Drone Graffiti

Documenting occurrences of graffiti made with drones (the peaceful ones).

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The last post of the drone graffiti blog

Following the progression from concept through experimental projects and prototypes to the recent announcement of first proper drone graffiti product ready for sale and distribution, now seems like the right time to discontinue the drone graffiti blog and make the last post.

I’ll leave the blog up and live for as long as possible. Please have scroll back through memory lane to see all the awesome projects that I came across over the years. Starting from the bottom here. Or, for a quick sum up of the first 3 years, see my documentation video Drone Graffiti 2013-2016. 

It's been immensely fun, exiting and rewarding to follow how drone graffiti has transcended from ideas into something real, in parallel across multiple minds and locations since I started looking six years ago in 2013.  

Thanks to anyone who followed, supported and connected with me over the blog over the years! And thanks to the artists, engineers and makers who made this awesome leap for human expression happen.

As always, I'm super exited about what the future will bring.

Best, Jesper

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For the first time since the dawn of drone graffiti it's now possible to order a proper graffiti painting drone and have it delivered to your door. 

Made by drone graffiti pioneer artist KATSU and tech stars at Tsuru Robotics, the ‘Katsuru Beta’ is for sale at https://katsuru.ai/ until January 1st as a special edition collectors item. 

"It reaches unreachable surfaces. It paints at enormous scale. It will kick off a new era in art & activism." KATSU states on his Instagram. 

As recent works from both KATSU and Tsuru Robobotics suggests, a full delivery on that promise seems most likely. 

Buy your own at https://katsuru.ai/ and find more detailed images at Hypebeast.

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Street and digital media artist KATSU just opened a new Instagram account for Katsuru, the previously mentioned fully automated AI enhanced drone system. Welcome! 

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The action role-playing video game The Surge 2 that was just release has a pretty awesome hidden feature, a graffiti drone to place message tags for other players. It's, as far as I know, the first appearance of a graffiti drone in a video game. Cool!

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KATSU is working on a fully autonomous AI enhanced drone system

A recent interview with drone graffiti pioneer KATSU for the (still ongoing until September 29) Beyond the Streets graffiti exhibition in New York mentions the KATSURU system. According to the interview it’s a "fully autonomous drone system for artists”. 

The interview also mentions the inspiration for KATSU’s original graffiti drone being the German police’s attempt to catch graffiti artist using drones. 

On Instagram KATSU made quite a few posts tagged #katsuru during the past year. This magnificent quotation of Fransisco de Goyas ‘The Naked MajaXX’s classic art piece mentions the AI part. 

Link: the interview

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Working for five years under the radar to create a viable graffiti drone product, Roi Neustadt from Tel Aviv have now decided to reveal test videos and patent documents for his project.  Neustadt's approach differs from other projects by using a steady frame against the wall, and the letting the rotor presure of the drone apply both upwards and inwards towards the wall. The early footager shows an extraordinary precision.

Find more videos at Roi Neustadts YouTube channel.

And check out the patent documents revealing a deep layer of details: 1, 2.

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Tsuru robotics session in Los Angeles

If you happen to be in Los Angeles July 28 - August 2 for the Thrive SIGGRAPH2019 conference you'll have a change to join the Tsuru robotics  session: "DroneGraffiti: Autonomous Multi-UAV Spray Painting" evolving around the technology that Tsuru Robotics have applied in amazing projects with Misha Most in Moscow, and recently with Carlo Ratti in Turin, Italy.

Read more about the session. 

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First announced two years ago the Turin based architect and design studio Carlo Ratti Associati's Paint by Drone project have now come to life in the crowdsourced format of UFO-Urban Flying Opera.

In collaboration with drone graffiti superstars Tsuru Robotics a 14 by 12 meter big mural was created based on the inputs of around 100 selected inputs from people in Aurelio Peccei park in Torino in the end of June.

“The city is an open canvas, where people can inscribe their stories in many ways,” says professor Carlo Ratti: “Such processes have always been happening; however, with UFO we tried to accelerate them, using drone technology to allow for a new use of painting as a means of expression.” “The project is inherently participatory, and it is about hacking the city,” says Antonio Atripaldi, project manager and partner at Carlo Ratti Associati: “It allows us to consider people’s input, and build new initiatives around bottom-up contributions. For cities, this means residents can reclaim, beautify and leave their mark on the space they inhabit.”

Read the project press release.

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Disney files patent application with their PaintCopter drone. The application was revealed recently and shows in more detail the drone painting concept, presented last year.

The basics are a tethered drone with a continuous paint support flow from the ground and the ability to orient it self against a vertical surface including a sense of depth for 3D abilities.

Patent application

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Meet Voliro, the drone that works with Æternity for The Graffiti Drone project.

Launching the blockchain based Drone Graffiti project recently, Ærternity teamed up with Swiss company Voliro. Æternity founder Yanislav Malahov explains in this interview with My Dear Drone.

Even though the Swiss team from ETH Zürich’s Autonomous Systems Lab is still faces multiple challenges of stability, on its own it almost looks like it's dancing in the sky. Grace like that is bound to go far!

Here's an early take of the painting ability.

And here's a take from “the Drone Graffiti project.

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How drone graffiti and blockchain can work together

There is an exciting potential beyond the buzzwords of the recently launched The Drone Graffiti project. Beside this weeks great story about one of the first participants, Tom Edwards' farting unicorn and it's travels from the original owner, through the hands of Tesla and Elon Musk and into the public domain, I want to share some thoughts on how I see this potential.

Transgressing the ephemeral A blockchain data structure can carry and share digital objects, like images, code and instructions. Connected to programmable drones worldwide, this technology can, not only be used to paint the same painting multiple places at the same time, but also to paint the same image across time.

This way it has he potential of transgressing the ephemeral nature of street art and preserve it through time. Basically, in a hopefully distance future, once the buildings along New York's Houston Street has long gone, it could still be known, which graffiti appeared when, on what and by whom. If the graffiti was made with blockchain programmed graffiti drones...

Structurally a blockchain allows for changes and additions. For forking the code and creating new generations. The main thing is, that the digital objects of a blockchain carries their own history with them. Most likely the day when all graffiti writers replaces cans with code will never appear. But with its potential for documentation a blockchain should be a pretty straight forward way of documenting graffiti in at least images, time and location, powered by crowdsourcing. And then tagged with the artists names it could make way for a great library of street art and graffiti.

As anyone who have been following this blog knows, the actual painting job, though easy to fantasise about, is actually super hard to effectuate. But while we are quite far from something real, now the dream is up in the air, shared by many. And that, at least, is a great beginning.

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The drone graffiti project based in Mexico city plans to combine the crowdsourcing and archival mechanisms of blockchain technology with the programmable artistic of graffiti made with drones.

February 8 – 10, 2019, during Mexico City Art Week, the project will enable three selected artists to simultaneously create urban art on a large building close to Mexico City’s Paseo de Reforma and the iconic Monumento a la Revolución and on the Æternity blockchain.

This is the second big drone graffiti project in Mexico, succeeding the 2015 Droncita project.

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An exhibition of KATSU’s latest drone paintings will open at the Diane Rosenstein Gallery in Los Angeles this Saturday.  

“KATSU’s drone paintings are the 21st Century’s Action Paintings, residing at an intersection of gesture and loss of control. His paintings are created in a symbiotic gestural application of atomized enamel paint sprayed by a remotely controlled customized quadrocopter drone onto an acrylic coated canvas. The drone is a semi-autonomous collaborator. Drones are voyeurs and recorders, used to exploit access and proximity as image-gathering devices. In KATSU’s practice, the drone’s purpose is subverted; it is an image creator.” it says in the description from the gallery.   The Drone exhibition runs November 3 - December 15, 2018.

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This week saw a surprising new player in the game of drone graffiti. Disney! The Disney research team have just released photage and a paper from their PaintCopter project It’s not the smoothest operator seen so far being tethered to the paint supply on ground. But it will be interesting to see how far a big player like Disney can take these experiments. Also, bringing 3d modelling to the table is something new and exciting. And, it’s great to see the team openly sharing their work and progress.

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It's been a pretty amazing ride to follow the development of graffiti drones from the first baby steps to a now highly developed technology.

KATSU, one of the first people to ever do drone graffiti have now achieved a pretty amazing level of precision. Enough to follow a long time fantasy of "sending my drones out my bedroom window, having them render my tags all over the city and then flying back home to me, like, in my bed." as he told Vice in a 2014 interview.

Keep on dreaming, KATSU!

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Drone graffiti is cool, so naturally drone graffiti graffiti is cool too! Adrian Rahier, one of the guys behind the original #Thugdrone, just posted these photos on Twitter from Nantes in France.

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In november 2017 Moscow based street artist Misha Most, programmers from Interactive Lab and engineers from Tsuru Robotics revealed a magnificent piece of public drone graffiti. Now the guys from Tsuru Robotics have written great great articles about work following up on the technical and engineering aspects of the project. Both published at the DIY Drones blog.

Read part 1 Read part 2