In the Robot Skies: A drone Love Story Join us for an expanded cinema performance and film premiere of In the Robot Skies at the London Film Festival on October 8th, with live music accompaniment from acclaimed electronic producer Forest Swords. Buy tickets here http://ift.tt/2d51yFJ Directed by speculative architect Liam Young and written by fiction author Tim Maughan, In the Robot Skies is the world’s first narrative shot entirely through autonomous pre programmed drones. In collaboration with the Embedded and Artificially intelligent Vision Lab in Belgium the film is captured by a specially developed flock of camera drones each with their own set of cinematic rules and behaviours. The film explores the drone as a cultural object, not just as a new instrument of visual story telling but also as the catalyst for a new collection of urban sub cultures. In the way the New York subway car of the 80’s gave birth to a youth culture of wild style graffiti and hip hop the age of ubiquitous drones as smart city infrastructure will create a new network of surveillance activists and drone hackers. From the eyes of the drones we see two teenagers each held by police order within the digital confines of their own council estate tower block in London. A network of drones survey the council estates, as a roving flock off cctv cameras and our two characters are kept apart by this autonomous aerial infrastructure. We watch as they pass notes to each other via their own hacked and decorated drone, like kids in an old fashioned classroom, scribbling messages with biro on paper, balling it up and stowing it in their drones.. In this near future city drones form both agents of state surveillance but also become co-opted as the aerial vehicles through which two teens fall in love. Directed by Liam Young Written By Tim Maughan Starring Maia Watkins and Moe Bargahi Produced by Dani Admiss Music by Forest Swords Director of Photography Vini Curtis Drone Costumes by Jennifer Chen Human Costumes by Maharishi Camera Drone pilot Liam Young Tethered Character Drone Pilot Denis Stretton Special Thanks Alexey Marfin Commissioned by Channel 4 Random Acts and STUK, Belgium. IN THE ROBOT SKIES TEASER liam young
A slump in oil, gas and other commodity prices over the past two years has left lower helicopter prices in its wake. In economies like Brazil’s, which are heavily reliant on volatile commodities prices, demand for corporate use copters has grown soft. And while companies that extract natural resources often rely on choppers to survey prospective mines and oilfields, they’ve recently been warming to drones, which can be less expensive. “The civil and parapublic [helicopter] market still looks pretty awful,” Thomas Enders, chief executive of Airbus Group, said during an earnings call last month. Airbus produces about a quarter of the world’s rotorcrafts, according to Forecast International, an aerospace-market research firm. Helicopters generally hold their value much better than cars. The latest downturn is notable because rotorcraft production has declined—an important gauge of demand, since producers often have buyers lined up when the parts come together on the factory floor. Global rotorcraft production will likely total just 1,050 in 2016, which would be the fewest in at least a decade, according to Forecast International.
“A poster bearing the image of a Pakistani girl whose parents, lawyers say, were killed in a drone strike, lies in a field at an undisclosed location in the northwestern Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province. A group of artists in Pakistan are hoping to generate “empathy” among US drone operators by placing giant posters of children in the country’s troubled tribal regions”
Photos are lies because art is a lie. Art is artifice. Art makes things as they are not—occasionally in the service of greater truths […] To get a “true” photo, you need to remove artifice. This means removing art. Art’s opposite is bulk surveillance. Drones, CCTV, ultra-fast-ultra-high-res DSLR, our fingers stroking our iPhones or tapping at Google Glass. Omnipresent cameras suction up reality without curation. We’re at the finest time in history to see stars, or anyone, photographed looking like hell.
The drone operates less like an RC plane and more like a Roomba. You can define an area of interest on a laptop, beam it to the eBee, and then just toss the drone in the air where it will autonomously collect imagery. Within 40 minutes, the drone took 225 photos covering 100 acres from an altitude of 120 meters. Larger areas of 2,500 acres and more are possible, but this was sufficient for our needs.
Dronestagram posts images from Google Maps Satellite view to Instagram, and syndicates this feed to Tumblr and Twitter, along with short summaries of each site. You can follow Dronestagram at any of these locations. Most of the records of strikes so far are drawn from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which compiles reports from Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.
Today, a new generation of practitioners his emerged who are monitoring and critiquing the use of drones not only for military purposes, but also for civilian activities. Their hallmark is a playful curiosity, about how these technologies may be integrated into our daily lives. Working in parallel to the growing movement of UAVers, the ham radio operators of the drone world, these artists and makers, are hacking freely available UAV technology to create unusual aerial antics. But whilst these blithe, inquiring actions are needed and valid, in the meantime, the drone-war continues, with hundreds of civilians killed each year, its remit ever expanding. It would seem that now more than ever, robust critical, tactical media interventions, are urgently required.
Although I am truly fascinated by what sorts of optical landmarks might yet be developed for field-testing the optical capabilities of drones, as if the world might soon be peppered with opthalmic infrastructure for self-training autonomous machines, it is also quite intriguing to realize that these calibration targets are, in effect, ruins, obsolete sensory hold-overs from an earlier age of film-based cameras and less-powerful lenses. Calibrating nothing, they are now just curious emblems of a previous generation of surveillance technology, robot-readable hieroglyphs whose machines have all moved on.
