Aerial Art

13th October 2017

From holiday photography to wildlife monitoring, drones are revolutionising modern life. Now artists are using them to take their work to new heights. By Paul Croughton

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From the beautiful aerial landscapes painted by the Carline brothers during World War I to Peter Lanyon’s 1960s gliding paintings, aviation has inspired artists for more than a century. Now, in the era of drones, things have gone one step further: the aircraft are not just providing the view, they’re actually creating the art – in this case, great big towering walls of it.

the sky is, almost literally, the limit

In the world of street art, it used to be that you could paint only as high as your spray can, ladder or scaffold, could reach. No longer. An Italian architect has devised a way of using a fleet of drones to paint large-scale murals where the sky is, almost literally, the limit.

It’s a development that could have been born at this year’s inaugural FOS Future Lab, where flying vehicles and autonomous racing cars were revealed, alongside the world’s most advanced 3D printer. But instead, this is the work of Milan-based Professor Carlo Ratti, whose system is called Paint By Drone and puts to work a fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, or drones to you and me), each with its own tank of paint. They all paint with CMYK colours (cyan, magenta, yellow, key/black), replicating traditional printing set-ups. The artistic process is – somewhat inevitably – controlled by an app, which co-ordinates each drone and can recreate any piece of art that has been programmed into it. Alternatively you can draw on the app, and watch as the drones bring to life your brush strokes in real time.

a space to showcase new forms of open-source, collaborative art

Carlo Ratti Associati has employed drones before: in 2013 the firm’s project Skycall used UAVs to guide students and visitors around the MIT campus in Massachusetts. “With Skycall, we investigated two main development paths of UAV technology: a drone’s capacity to autonomously sense and perceive its environment, and its ability to interface and interact with people,” Professor Ratti tells us.

A year later, New York graffiti artist KATSU created a spray-can-wielding drone to paint at altitude, but his work lacked finesse – more Pollock than polished. Now Professor Ratti’s “phygital graffiti”, as he calls it (with a nod to his favourite Led Zeppelin album), aims to transform unloved scaffold sheeting or building facades into “a space to showcase new forms of open-source, collaborative art. It’s the idea of leveraging digital technologies to create participatory works of public art, especially in cities’ outskirts, to give them new life.”

The fruits of this project will be seen towards the end of the year when two installations are revealed in Berlin and Turin, using local talent to come up with the final designs. The location is yet to be finalised but, as Professor Ratti explains, “The great thing about our system is that it can paint anywhere…”

carloratti.com

This article is taken from the Goodwood magazine, Autumn 2017 issue

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