Art is something that can capture the attention of people on many different levels.  Artists are constantly looking for new ways to express themselves through art.  It should come as no surprise that one new way artists are creating is through the use of drone technology.  As one of the biggest up and coming technologies, drones can be used in countless way, including art forms.

One of the most common drone art forms is photography.  Drones can be equipped with high definition stabilized cameras that capture stunning images.  What makes a photograph captured by a drone visually unique is the perspective from which it is taken.  Most photographers are limited to where they can position themselves or a tripod to use their camera.

Photographers can shoot from within a plane or helicopter, but from those heights it is often hard to get much detail. A drone can capture a sweeping aerial image with tremendous clarity.  A drone can also get closer to a subject, or approach it from any overhead angle, while still maintaining a safe distance.  Renowned photography editor Ayperi Karabuda Ecer has just released a new book called Dronescrapes: The New Aerial Photography.  Being released under Dronestagram, the leader of all drone related photography, the book is a collection of 250 drone images captured from around the world.

Sang-won Leigh, Harshit Agrawal, and Pattie Maes of MIT’s Media Lab have found a way to integrate the use of drones in other art forms called The Flying Phantograph.  The have designed a drone that will collaborate with a human artist to create an original piece.  According to the project’s mission, “We present an installation exploring a human-machine creative process, where each of them contributes to the aesthetics of the final art. 

Through such exploration, we seek to understand how a person meanders through a space of expressive intentions, when a machine-driven ‘pantograph’ adds it’s own artistic intentions to it.”  The way it works is that an artist uses a set of controllers to create an abstract image.  This input is relayed to the drone that then draws it out onto canvas.  The drone has to take into consideration the canvas texture and the air conditions around it to create it’s own interpretation of the artists suggestion.

In Budapest, Hungary Nina Kov and Gábor Vásárhely came up with a dancing drone show.  Nina is a choreographer and dancer while Gábor is a drone expert.  Together they are the artistic director and CEO of Collmot Robotics.  Using music by Zagar they premiered their show at the Sziget Festival.  The performance consisted of a dance team with a lead dancer, and a flock of drones.  The dancers wore white jumpsuits and helmets decorated with LED lights.  In their hands they held a sensor that relayed their movements to the drones flying above them.  With the lead dancer representing the lead bird in a flock, they went through a sweeping dance that mimics the flight pattern of a flock of birds.  Using the information relayed by the sensors in the dancers hands, the drones then mimicked the movement of the dancers.

Art is often used to represent the cultural climate of a society.  Drones are currently having a huge impact on global society.  This is being reflected in the creative imaginations of today’s artists.  It is making a beautiful amalgamation of creativity, imagination, and technology that represents our present and future.

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