Event 2 - "Drone Sweet Drone"

            For my second event I went to Anne Niemetz’s Drone Sweet Drone exhibition, which focuses on the union of art, science, and technology. Niemetz is a media artist and she particularly works with interactive installations and audio-visual design.

            During the exhibition I had the chance to speak with Anne Niemetz about her inspiration for this art installation. Her main reason was the drone technology itself. For example, how it is normal to have hobby drones for everyone, how Amazon wants to deliver with drones, and the many uses drones have with warfare technology. In our conversation, Niemetz mentioned that drones can have “concerning sides, and as a media artist, one of the things we should be doing is looking at the ramifications of this technology.” Initially, I had a hard time grasping the meaning of her work, but after speaking with her, I felt like I understood each part of the installation. Her inspiration to raise concern about the drone technology is very important because of the increase in life-threatening incidents and privacy interruptions. You hear more and more about drones flying close to planes that are landing or taking off and threatening the lives of all the passengers inside. Celebrities have drones flying in their backyards taking away the privacy of their own home, even I have seen a drone fly over my house. Not to mention the increased use of drones in modern warfare technologies. Niemetz’s installation touched on the many different uses of drones. The embroidered drones each had a unique sentence to tell one of the uses for a drone, like “I AM YOUR PLAYTHING,” “TRUST ME,” and “I FOLLOW YOU.” They had different light patterns as well to demonstrate the different purposes. The “TRAIN ME” drone had a random light pattern to show that it was somewhat “all over the place.”

            I do agree with Anne Niemetz that we need to have caution with these drones and all of the different uses they have because of the threats they are posing to human well-being. This exhibition fits perfectly into our art and technology topic. Her artistic representation of the drones through embroidery and LED lights represent the uses for this new technology.