DRONE
Commissioned by the City of Somerville, MA, the project provokes our concerns over labor relation in the machine era. Drone (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) is a word we borrowed from the honey bee community. We develop our knowledge structure in the way honeycomb is a place bees produce and hoard honey. In a highly-automated society, we collect, store and transfer data to build intelligent infrastructure to deal with the problems we are facing. As the word drone is initially used for tasks too "dull" for humans. It poses the question of man’s condition in the future- are we going to benefit from the technological development or obliged to feed intelligent machines?
The project is accommodated by two robotic drone performances. The movement of the robotic drone imitates bees’ process of building a honeycomb by moving a hexagon model. This performance also researches drone’s new uses in the touchable future, namely, grasp, carry and deliver targets autonomously at any designated points precisely.