Growing up in the woodlands of the Os Mountains in Norway, a secluded Narnia like environment, singer Aurora had always been fascinated with humans and nature and how they interact with each other. Many of the songs she has written, like Runaway and Running Wih the Wolves, examine this relationship. As she ventured out into the world she also became fascinated by how technology influences these same relationships. She saw that people spent so much of their lives being influenced by technology, posing the question of whether this new relationship was hindering or progressing the human experience. In her song Winter Bird from her 2016 debut studio album All My Demons Greeting Me As A Friend, Aurora examines the juxtaposition of humans, nature, and technology.

To film the video for Winter Bird, Aurora and her director Simon Thirlaway traveled to Pittsburg, PA to work with some of the best roboticists in the world at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. Founded in 1900 by industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, the university has become synonymous with being one of the best technology schools in the world. It is continuously ranked as one of the top 20-30 best institutions of technological development both nationally and globally. When Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute first opened 40 years ago it became the go-to resource for anything involving robotics, and most recently drones.

With the help of Carnegie Mellon University’s Associate Professor of Art Ali Momeni and robotics Ph.D. student Ellen Cappo, Simon Thirlaway directed a video that uses drones as characters in the story line. The video takes Aurora’s love of nature, specifically her favorite bug, moths, and shows how as a human she reacts to the changes of her life. Standing inside of a metal, open framed cocoon, Aurora hauntingly sings of remembering what it feels like to come to life. An awakening like a moth emerging from a cocoon. As Aurora sings, three drones swirl around the cocoon frame, trailing strips of gauze. The drones begin to wrap the cocoon with the gauze, an enclosure that Aurora will emerge from, reborn.

As Professor Momeni points out, the Robotics Institute was the perfect location to bring together this vision of humanity, nature, and technology. “There are very few places that could actually pull off something like this,” he said. “There’s a lot of hardware, there’s a lot of software, and then there’s a lot of craft like hardware.” A cocoon structure that was visually appealing, yet could keep Aurora safe from moving drones had to be constructed. But the most difficult aspect technically was programing the drones to fly upwards and along an orbit around the cocoon without colliding, all while trailing strips of fabric to wrap the cocoon in. A program had to be written that saw the drones rise up, slowly rotate, and circle around the cocoon. The levels of the drones had to be slightly off to avoid collision and the entanglement of the fabric strips as the drones ascend around the structure.

But to be able to make a fluid, and graceful final product meant the team, as director Thirlaway joked, was “constantly rewriting the software, programming on the fly, no pun intended.” This job fell to Ellen who had to look at the project through the eyes of the drone and how it would behave in a human world. She explained it as “How should the algorithms interpret a human’s intent?” As someone who has dedicated her life to studying and working with drones and robotics, Ellen says that she often sees artists incorporate technology into their work to enhance the final outcome. But what was fascinating and drew her to this project was how it differentiated in that the art dictated how she programmed the drone.

For many people, drones have this stigma of being a predatory, militant tool. Or a device that is void of human traits, an object that simply follows the commands fed into its software. In Winter Bird, the drones become more than just technological tools, they are characters in the story. They take on an ethereal quality, seamlessly dancing with Aurora. As Aurora said, “It’s been an honor being wrapped inside a cocoon by three drones. I feel like the drones has [sic] personalities, which they don’t, but they do.” Our modern world has evolved in a way that humans, nature, and technology can now all revolve around one another.

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