The companion podcast to Issue No. 77 of The Intersect. Chelsea and Georgia sit with a question that doesn't resolve cleanly: when wonder and surveillance share the same infrastructure, does knowing that change what you felt before you knew it? The conversation keeps circling back — and it's worth following it all the way around.

Contents

• 00:00 Introduction to Aerial Perspectives
• 00:00 Aerial Photography Competitions
• 00:03 The Bittersweet Progress of Technology
• 00:04 The Internet's Changing Nature
• 00:06 The Arc of Technology
• 00:08 Record-Breaking Drone Displays
• 00:11 The Duality of Drone Art
• 00:13 Absurdity in Drone Displays
• 00:15 Sound and Surveillance Art
• 00:17 Patterns of Technology and Control
• 00:18 Conclusion: Coexisting Realities

In this episode

Seeing the world from above. DJI's SkyPixel competition is in its 11th year and has handed out nearly $200,000 in prizes — but the real question is what happens to the joy of a perspective when the tool that unlocks it also coordinates strikes.

The internet's familiar arc. The web's journey from liberation to lock-in maps onto the drone story with uncomfortable precision. Chelsea and Georgia trace a pattern that, once you see it, is hard to stop seeing everywhere.

22,582 drones, one computer. A new Guinness World Record for simultaneous airborne drones is genuinely awe-inspiring — and genuinely unsettling for exactly the same reason.

Drift's Franchise Freedom at LACMA. A swarm-based drone performance that deliberately evokes starling murmurations raises a harder question: can art reclaim an image once its shadow has been cast?

Skeletor trolls the freeway. A lighthearted pop-culture drone stunt turns out to be a useful measuring stick — for just how wide the gap has grown between what's possible here and what's possible elsewhere.

The Harbinger: sound and surveillance. An art installation shifts the medium from the visual to the audible, asking when exactly we stopped noticing the surveillance creeping in — and what it sounds like when care and control become the same thing.

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