While other approaches have gained more tailwind, the Flone project project is still in the game.
Aerocoop have recently updated their DIY instructions and made the first outdoor flight. Even though precision is low, it’s quite a progress since the first flight in 2015.
With collision sensors and a positioning chip on top applied to - not just a single drone - but a swarm of drones in formation, the Turin based architect and design studio Carlo Ratti Associati are taking drone graffiti to the next level with their Paint by Drone project.
Partly based on experience from the studio’s 2015 Vertical Plotter project the new concept will allow for app based pre-programmed images to be applied by the system, and for multiple participants to work together on live painting.
And the motivation seems quite noble:
“Our cities are filled with blank vertical surfaces, either permanent or temporary. Scaffold sheeting, for instance, has great potential, but in fact it is mostly used in bland ways – left empty or employed for advertising
With Paint by Drone we would like to unleash the potential of ‘phygital graffiti’. Any façade can become a space where to showcase, new forms of open-source, collaborative art or to visualize the heartbeat of a metropolis through real time data.” Says Professor Carlo Ratti, founder of Carlo Ratti Associati studio and Director of the Senseable City Lab at MIT.
So is this really happening? So far, only prototype images have been released, there have been no actual live video of the drones in action. The studio sure plans to! Live events presenting the project is so far planned for Berlin, Germany and and Turin, Italy in the fall this year. I can’t wait to see this actually happen!
KATSU’s Icarus 2 graffiti drone made quite a buzz a few weeks ago. Now the New York based street and media artist hit Instagram with his own account, and his latest post shows a robot on wheels called Lil Whip Drone applying the same ‘aim and spray’ technology of the Icarus 2. The artists promises to release the technology open source soon.
The past week’s renewed attention and interest in drone graffiti on top of the ‘Icarus Two’ video from KATSU has revealed a few more interesting drone video projects, that I haven’t yet mentioned here. So, here is a small catch up:
New Atlas mentions Technica’s Drone Pollock project (see video above). A pretty elaborate Jackson Pollock inspired programming based project involving shot-glasses of paint on the back of a somersaulting drone.
The sUAS News blog mentions, among other interesting projects reaching far beyond graffiti, the Handy Paint Products’ 'fantastic’ Painting drones:
Also recently an old prototype video by Javid JAH, The Graffiti Drone Bomber, surfaced on Youtube:
Just yesterday we saw the first video with KATSU’s graffiti drone writing actual letters for the first time. And now it turns out that Edouard Leurent from Paris and a few friends, Hassan Bouchiba and Adrien Rahier found a way to do stencils a long time ago with their Thugdrone. Cool stuff!
Check out the full and elaborate presentation of the project.
KATSU made it to the next level and started writing with his graffiti drone.
The technique is new. The drone itself is leaning against the wall for some sort of stability, like Constantin CLAUZEL’s grapher drone and other projects I’ve heard about. But the paint mechanism is working independently of the drone’s movements, making it possible to create actual written letters quite freely. Most likely each letter have been programmed, meaning that it would be possible to make any letters and words with this. And the message is clear.
Steele Davis build a sticker slapping drone.
They’ve made it! Constantin CLAUZEL’s graffiti drone recently made a live painting in Paris. The Hackerloop project have been on it’s way the past months, applying a special technique of pushing the drone towards the wall with a horizontal rotor in the back to achieve a higher degree of precision. Judging from the result, a depiction of a special male human body part (or is it really a long unfolded middle finger?) they’ve certainly come a long way.
Congratulations!
More footage and details of the drone
We’ve been following Constantin CLAUZEL grapher drone project for a little while. It just took one step further with a lift off.
The Pollockocopter is here!
Finding a cool name for a new graffiti drone is a big part of the game. Grabbing theirs from the American painter Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) the German group Cooper Copter entered the scene this week at the Reeperbahn Festival in Hamburg. Not far from Pollacks renowned dripping and splashing paint technique, the Cooper crew let drones do the work, smashing paint bombs towards a wall, when flying over it. Some more info on the ideas behind (In German).