“DRONES HAVE SCULPTED A LIKENESS OF SOREN KIERKEGAARD FROM CUMULONIMBUS CLOUDS” reads one nugget from the horde of golden tweets from @DroneInsertion, a Twitter account which parodies the hyperbole common across the saturation of news stories on the growth of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Drone assassinations, government drones spying on you while you sleep, drones moving Illuminati secrets to and from Dan Brown’s office – well, it’s all starting to drone on. The majority of people don’t even know what drones are, or what they’re capable of. In fact, those who spend their Saturday mornings building their own approximations of the crafts in their garden sheds aren’t sure either.
The basics: a drone may come in a miscellany of shapes, but to be defined as a UAV it must be a remotely piloted airborne craft, with a degree of autonomous control (via GPS). Their uses for now include surveillance and reconnaisance, fertilizing crops, rescue, and yes – killing terrorists. DIY drones are regularly controlled by iPads or Androids by their builders, and most often include remote sensors, and a payload – i.e. the option of real time video transmission, and are not made for commercial or military purposes.
Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine and henchman of DIYdrones.com (the website which, if not the genesis of the homebuilt drone, is certainly the lynchpin in its exodus to nerds the world over), describes the boom in interest as “one of those fundamental democratization moments, where technology that used to be expensive, proprietary, even secret is out there. Once the technology is out there not only can people use it for their own purposes, but also discover entirely new purposes we haven’t thought of. Personal computers do things that IBMs were never meant for. The internet was built for military purposes, and now we use it for our own. Likewise for aerial robotics, or drones.”
That’s the hacker mentality down to a tee. The Science Gallery’s current Hack The City program features two different drone-based experiments. Liam Young’s Electronic Countermeasures plays with the use of drones as a vessel for ad hoc communications networks, an increasingly topical use since the Pirate Bay announced plans to host its servers on drones. Remote storage of data allows it to escape the legislation of one particular jurisdiction, and while popping all your Breaking Bad .avis on a hard drive and giving them to your friend is still a far, far easier task, the theoretical implications of the project are far-reaching, a possible future answer for the information age’s most challenging riddles concerning the ownership of data.
Other complex puzzles are arising from the friction between old laws and new technology; the ownership of space, and questions of privacy. Hack The City’s Loitering Theatre, a project run by visual artist Nina McGowan, and filmmaker and digital rights expert Caroline Campbell, illuminated this tension. Using a light-weight augmented reality-geared Parrot drone, the pair created a film that pried into Dublin’s inaccessible spaces. The end product, scored by Philip Stewart, is fascinating viewing, snooping into abandoned buildings, hovering around Facebook HQ, and giving the viewer a POV of Daniel O’Connell’s carved face. But the lessons learned in the process of making it are more essential.
Campbell says Loitering Theatre offered “a new critical view, a view that is quite privileged. You’re either a high-flying individual with a personal helicopter, or you have access to a security camera, or you’re at the top of the IFSC.” McGowan underlines that the point of the project was to “break out of the human perspective on the street – we’re corralled through these passageways that are either commercially or security orientated – they’re trying to keep you in or keep you out. We wanted to bypass that somehow – if you’ve got a different vantage point of the city, would that expand the potential for a hack?”
Campbell and McGowan take me out for a test run of their Parrot. What’s striking about the vehicle is that, through its innate steadiness (clement weather depending) and the intuitiveness of human control they appear, to the casual observer, sentient. It hovers with purpose, and it can, of course, see you (until, of course, some dope from Totally Dublin crashes it into a bridge wall), and before long a crowd has gathered to gawk.
Unsurprising then, that Loitering Theatre attracted the attention of the some angry security guards and the Garda S√≠och√°na. Nina says “We got in trouble with the coppers because they don’t even know what to make of it, how to handle the legal aspects.” Not that it was the end of the world – When were dealing with the police here, the guy in charge of aviation policing who went through our footage told us that it looked great.”
Aviation Authority guidelines are tight when it comes to flying, but are mainly designed for RC enthusiasts who might get a bit too stratospheric with their helicopters. The relative newness of drones makes them difficult to police. Chris Anderson explains that “privacy is not largely policed on an international level, but on a local or federal one, different communites have different standards. We already have Google cars going by, and Google airplanes overhead, you don’t have an expectation of privacy from satellites.” On the subject of legislation he says “I think one size doesn’t fit all in privacy, in real life or online. I wouldn’t come up with a rule on privacy, but as with anything else, people need to be informed as to what the consequences might be to these things, and also look at the upsides – we all like our Google Maps.”
While commercial use is not typically allowed, there’s a great deal of speculation as to how this might develop. Domino’s Pizza Delivery Drone to your window dispatched from Dundrum? The more exciting aspect of the delivery element of drones is in the medical and rescue sphere, with distribution of pharmaceuticals to the disabled or aid to the stranded hypothesized uses. Anderson points out a likely development in the entertainment industry: “an infinite camera boom controlled by just lines on an iPad is becoming interesting”. There are even aesthetic possibilities – a recent Saatchi & Saatchi funded project that premiered at Cannes showcased sixteen quadrotor drones choreographed to perform an arresting laser ballet to the music of Oneohtrix Point Never.
Right now though, the future of drones is all up in the air. DIY drones are most commonly just a hobby, or a fun toy dad’s buy from Amazon “for the kids”. Nina McGowan notes that “They appeal to the boys, there’s that military aspect to them. They’re seen as something that’s really sexy, but somebody told us calling our thing a drone was akin to throwing glitter on a turd.”
Want to make your own UAV? Hit up DIYdrones.com for parts and labour.
Check out more Loitering Theatre work here.
