Interview: KATSU and The Graffiti Drone

Published in conjunction with Motherboard.- VICE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vZzqjKIBNc KATSU is an artist and vandal. His work pushes our idea of what can be achieved with the graffiti artist’s limited tool set. Having established himself as one of New York City’s most prolific and imaginative taggers in the 1990s, KATSU garnered admiration from …

Interview: The Aerial Anarchist

Raphael “Trappy” Pirker is the founder and front man of Team Black Sheep, a group of hobbyist drone pilots who have gained global renown, and infamy, for their aerial videos of landscapes and cityscapes from Rio de Janeiro to New Zealand. Trappy first came into the public spotlight when he …

The Government is Closed, But Are Drones Still Flying?

By Arthur Holland Michel At the Center for the Study of the Drone, the first question we asked when we received news of the U.S. government shutdown was, “How will the shutdown affect U.S. government drone use, both abroad and domestically?” Cyril Almeida, a Pakistani journalist, speaking for the Northern …

Learning to Fly: a Day with the Tushevs

By Arthur Holland Michel “I do this because it is fun,” Georgi Tushev told me as he loaded a lipo battery into his drone. We were in an enormous oval-shaped parking lot in the Rockaways, a slender peninsula at the southern end of Long Island. I was watching Georgi as …

News Analysis: Drones vs. Graffiti Artists

By Arthur Holland Michel If you are a graffiti artist, be aware that Germany’s rail company, Deutsche Bahn, has just enlisted drones to make your life harder. The small, 60,000euro drone-copters will fly “almost silently” over German rail yards to “collect evidence” against artists who paint train carriages in the …

Tech: Swarming at UPenn’s GRASP Lab

By Arthur Holland Michel Some of the most exciting and advanced technological developments in the world of drones are coming out of the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing & Perception (GRASP) Lab at the University of Pennsylvania. Last year, videos began to circulate of small drones cooperating with each other, independently …