In this performance, a pair of 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.
The piece is staged in an empty industrial area in Brooklyn over the course of a few summer evenings, with the actual flights taking place in the last half-hour before sunset each night. There are snacks and drinks and the atmostphere of a picnic or feast, with the quadcopters buzzing away in the background - or at least, buzzing away until their motors stop and they fall, roughly once every 90 seconds during the performance. It’s hard to frame this as a “performance” because there is no arc, no development to a climax, that happens over the course of the loops.
I’m most interested in how the tenor of the evening is charged by the swoons - each one is momentarily breathtaking/heartstopping, an unequivocal moment of displaced peril, but the accumulated effect of repeated swoons is…mundane? Acceptable? The same sort of overlookable miracle as in that painting you’ve seen.
In terms of materiality, working with open-source autopilot software is illuminating - the interventions needed here are both brutal and nuanced, since many aspects of the flight control software are dedicated to preventing the exact kind of plummet that is the focus of the piece. I quite like that there’s a split-consciousness at work that is absent from/antithetical to conventional 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, one of introspection and auto-proprioception, 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.