FWF Peek-Project
New Perspectives in Human-Machine-Theatre
‘Performing Drones’ is an interdisciplinary project that explores the interaction between humans and drones in artistic contexts. Technologies influence our everyday lives, our culture, our perception of the world, our communication and relationships and the way we see and define ourselves. Drones are a technology that has simultaneously entered our perception through holiday videos, advertising clips or nature documentaries, through civilian use in harvesting or searching for missing persons and through military use in war zones.
‘Performing Drones’ examines the use of drones in theatrical productions and analyses the possibilities and challenges of interactions between humans and machines in an artistic context. The interdisciplinary research team from performing arts, control engineering and robotics as well as media and communication sciences wants to understand the interaction between humans and drones and use it to explore the interface and interaction between human and technological actors.
The artistic aspect of the project addresses questions of surveillance, swarm behaviour and mediation through the use of drones as equal actors on stage, the drone researchers work on questions of autonomy and localisation, while the media and communication researchers deal with how the drones are perceived and what interactions arise during the productions.
This research project is funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF. [10.56776/AR809]
Current Project
InterAction
The first sub-project, the InterAction theatre laboratory, is dedicated to the collaboration of artists with controlled drones. In a kind of experimental station, artists from the fields of dance, performance, theatre, music, literature and discourse will work together with one to three drones to create a 3–5-minute performance. The process will be accompanied by qualitative interviews. The performances carried out in the Lake Side Park drone hall were recorded with several cameras by video artist Philip Kandler and edited and subsequently presented by students from CHS Villach.
The following artists were involved: Patricia Aulitzky, Stefan Ebner, Katarina Hartmann, Christine Hinterkörner, Patrik Huber, Michael Kuglitsch, Anna Possarnig, Thales Weilinger, Robert Woelfl
The accompanying interviews with the artists and participating technicians examined how art and robotics cooperate and how artistic performance comes together with technical research in order to find out how the cooperation between actors from different fields takes place and to what extent a mutual interaction between people (artists) and machines (drones) can take place.
Project Team
