An interactive exhibition part of the Cambridge Festival

24 March - 11 April 2025, 10am-5pm

Atrium, Alison Richards Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DP

Dronotope: The Politics of Timelines and Data Visualisations

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 and policy preferences. For instance, 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.

How can we use data visualisations and timelines self-reflexively to tell more diverse stories about disruptive technologies? In this interactive exhibition, the Centre for Drones and Culture invites the public 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.

The exhibition runs from 24 March to 11 April 2025.

If you’re in Cambridge, please join us for the launch of Dronotope on 27 March 2025, 1-2pm, where the research team will speak about the work behind the timeline and the exhibition over drinks and refreshments.