#drone graffitii

[dronegraffiti]

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.

[dronegraffiti]

With collision sensors and a positioning chip on top applied to - not just a single drone - but a swarm of drones in formation, the Turin based architect and design studio Carlo Ratti Associati are taking drone graffiti to the next level with their Paint by Drone project.

Partly based on experience from the studio's 2015 Vertical Plotter project the new concept will allow for app based pre-programmed images to be applied by the system, and for multiple participants to work together on live painting.

And the motivation seems quite noble:

“Our cities are filled with blank vertical surfaces, either permanent or temporary. Scaffold sheeting, for instance, has great potential, but in fact it is mostly used in bland ways – left empty or employed for advertising

With Paint by Drone we would like to unleash the potential of ‘phygital graffiti’. Any façade can become a space where to showcase, new forms of open-source, collaborative art or to visualize the heartbeat of a metropolis through real time data.” Says Professor Carlo Ratti, founder of Carlo Ratti Associati studio and Director of the Senseable City Lab at MIT.

So is this really happening? So far, only prototype images have been released, there have been no actual live video of the drones in action. The studio sure plans to! Live events presenting the project is so far planned for Berlin, Germany and and Turin, Italy in the fall this year. I can't wait to see this actually happen!