To celebrate the completion of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s (LACMA) $742 million David Geffen Galleries, the museum looked upward. As the gala for the Peter Zumthor-designed building concluded, the Amsterdam-based studio DRIFT staged "Franchise Freedom," an aerial performance involving 1,000 drones that transformed the Wilshire Boulevard skyline into a canvas of kinetic light.
The performance is the result of two decades of research into starling murmurations—the complex, undulating patterns formed by bird swarms. By translating these biological rhythms into algorithmic flight paths, DRIFT creates a tension between the rigid capabilities of hardware and the organic unpredictability of the natural world. The drones do not move in the synchronized, grid-like fashion typical of commercial light shows; instead, they pulse and drift with a collective intelligence that mimics biological logic.
Founded by Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta in 2007, DRIFT has long occupied the intersection of technology and environmental philosophy. Since "Franchise Freedom" first debuted at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2017, the studio has used the medium to challenge the boundary between the synthetic and the sentient. Above the museum’s new 110,000-square-foot concrete expanse, the display served as a meditative counterpoint to the permanence of architecture, suggesting that our most advanced systems are often just echoes of older, natural patterns.
With reporting from Hypebeast.
Source · Hypebeast
