DRONE TESTING INSTITUTE Hartlepool, UK
Drones, or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), have entered the public consciousness in recent years as their controversial use in warfare and surveillance becomes more widespread. Installations such as Under the Shadow of the Drone by artist James Bridle illustrate our uneasy relationship with these machines as they increasingly enter public view (or hover just out of sight of it). The brief asked students develop a test institute that occupied a kilometre-long stretch of coast in Hartlepool, formerly occupied by a large abandoned industrial works. The test was to be derived from studies of the body and its relationship to the world. I chose to study myself moving through space using dislocated vision, watching myself move in real-time via a camera mounted to my back. This study developed into an interest in the surveillance culture of drones, and the possibility of an architecture derived from the drone’s visual field. The project responds to the prevalence of drones by suggesting a Drone Testing Institute, in which drones are developed within an architecture that attempts to make itself impossible for the drone to fully comprehend. My movements were translated into a set of temporal ‘glyphs’ that become the basis for three-dimensional projections based on the flight path of a typical militarised drone. The projections were designed to confuse the drone’s sense of distance, causing difficulty in targeting the structure in the landscape. The architecture attempts to be drone-proof. At the same time, it hides a runway, hangar and control space for the drone, so that the architecture and drone are in dialogue with each other. The architecture is a series of large concrete elements that appear as abstracted, sculptural forms. However, they are precisely calibrated to confuse the drone’s (or its remote pilot’s) sense of spatial awareness, never allowing the whole picture of the Institute to be clearly seen. The Institute operates as a kind of visual camouflage, despite the scale of the elements that make it up: a drone-proof architecture for a future in which drones are everywhere.
The test that the architecture was derived from was a study of myself moving through space with dislocated vision. I achieved this through the use of a pair of video goggles wired up to a camera that streamed live footage to the goggles themselves. The camera was mounted on a rig I built that I could wear on my back. This meant that the footage the camera captured was the only thing I saw as I was interacting in the space. It allowed me to artificially create an out of body experience and view myself in third person. The footage below is what I saw as I was wearing the apparatus.
The campus and the route manoeuvred and the distorted campus
The distorted campus glyphs describes the footage
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Hydraulic Hangar Door Section 1 : 200
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1. 1000mm X deep square cross section beams span the length of the door. 2. Hydraulic actuator, pipe feeding the actuator hydraulic fluid. 3. Concrete counter weight is used to reduce to total energy to lift the hydraulic door. 4. Steel flanges are bolted to the concrete cladding that keeps the door camouflaged when closed. 5. Steel brackets allow the hydraulic actuator to rotate when the door opens and closes. 6. Static axle fixed to the door sits in two steel bushings embedded in the concrete wall. 7. Custom Surveillance Drone, Crew required: 3, 185km range for 5 hours, Max altitude: 5000m, Max speed: 200km/h, Requires 3 hours a week maintenance, 5.2m wingspan, 4m long.
Perspective render of the drones attempt to scan the environment
Further process and images
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My thoughts and findings during the test: My peripheral view was eliminated and reflects the illusionary world of a game, the spaces to left and right of the camera don’t exist until you look directly at them and because I appear static, it feels like spaces are moving around you and reconfiguring themselves in a linear arrangement. You get a very restricted view of both the ground and the sky, the tops of buildings would be obstructed, and again only a fraction of the world is visible but enough to be able to move around. Spaces feel more linear, you feel guided by linear movement, it almost feels like behind you doesn’t exist. Never had an urge to fully turn around. It felt like I was sucked in to the camera and felt taller than I was, I felt more dissociated with my body the longer I spent in the apparatus. Things also appeared further away, as I felt like I was sucked into the camera, even though I could see I was right next to the stairs, I still bumped into them as I almost felt like I was behind myself. The use of one camera effected my depth perception, initially it was hard to grab things and interact with things such as traffic lights, however it became easier over time. Finally when taking the goggles off there is an odd feeling of you point of reference being adjusted and returning to normal.
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The resulting notational drawing is proportionate to time and is directly relatable to the footage from the video. Therefore the drawing became a diagram that represented space, time, direction and speed
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19 Individual fragments
Chosen four fragments based on the thickness of the individual horizontal elements of the fragments, to allow for maximum carved programmatic space
Scale of each piece increases as the altitude increases
The first segment of the flight path, the curve is based on the 5 degree climb angle of self powered drones and the turning angle of 40 degrees per 200 metres
Locations of the views from the drone occur at every 25% of the maximum altitude on the first section of the flight path, fragments stay in the same order on the flight path
X-ray diagrams of the 3d structures embedded in the landscape with the underground connections and flightpath overhead