Drones stalk visitors to Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei's Park Avenue Armory installation
The movements of visitors navigating this installation, by architects Herzog & de Meuron and artist Ai Weiwei, are tracked by drones and played back to them ? in a comment on surveillance in public spaces.
Hansel and Gretel opened at the Park Avenue Armory on New York's Upper East Side on 7 June 2017.
Visitors begin their journey in the Armory's bunkers, before emerging into venue's 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall and encountering a five-foot-high (1.5-metre) bluff.
Fumbling around the dark space, their movements are recorded by infrared cameras and broadcast live online.
The installation is titled after the fairytale in which two children find themselves lost and in peril in a familiar forest, and draws on a similar theme of disorientation. But instead of the breadcrumbs that the children leave to help them find their way out of the forest, the trail left behind the visitors to the exhibition is a white light, created from their recorded movements.
Their images are also projected back onto the floor, but the shadows of surveillance drones flying overheard break up the pictures.
"The artists take advantage of the vast openness of the Drill Hall, creating a 21st-century public place in which the environment is disconcerting, the entrance is unexpected, and every movement is tracked and surveyed by drones and communicated to an unknown public," said the Armory.
Once they make it to the first-floor Head House, the visitors become t...
-------------------------------- |
Max Mertens installs swings "in the sky" over a busy Luxembourg street |
|
Tetinska: Innovative House Design by SMLXL in Prague
03-05-2024 09:24 - (
Architecture )