Flight Sculptures and AeroGlyphs

Reading the latest BMFA News today (Feb 2024 pp32), I was surprised to see an article on "Using Models to Make Art" by Chris Bradbury. He has made some amazing images of radio controlled planes, helicopters and drones flying at night, illuminated by LEDs. I found some of his work online at the following link:

https://www.behance.net/gallery/11879703/200ft-High-Light-Sculptures

This immediately reminded me of something we did for fireworks night back in 2018.

We called it "Drone Fireworks". Our method used a micro drone which we filmed using video and then used a software post processing stage to split the video into images and do something called "image stacking", where all the individual frames are composited together into a single image. The result, as you can see, is definitely a piece of art.

In Chris's article, he uses a different method, choosing to make the images with a camera using a 30 second exposure. His images are stunning, and include some really beautiful backgrounds that he's flown though at night. That's kind of hard to do if you're flying a micro drone inside a room, but he's definitely given us some ideas for things we could try in the future.

After doing some background research, I discovered Reuben Wu's work on AeroGlyphs:

https://reubenwu.com/projects/25/aeroglyphs

https://obscura.io/collections/reuben-wu (aeroglyph variations)

https://www.behance.net/gallery/69267309/Aeroglyphs (Behance)

And a national geographic talk about his work on YouTube:

This is slightly different as he uses drones and time lapse photography to draw geometric shapes in the air, hence the name, aeroglyphs. His artwork shows squares, triangles, ellipses and lines as light traces in the air as the drone flies through the space. What's really interesting about this is how the drone is used to circle and highlight an object at night, with the drone's light acting to illuminate the landscape below. In the video, his description of how he used this technique to illuminate a receding glacier to highlight the impacts of climate change while "preserving the memory of a landscape in peril", shows how his first simple idea evolved into something much bigger. This is a fantastic use of Drones4Good in highlighting climate change.

Making art with drones should definitely be a thing. I think it's time we made some more.