Exploring the issues of pictures made by drones, in workshops for children.
On 27 September 2014, as part of the launch day of the season for young audiences at the Pompidou Centre (Paris, France), I proposed a foreshadowing workshops “Drone-altitude”, which will take place in December 2014. Project imagined with Patrice Chazottes, Deputy Director of Public, Marie-Claude Beck, head of educational project and Christine Herpe-Mora, head of educational project, conducted with Esther Pailhou and Malak Varichon, facilitators.
We welcomed during the afternoon, about 500 people, in groups of 30-50 people (families) for short workshops of 25 minutes.
Principle of this drone workshop
The workshop took place in three steps :
- Issue. Welcome to the audience. Discussion to locate the drone issues today and tomorrow, and the importance of an artistic look to take distance, through creativity. The workshop proposal is that people in small groups create on the ground, from supplied graphics (colored shapes in plastic), an imaginary territory in several areas. Then this imaginary territory would be filmed with a drone, and collectively we would carry a “look from the sky”, poetic, on this invented world.
- Manufacturing. People were making, on the ground, their imaginary territory.
- Shooting. Then the people were behind the safety net, I put the drone on the ground, and I was driving, the image being picked up to a projector. These were the people who led me, very playful, trying to fly their “imaginary territory.”
Result
The workshop seemed to have been quite striking to participants. Simply take the “power” to look at the world from above gives a completely different perspective, both artistic, because it produces a visual and political abstraction, because it is a takeover.
The issues raised by the drone will be increasingly present in our daily lives has been addressed from the front, with this introductory moment.
