For our Totally Legit 2025 festival art installation we are gearing up for DRAGONSPY! We put together this proposal for a Burning Man letter of interest but are hoping to take it around a few events this summer, including Electric Sky and Critical Northwest, and then hopefully find it a more permanent home. This is a very future-forward, tech-heavy kinetic project with programmable LEDs and motors, holographic fans, video streaming, and AI in the video stream. We wanted to do something “ubergeek” this year.
Project Summary
The DragonSpy is a kinetic, mechanical dragonfly with a 7-foot wingspan made of fans and animated LEDs. As it hovers and circles around you, the all-seeing DragonSpy reflects upon your future selves through its faceted, compound gaze and shares its vision to others through remote radio communication.
Physical Description
The DragonSpy is designed to convey the notion of a large, mechanical, dragonfly-shaped drone from the future. The frame of this kinetic sculpture will be fabricated out of plasma-cut aluminum, with LEDs and holo fans embedded in the wings, animated to indicate dragonfly-like movement. Large half-sphere eyes will be composed of hexagonal facets, upon which are rear-projected a live video stream of the observed person, transformed, replicated and fragmented onto the facets. The DragonSpy will be suspended from an articulated robot arm – like a mini crane – that will provide two degrees of movement, including drone-like hovering up and down, and then circling around the person it is observing. A remote viewing pedestal will share with others the video stream collected by the DragonSpy.
Physical Dimensions
The DragonSpy will be 7 feet in wing-span width, 7 feet in head-to-toe length, and 3 feet in height. Adding the stand, the project will be 15 feet in height, and 15 feet in diameter.
Interactivity
From a distance, the DragonSpy looks like a large dragonfly. As participants approach, they realize it’s more like a sci-fi drone. Getting close, it turns toward them and starts circling around overheard. If they try to touch, it moves away. Looking up, they realize they can see themselves in its many faceted eyes. “It’s sees me” one declares with delight! Realizing the video is being shared on a pedestal nearby, they think, oh, it’s a spy drone.
Philosophy
Technology has transformed not only how we interact with others, but how we experience ourselves. With this installation, we seek to convey our complex relationship with ubiquitous, streaming video in our lives as both a friendly, assistive technology, but also a vehicle for surveillance and misinformation. On the one hand, the drone has been made into a friendly, pretty dragonfly, like a buddy that hovers over your shoulder, with its ever-present gaze pleasing the narcissistic self with images of who we are and who we can be. On the other hand, suspended from a sinister robotic arm, its ever-present gaze is recording your every move, and sharing it with other people – or other entities – who may not have your best interests at heart. A tiny moment of delight has been captured to serve a much larger purpose in a monumental digital cloud that is beyond our human-scale comprehension – and in many cases aggregating and transforming our video streams to meet other, nefarious agendas.
Estimated Total Budget (in material costs)
13500