Close Enough is a live performance and interactive installation about the strange intimacy of drone surveillance. Friendship and love increasingly happen at a distance, through screens, and that remote intimacy now extends to war, fought by pilots who come to know strangers they will never meet. In the installation, live drones, the pilot, and the audience explore drone intimacy together.
That intimacy changes with the machine. A MALE (medium-altitude, long-endurance) drone like the Predator circles far overhead for weeks at a time while its operator, often on another continent, watches a target’s life unfold on a screen: their routines, their relationships, their small daily habits. Operators have described this in testimony as a form of stalking, weeks spent coming to know someone intimately before ending their life without physical consequence to themselves. With an FPV (first-person view) drone the pilot is still physically distant, but often the drone itself is the weapon: it flies until it collides with its target, meeting a person face to face in their final moments. Each drone subtype creates its own kind of closeness, and the work moves between them.
Close Enough uses autonomous drones, computer vision, and the visual language of military intelligence to recreate this watching and place the audience inside it. Visitors find themselves on both sides of the apparatus at once, watching the surveillance unfold and gradually recognising themselves within it, held in the uneasy position of having been known by something long before they noticed it looking. The work unfolds in three acts. In the first act, a pilot sleeps beneath their own drones and dreams in the language of the machine, while the audience watches the sleeper through its eyes. In the second act, a video essay scrolls through the feed of a drone-war veteran, tracing how the screens that carry friendships and love came to carry war as well, until strangers’ last moments scrolled past in the same feed. In the third act, the pilot flies live drones over the audience, turning the watching onto the room itself: each visitor is noticed, followed, recorded, and documented.
Close Enough will be presented at GOGBOT Festival in Enschede in September 2026.
In collaboration with Flora Reznik (film editor) and Luz Lassizuk (dramaturg).
Special thanks to CrossFit Coolhaven for letting me train my drones at their space.
In development. Early captures from the drone feed below; full documentation to follow.
