The story behind the lights
Noor Riyadh is the largest light art festival in the world, a citywide programme of installations, projections and performances. For it, Franchise Freedom, a work by DRIFT, created by the artists Lonneke Gordijn, Ralph Nauta and Lucas van Oostrum, flew at a size it had never flown before: 3,000 drones, each one following the same simple rules a starling follows in a flock, together forming one living shape over the desert.
The swarm opened and closed like breathing, split into separate flocks and found itself again, with no image drawn by hand: the movement comes from the algorithm, as it does in nature. It flew every evening of the festival, on weekdays at nine and on weekends at nine and eleven, and set a new record for the largest drone light show.
Desert Swarm is Franchise Freedom, a work by DRIFT, created by the artists Lonneke Gordijn, Ralph Nauta and Lucas van Oostrum. A DRIFT and Drone Stories production. The drones for Noor Riyadh were provided by Lumasky.
