ARCH_500-600 Options Studio: ‘Eye Spy with My Machine Eye’

“There are eyes everywhere. No blind spot left. What shall we dream of when everything becomes visible?”

 

—Paul Virilio

 

Among the high-rise council estate towers in London, a network of surveillance drones scans, surveils, monitors and records the residents within. Two teenagers, each held within the confines of their respective towers by police order, communicate surreptitiously by co-opting the same technology that separates them. Jazz snatches one of the security drones from her balcony; she hacks and personalizes it to pass love notes across the estate skies to her boyfriend Tamir. The police drones intercept their communication and document the violations. Despite oppressive surveillance, the lovers find freedom in this brief moment of subversion. Young and Maughan’s drone-generated film, “In the Robot Skies” (2016), explores the social, cultural, global and urban implications and complexities of drone technology as it enters civil space. Their films are extrapolations gleaned from our present-day world but seen anew—and through—the anonymous gaze of the machine eye.

 

An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) drops a smart bomb over an Afghan village: “point, click, kill, forget.” Hovering above an agricultural field, drones produce precise 3D maps for soil analysis and generate data for irrigation. An Amazon drone delivers flowers to the stoop of a New York brownstone while an Uber drone drops the owner at her doorstep. Police drones surveil a riotous crowd in search of perpetrators. Drones navigate the site of an earthquake to aid rescuers on the ground. A drone peeks through a tenth-story window, watching and recording a private family moment. This ubiquitous aerial eye can operate benignly with the tenderness and empathy of Wenders’ angels or voyeuristically like Hitchock’s protagonist in “Rear Window” (1954)—or with the maliciousness of the panipticon gaze found in Orwell’s dystopia, “1984” (1949). Drones can also offer a platform for new forms of agency and creativity.

 

“As we [drones] become cheaper and more ubiquitous, my view is being democratized. Now, I am an infrastructure with a new type of agency. I am a new perspective on the world … I tell the stories of who you have become in a modern world.”

 

—Liam Young

 

In Superflux’s film, “Drone Aviary” (2015), “the drones become protagonists, revealing fleeting glimpses of the city from their perspective, as they continuously collect data and perform tasks. It hints at a world where the ‘network’ begins to gain physical autonomy, moving through and making decisions about the world … A speculative map highlights where physical and digital infrastructures merge as our cities become the natural habitat for ‘smart’ technologies.” Cities will be transformed by stratified aerial “infrastructure” relieving ground transports. Architectural space will privilege a range of aerial points of view; rethink relationships between private, public and really public zones; and accommodate drone entry and housing.

 

This studio will experiment with new typologies, spatialities and visualities through the design of an Urban Droneport and Cross-disciplinary Drone Research Lab to be located along the Mississippi River from the MacArthur Bridge at Chouteau’s landing to the near north riverfront.

 

“Are you looking back at me? Can you see me watching you watching me, watching you?”

 

—Liam Young