Marcos Lutyens

NanoDrone, ArtShare LA, Los Angeles, CA, USA, 2013

NanoDrone at Future Tense, ArtShare LA, Los Angeles 2013

Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn't exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

Ray Bradbury

NanoDrone involves a small aerial video drone that was let loose in the Bradbury building: small enough not to be noticed by the guard on duty, nor the LAPD that uses the building for their offices.

Surveillance gets more intrusive: from the air, at a molecular scale, through walls. Seeing, feeling, sensing the physicality of intrusion and trespass and reversing the viewpoint onto the observer.

These surveillance images were taken sometime in the past (now) or future (then) within the Bradbury Building, a structure well known for its porosity of time.

George Wyman, a mere draftsman in 1893, took on the task of designing the monumental building having been given the approval through a ghost at a Ouija board that left the message ‘success’ written upside down, in answer to whether he should take on the challenge.

As with most places in Los Angeles, the building went through a myriad of forward and past projections in various media, most notably as the shooting location of Blade Runner. The building was also incorporated into the video game SimCity 3000, the Star Trek novel: The Case of the Colonist's Corpse: A Sam Cogley Mystery and Marvel comics has both real employees and fictional characters working inside the building.

This is part of a series of work that explores perception, consciousness and chance, and the evolving changes in how we see the world and how the world sees us.