5000 Feet is much less about answering to the medium, I think. It’s much more an examination of our role, not only as consumers, but as producers of content. In the case of the drone pilot, you’re talking about someone whose working life is very familiar to ours, at least technically speaking. I think most people who see 5000 Feet have a very strong sense of what that working life is like, because it really is, in a strange way, a mirror image of what we do, brave office workers that we are. We sit in a cubicle at work, at home, in the home office, all day, in front of these screens. Of course with him there is a giant underlying paradox, as he pointed out. His minute gestures—moving a mouse this way, moving the joystick the other way, hitting a few keys on a keyboard—have giant, giant effects in places halfway across the world. So, I suppose, the two pieces do bring together this notion of the artist in this romantic, nostalgic way—reacting to the medium—and then this figure of the drone sensor operator as another sort of person who works inside of the medium, who embodies the contradiction of what the technology does to you, what it does to the people he works with.
One of the things I get asked most often about by the press is for examples of non-military, non-police use of drones. Part of our function here at DIY Drones is to educate the public about civilian and peaceful uses of drones, so I’m always happy to reel off some examples, from agriculture to Hollywood (aside from the main reason we do it here, which is education and fun).
–from my new favorite website, DIY Drones. I stumbled across this while looking for autogyro-based drones the other day, and now I’ve learned I can just build by own autogyro-based drone!