In this performance, three custom quadcopters climb to a certain height and then cut power to their own motors, freefalling until the last moment before they hit the ground; they restore power and re-stabilize, and then rise again to repeat this pattern indefinitely.
For the devices, they exist in a bistable state, flip-flopping between serene order and perilous chaos.
For the observer, the piece places at its forefront the question of how keenly can we perceive these controls, how might we recognize (or even empathize) with a robotic system that evinces these moments of giddy/vertiginous abandon?
There’s a split-consciousness at work here that is different from most autonomous systems - most systems that encounter the unknown (new terrain, new waypoints, new forces and loading) have a highly-developed rubric for working out the next process, the next iteration of the OODA loop. Here, the loop is intentionally interrupted at a critical point, while a parallel process, an observation process, becomes paramount, intervening at the last moment before disaster.
At the end of his essay on Sophie Calle’s Suite Venitienne, Baudrillard writes about the act of swooning:
Nothing is more beautiful, since swooning is at once the experience of overwhelming pleasure...
Please follow me.
…I began work on this piece interested not in imparting an essentially human condition onto a quadcopter, but instead curious as to how the hopelessly contingent, utterly alien X form of the drone could still engender in its audience some qualities that are fully and only human.
This piece was created as part of the Cornell Tech Backslash Fellowship of 2024-2025.
Special thanks to Mario Yang, Tobi Wienberg, and Prof. Wendy Ju.