For our Totally Legit 2025 festival art installation we are gearing up for DRAGONSPY! We put together this proposal for a Burning Man grant application but are planning 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 really “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 wireless communication.
Artist Group
Totally Legit is a Seattle-based, interdisciplinary art group that has created large-scale, immersive installations both on and off the playa since 2009. Our projects often have futuristic themes and incorporate interactive sound and lighting, kinetic elements, animated LEDs, and steel or wood structures. We have brought two honorarium projects to Black Rock City: Steve the Robot Heaid (2009) and the Zymphonic Wormhole (2014). In 2020 we opened a collaborative art studio called Passable.
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 a mobile-like fulcrum on a post. The post and fulcrum poles will provide three degrees of movement, including drone-like hovering up and down, and then circling and spinning around the person the DragonSpy is observing. A remote viewing pedestal will share with others the video stream collected by the DragonSpy. Please note there will be NO video recording, or sharing of the video stream online or outside of Burning Man, which will be explained via a sign on the pedestal.
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 DragoFrom 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, 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 like a spy drone. The images of themselves they see in the DragonSpy eyes are transformed, invoking different colors and backgrounds suggesting it sees multiplied selves, past and future, in different contexts.
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.
How will you illuminate your art installation?
The wings of the DragonSpy will be lit and animated with controllable RGB LED strips. A colored spotlight will be projected onto the ground invitingly to encourage participants to stand where they will be best seen. The stand, the fulcrum pipes, and the pedestal will have uplit spot colored lights. All of these lights will be powered by our solar battery and solar panels. A separate ring of staked solar lights will define the perimeter to assure the project will be seen by art cars, walkers, and bikers as a safety measure in case there is a problem with the solar power.
Environmental Sustainability Details
In 2023 we decided as a team to commit to designing and building projects that are feasible with solar power. Our camp has been run on solar power for two years now and we have all received training on how to use renewable energy in art through a class in Seattle provided by Bruce Cooper from the RAT program. Based on our estimated power requirement estimates, included in our power planning for the DragonSpy project are two batteries, four solar panels, and a solar charge controller. This should be sufficient to keep the DragonSpy powered through the night. We recycle materials where we can, and will be repurposing steel used in a past project for the fulcrum pipes.
Estimated Total Budget
$16,798 total, $15,726 without starlink component. Budget includes cost of space rental for 3 months and transportation. Without space, transpo, and starlink, material costs alone of the installation are $10,644.