The last time the London-based artist James Bridle visited the U.S., he and a team of assistants painted a full-size “shadow” of an MQ-9 Reaper drone on a street corner outside of the Corcoran Gallery, in Washington, D.C., just before an exhibition of his work. He wanted to “get a feel for what it would be like to stand next to one,” he said. The drone’s wingspan was twenty meters, expanding beyond the sidewalk and over the gallery’s rock garden, dwarfing the S.U.V. parked at the curb; gallery visitors, on their way inside, could count the steps needed to cross it.
People who have heard of Bridle tend to know what a military drone looks like, if only because they’ve seen one on their laptops, flying somewhere far away. He’s perhaps best known for Dronestagram, a social-media account that regularly posts photos of the locations of drone strikes, shunted through Instagram’s square crop, and often one of its nostalgia-inducing filters, which now has nearly ten thousand followers. Bridle’s work, which the Museum of Modern Art will present for the first time in its Design and Violence project this winter, generally deals with the ways in which the digital, networked world reaches into the physical, offline one. At thirty-three, he’s part of what might be the last generation that makes those distinctions: Think of stock-market “flash crashes” brought on by algorithm; subway advertisements spotted with QR codes; the post-Instagram invention of the selfie; CAPTCHA verification, which requires you to prove to a computer that you’re a human, in a kind of reverse Turing test; or a Reaper sending surveillance data to operators sitting at consoles that are sometimes halfway around the world.
“Drones,” Bridle said, “are inherently network objects. They allow you to see and act at a distance, while themselves kind of remaining invisible.” One measure of the distance that keeps them out of sight, however, seems to be shrinking. Flying, unmanned vehicles are transitioning from a technology that operates primarily in foreign space—for Americans, at least—to an increasingly familiar, domestic one. A small milestone of sorts was reached this fall when a three-pound quadcopter crash-landed in midtown; it was the first drone wreck in Manhattan to provoke a response from the New York Police Department. Impending commercial applications for drones, like the Amazon Prime Air service, announced earlier this week on “60 Minutes,” which aims, eventually, to use autonomous drones to make deliveries thirty minutes after products are purchased online, guarantee that it will not be the last unplanned landing.
Bridle recently visited New York for a conference on drones and aerial robotics, hoping to talk about what kinds of decisions could be left to an algorithm, and the problems with jamming every flying machine without a cockpit—whether it’s a warplane or a remote-controlled toy helicopter—into the same category, “drone.” But he left disappointed. “A good proportion of the drone-conference attendees were either owners or retailers of small remote-controlled aircraft, who really didn’t see why we should be discussing foreign policy or Waziristan,” Bridle said. “The discussion, at the moment, is confined to these engineering and very practical legal issues, about how to stop it from falling on someone’s head.”
While in town, he visited Sameer Parekh, an engineer and the founder of Flying Robots NYC (now the New York City Drone User Group), the city’s first civilian-drone enthusiast group. Parekh, who holds a pilot’s license and left Goldman Sachs to develop affordable, autonomous flying drones, has been working on the same problems that Amazon hopes to solve. For instance, fully autonomous aerial drones require light navigation systems that can work alongside G.P.S., because the latter isn’t precise enough for takeoffs and landings. “If all you’re using is G.P.S., you get one to two meters of accuracy,” Parekh said. “It’s fine if you’re on Google Maps and trying to drive around. But even the Google self-driving car doesn’t use G.P.S. to stay in the middle of the lane. It uses the lane markers.” The project proved to be so difficult that, even after two years of research and development, Parekh couldn’t advance past lab-bound test flights. He’s since given up, and is now working exclusively on robots that don’t leave the ground; his leftover flying-robot parts are currently for sale.
Bridle was asleep, back in London, when the “60 Minutes” broadcast aired in the U.S. on Sunday night. But when he woke up the following morning and saw the news dominating his Twitter stream, he was not impressed. “As far as I’m aware,” he wrote via e-mail, “they haven’t solved anything,” because, outside of very controlled settings, drones still need human pilots to guide them, and the machine Bezos demonstrated appeared nearly identical to ones already on the shelves of electronics stores. (Nevertheless, Amazon’s Prime Air Web site states that the service will “be ready” to launch as early as 2015.) It may be inevitable that domestic skies will be filled with drones, but, Bridle thinks, that future probably won’t look like Bezos’s product demonstration.
The trouble with promotions like Amazon’s, Bridle said, is that they tend to limit how people think they can react to drones, and hide the choices that we can make about the less-noticeable ways that technology shapes our lives and our behavior. Responding to this impulse is what led Bridle to create art in the first place. Not too long ago, Bridle worked at a publisher where he was the only employee trained in computer science. He still remembers his colleagues’ anxious, frenzied reactions to what they thought was the death of print. “Why this kind of really intense, emotional reaction? What I came to realize is that it’s a much more complex set of emotions around the mental models we carry around in our heads, essentially,” he said.
His projects, as a result, have tried to recognize what nascent technologies can provoke, within people as well as out in the world. Once they settle into a dominant form—like a drone, or an e-book—they become familiar enough to be overlooked. “Drones,” Bridle said, are simply “part of larger systems that are invisible to us.” Opportunities to interact with those systems, on our terms, are scarce. Unless, of course, we lay out a twenty-meter outline of a drone, stretched across a sidewalk, and get a good look.
Alex Carp is an editor of the McSweeney’s Voice of Witness book series and a reader at Guernica magazine.
Photograph by Steve Stills.
