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On June 19, Bridle released a military-grade surveillance balloon into the air above South London. Hosted at the parking-structure-turned-art-space Bold Tendencies, it’s the central part of the work. Until September, the balloon will lift a variety of communications payloads up into the air, such as aerial cameras and darknet routers.I spoke to Bridle about the purpose of this event, why London is the perfect place for it, and why you'd be wrong to assume his project is actually just another form of surveillance.Motherboard: What’s the inspiration behind this project? How does it fit with the rest of your work?“Surveillance isn’t going away, so the first step is democratizing access to it and making what it’s doing more transparent.”
James Bridle: It reaches back into the history of ballooning, and looks at the way ballooning started in the 19th century as this utopian project, with incredible balloon empresarios doing dazzling flights over cities.
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Yes, it’s used by the British Army. It’s also being trialed in the US for monitoring the US-Mexico border. The balloon is quite closely related to the drone in the sense of being an unmanned aerial system, essentially, with a quite similar yet otherwise distanced set of performances that it could be used for.Drastically cheaper than a drone, as well.
Yeah, but there are interesting issues around that, of course. The price of helium worldwide is currently at an all-time high, in large part because of the increased use of balloons in war zones in the last 10 years. The two major uses of helium are for balloons, which the US Army is the world’s biggest purchaser of, and for cooling and medical equipment, like MRIs and such.In addition to darknet routers and cameras, what else will the balloon lift with it over the course of its run?
We’re working with a local ham radio group to do ham radio reporting, and civilian-bound radio workshops, and advancing on that to mesh networks. We want to see how far we can send a signal across London to create local area networks, of the kinds that are used in protest situations, but also quite frequently in humanitarian situations.We’re going to be working with ScanLab, who are a brilliant young architectural and fairly artistic research group in London who do lidar scanning. Lidar is the technology used in Google StreetView, and Google uses it on its self-driving cars. It’s effectively radar, but done with a beam of light that records depth, so you can build up a 3D map of the area.
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I keep catching myself in that exact quandary. How do you make this as open a project as possible? It’s quite easy to make work that’s supposed to be about surveillance but just does more surveillance.The first thing I’m doing is releasing all of the balloon’s recorded data to anyone who wants to see it. That’s an absolute first step. We’re doing this in a public space, and all the results and as much of the raw material I can possibly upload and share will be available for anyone to access.Beyond that, I’ll also be giving people direct control over it. I’m working on developing systems so that people can not only access the images but control and request the use and production of images themselves.We’re working on the assumption that, certainly in London, surveillance isn’t going away, so then the very first step is democratizing access to it and making its gatherings and what it’s doing more transparent.