of occupation.

In New Baghdad on the twelfth of July 2007, death rained down from the 30mm cannons of two Apache gunships. (And let us not miss the history of blood and original accumulation condensed in that linguistic expropriation: a name stolen from a people who symbolize indigenous resistance is now the trophy-scalp decorating a flying weapons platform of US Army Air Cavalry, successors of the horseback troopers who chased Geronimo.)

The problem of enjoyment – of “war porn” – in this video released through WikiLeaks is glaring: the images of a dozen people slaughtered from the air do not in themselves exclude fantasmatic identifications with the voices heard and, through them, with the power of these weapons and the war machine as such. Similar images, seen countless times in the entertaining fodder of the cinema of war, erode the power to hold apart fiction and real killing.

There is a habitual structure of projective identification activated here that holds out something like a spectatorial path of least resistance. It tends to suck us in and place us, so that we assume a certain position and point of view in the antagonistic scenario. And this of course is exactly how movies and video games work. The template of entertainment matches the actual massacre.

Watching this video aligns us, like it or not, with the occupier's gaze, the soldiers' gunsights - behind which, the god's eye vantage of fantasmatic power. (The cameras of the murdered journalists would give us a very different vantage and image: see the negative presentation below.)

The fantasy of omnipotence is of course only a fantasy: the murderous paranoia of the soldiers, seeing weapons and enemies everywhere, betrays this clearly. Such paranoia is structurally produced by the occupation itself: they are manifesting the survival imperatives of occupiers (which does damage to them as well). But the ethical lapse this entails is mirrored and encouraged by the structure and template of the video image. The fantasy of absolute power that activates these alignments sets up the possible enjoyment for spectators.

Even if - consciously, ethically, politically - we refuse with a fitting revulsion the point of view offered, the fantasy lure of power never ceases to call to us in ways we can't be certain we don't respond to unconsciously. Enjoyment, in this sense, doesn't exclude the displeasure of revulsion.

Ethical corruption and the attrition of outrage thus accompany such images, along with disgust and indignation. We're obligated to see and absorb this video, in order to witness what's being done. At the same time, we need to resist and palpate its insidious lures. Here as everywhere else, we have to struggle for our humanity.

WikiLeaks has undertaken with courage and diligence the tasks of decrypting exposure abandoned by a mainstream journalism castrated by its corporate owners. For that, it is under attack by numerous states and agencies, including the Pentagon – as even the New York Times acknowledged on 17 March.

In the struggles to resist neo-imperialism, the info wars remain a crucial battleground. Under conditions of integrated spectacle and stupefying concentrations of corporate power, access to truth and counter-images is fundamental. And we’re going to have to fight for it, as the blow US courts struck this week to the principle of net neutrality should alert us.

Photo is from Gardez, Afghanistan, on the wake of the 12 February killing of five people, including two pregnant women, by US Special Forces.

Glenn Greenwald reports on the campaign against WikiLeaks, the growing fury over the posted video of the 2007 massacre, and the politics of net neutrality in a series of articles for salon.com.

On Democracy Now! Amy Goodman goes over the video with WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange. Families of the victims respond.

A more rigorous analysis of the video in context with Assange on Al Jazeera, 19 April.

war porn (1): joysticks

When quantity passes into quality, the whole situational context is altered and a new situation emerges.

As demonstrations of new powers of genocidal violence and state terror, Auschwitz and Hiroshima were qualitative leaps of this kind. These new social facts entered history, objectively changing everything.

The scale of the Nazi genocide, meticulously planned and accounted for behind a veil of Nacht und Nebel, was only retrospectively exposed.

The vast Manhattan Project that developed the first nuclear weapons on secret presidential order was kept from the American public until the weapons were actually used; Truman triumphantly announced the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as a fait accompli.

Today, right now, we are living through another qualitative leap in the power of terror and death. But unlike these precedents, this leap has just begun and can still be stopped.

This one, if it is not stopped, will likely be the real legacy of the dirty so-called war on terror.

Without shame or apologies, Obama of the Nobel Peace Prize is presiding over a rapid escalation in the force of unmanned drones used by the US military and CIA for surveillance and assassination in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Yemen.

Introduced by Bush II in tiny numbers, there are now an estimated 7000 drones in operation – and the number is rising fast.

Bomb and missile-carrying drones such as the MQ-1 Predator (cost: $20 million per system) and MQ-9 Reaper ($53 million each) are flown by “joysticks” from air-conditioned rooms in Langley, Virginia, and Creech Air Force Base north of Las Vegas. “War porn,” the troops call it.

 A small number of defense contractors, including Boeing subsidiary Insitu and General Atomics, will split the $3.5 billion allotted for drones in the 2010 budget.

To assassinate Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud on 5 August 2009, it took the CIA sixteen drone attempts over fifteen months, killing between 207 and 321 people in the process. How many were civilians? “Disputed,” but the war wagers are sure it’s worth it.

Evidently, so are Israel, Germany and the UK, all of which fly their own fleet of combat drones. Every state that can, obviously, will follow.

Is Finnegan awake? No paranoia needed, to read the writing on this screen.


Already in development: insect-size “nano” drones, which, The New Yorker reports, “can fly after their prey like a killer bee through an open window.”

Reflect on that, in the glare of the last decade. Reflect on the leap in objective power the state gains by this. Reflect on the state of “democracy” and the rule of exception. Can anyone doubt this will alter social reality and the possibilities for a future?

For now, it takes the appearance-form of assassination power (always with “collateral” killing) – but this obviously does not exhaust potential applications. (And again: where is the outrage and debate over this policy of assassination? Is it now already normalized?)

Reality: killer robotics will expand and combine with qualitative increases in powers of surveillance (think: merger of Google with the NSA) unless massive public outcry and determined protest prevent it.

For the moment, there’s still time to organize it.

Sources:
“Drones Are Lynchpin of Obama’s War on Terror,” dossier by Spiegel Online, 12 Mar 2010.

Interview with P.W. Singer (author of Wired for War), Democracy Now, 6 Feb 2009.

Jane Mayer, “The Predator War,” The New Yorker, 26 Oct 2009