Artist Dances With Drone And Turns The Interaction Into A 3D Printed Sculpture

Charon

Since they first captured the imagination of the public (and the press), drones have featured frequently in artists' work—grappling with the moral questions they raise and exploring their creative potential. Artist Sterling Crispin's new work Charon is a piece which involved Crispin programming a drone to fly autonomously in a motion capture lab so he could capture its flight path while it followed, attacked, and danced with him. After he tracked the drone's flight path he 3D printed a sculpture from the rendered interaction and displayed it on a flat screen TV.

"I think there are a lot of people interested in drones and autonomous systems and I've tried to approach the medium with some subtly and poetry, which I feel is often overlooked in favor of a more heavy handed and overtly military political read. Although, I still think that conversation is embedded in the work." Crispin says.

The resulting object is a tangled form representing the entwined relationship between man and machine, or what the artist calls "a physical embodiment of the tension between humans, robotic autonomous agents, and the virtual models which these agents rely on to understand the world."

By calling the piece Charon (the name of the ferryman in Hades) the artist conjures up the mythology related to the Greek underworld and sees it as symbolic of how drone culture has carried us into an entirely new world to the one we inhabited before. But the question remains: what will the place be like that we pitch up to when we reach the opposing shore?

It's a question that Crispin wants us to ponder:

As a civilization, and as a species, we have crossed the river Rubicon into uncharted territories from which we cannot return. These intelligent agents both embodied and disembodied, visible and invisible, physical and virtual, are surveilling, contemplating and evolving among us. The tension between the human, the Technological-Other and the alloself will define the 21st century. How will these entities reach beyond the limits of symbolization, and how will their emotional, psychological, and spiritual frameworks emerge?

In the video below you can see Crispin interacting with the drone.

@stewart23rd