Through the millennia artists have leveraged on available tools to express their feelings and vision of the world. Earlier it was the scratching of cave walls with stones and shells, painting graffiti with minerals and herbs, making them shine by covering the paint with the white of the egg.
Paint technology got better and better through the centuries, we can still admire painting in bright colours in Egyptian tombs dating 2000 years BC.
Brushes have also improved, from reeds to badger’s hair, to synthetic material.
Photography and cinema in the last century gave way to new forms of art expressions. Holograms are more recent ones. Technology has been an instrument for artists and new technology opens up new ways for artistic expression.
Hence, in a way, it is not a surprise that drones are being considered as tools for expressing art. Intel has orchestrated hundreds of drones, each carrying LEDs, to create hovering masterpieces in the night sky (watch the clip).
Now I saw a wonderful example of arts leveraging on technology created by Carlo Ratti Associati: using drones to paint on vertical surfaces in building.
They created an application, Paint by Drone, that allows the orchestration of drones to spray on vertical surface. Each drone is equipped with a paint reservoir and can be easily directed to fly at the right distance, and speed, from the “canvas”. The artist can paint on a tablet and the system converts its painting into flying instruction to the drone.
The first public demonstrations are planned later this year in Berlin and in Turin.