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The Eye of the Swarm
Superflux's Drone Aviary
As a design agency working at the intersection between emerging technology and everyday life, Superflux’s speculative scenarios are effective precisely because their implications can be easily connected to present-day experience. Their Drone Aviary project posits a world in which drones have free reign through civic space, bearing an uncanny closeness to our current reality not so much because of the technology’s capabilities but rather the insidious nature of its encroachment.
The term “drone” is set to become as ubiquitous in the language of consumer deliveries (Amazon) as it has been in military parlance (Afghanistan). Likewise, the idea of data-collecting devices that track individuals is no longer the Orwellian stuff of nightmares: we carry them every day. Drone Aviary’s strangely familiar imagery – onscreen ads that look something like a more banal version of Blade Runner, ever-present “share” buttons – underscores that this particular future is very much here (or at least circling just a few metres above). -
Superflux is an Anglo-Indian design practice based in London, but with roots and contacts in the Gujarati city of Ahmedabad. Working closely with clients and collaborators on projects that acknowledge the reality of our rapidly changing times, Superflux design with and for uncertainty, instead of resisting it and have a particular interest in the ways emerging technologies interface with the environment and everyday life.
Superflux.in
With parallels in Drone Aviary to Alfred Hitchock’s menacing Birds, Superflux, describe their interest in the “precipice moment” for this project – the point at which small groups of “birds” are in view but the swarm is yet to come – but in their scenario, the birds are very much man-made and multi-media. “When the network is digital and invisible it appears to be like magic and we remain unchallenged”, the designers ask, “but what happens when it starts becoming visible and gains physical form?”
In interrogating the architecture of networks – structures light in their physical manifestation but extremely “weighty” in terms of the authority they wield – such far-ranging transparency is ultimately revealed to be a form of opacity. For when the edge of the network is blurred, so too is the legal framework that might be used to regulate it. I (fs)
Shot entirely from the aerial perspective, “Drone Aviary” uses five different drones to represent a strand of discourse concerning their use in civic space. (All images and film: Superflux)
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