This paper adopts a geosemiotics perspective to the study of top-down views produced by drone hobbyists to explore how they challenge or disrupt traditional meanings associated with verticality. Using a dataset of 748 drone visuals collected from two months of participant observation on social media platforms, we identify four unique functions of top-down views: as abstract art, as transformations of the mundane, as playful mapping and as dronies. Through prototypical examples, we demonstrate how civilian drones have created new forms of visualising and embodying our world, acting as intermediaries between humans and nature and, thus, challenging persisting negative associations of the link between verticality and power. Overall, our findings encourage a reappraisal of the drone as an object and see it instead as a complex material assemblage of the sky, which has the ability to extend our perception, modify our geographical imaginations and multiply our possible interpretations of the top-down view.

本文采用地理符号学的视角来研究无人机爱好者制作的自上而下的视图，以探索他们如何挑战或破坏与垂直性相关的传统意义。使用从参与者在社交媒体平台上两个月的观察中收集的 748 幅无人机视觉数据集，我们确定了自上而下视图的四种独特功能：作为抽象艺术、作为平凡的转变、作为有趣的映射和作为无人机。通过原型示例，我们展示了民用无人机如何创造新的可视化和体现我们世界的形式，充当人类与自然之间的中介，从而挑战垂直性和权力之间联系的持续负面联系。全面的，