Drones are changing the way we work, play, and utilize the sky. Today, BREAKGROUND takes a look at the rising hipster subculture in unmanned aerial vehicles.
Story by Ross Ufberg; Design by Brittany Metz.
Coolest feature: The drone can regroom midflight, allowing the craft to take off with a Stalin and land with a Dalí.
Brooklyn inventor T.J. McRae has always been fascinated by aviation — and facial hair. That’s why he created the Mustache Drone, a craft that can reach speeds of up to 40 mph and comes with 5 different mustache configurations, from Franz Joseph to Super Mario. With precision GPS, livestreaming capability, and a built-in stereo system that loads a playlist from your iPhone, the drone is perfect for surreptitiously taking control of the tunes when hanging out on the patio of the local craft brewhouse or your friend’s ironic “not-my-birthday party” barbecue.
“We’ve literally been decorating our bicycles and roller skates in Brooklyn since forever, and I thought, drones are the future, we’re going to be using these things to carry our Pabst and rolling papers pretty soon. Let’s make one that’s right for us.” McRae is taking preorders now on his website, and his company, FLYBYHIPSTER, is teaming up with The Art of Shaving to use a portion of their profits to provide a fine grooming experience to underserved children in inner cities.
Coolest Feature: You can fill up your bookshelves and your walls all in one place.
A combination indie bookstore and “curiosity cabinet” in Madison, Wisconsin that specializes in gender theory titles and taxidermy mounts, has just launched a drone delivery service to compete with Amazon. Books & Bucks cofounder Kennedy Kleinfeldter, who prefers the non-gender normative pronouns xe and xyr, says xe came up with the idea when confronting declining sales and large rent increases in this expensive college town. “Basically, we know we can’t compete with Amazon. They’ve appropriated everything, from their name which they stole from mythical female warriors, to their products, which used to be hand-sold by people who care about what they do. So when they announced they’d be delivering books by drone, we thought, ‘Well, we can do it just as well as they can!’”
“So often, we find ourselves wanting a book right now,” Kleinfeldter told me, and xe is betting that xyr clients are willing to spend an extra buck or two over Amazon’s prices in order to ensure that the store’s employees are making a decent wage. With a fleet of five DJI drones that were purchased through a crowdfunding campaign, Kleinfeldter is hoping that Books & Bucks can thrive in this new market.
I asked one customer in the store if he’d be using the delivery service anytime soon. “I’m looking for a book for a comparative identities and literature class I’m taking called Binaries in (dys)topic Signifiers: Overcoming Aggressive Noneconomics and Subjectivizing Truths in Jenn-dered Jane Austin. The university bookshop is all out, and I knew I could count on this store to have it in stock. I mean, I like coming in here and all, but if I could just stay in bed till 11 and get the book delivered to my room, and then get my roommate to bring it to my bed, then, like, yeah, I’d never step foot in this place again.”
“So far nobody’s ordered any of the mounts via drone, but we’re confident we’ll be delivering both leather-bound books and stuffed leather to customers across Madison any day now,” added Kleinfeldter. Watch out, Amazon!
Coolest Feature: Vintage photography, digital methodology.
We’ve all been there before: yearning for a selfie, but without that pesky arm lunging out of the photo, or the embarrassment of carrying around a selfie stick. That’s why Asher Brexton, owner of Seattle’s PhotoNostalgia, has swapped the 4k digital Sports Camera on his Ehang GhostDrone for a vintage Polaroid Land camera, complete with a tiny remote control that allows him to take photos of people without forcing a shot that looks staged or insincere. “I do a lot of music festivals, weddings, and the occasional bar mitzvah. A lot of people are dying to be photographed, but they don’t want to look like they’re dying to be photographed,” Brexton says. “The un-pose is the new pose.”
The added cachet of an old camera being manipulated by new technology, plus Brexton’s meticulous pedigree — he was trained in Paris by a dissenting member of the Le Rhume School of Photography — has Brexton’s services in high demand. He’s now booked through December 2018 and has the luxury of turning away potential clients whose artistic worldview is not in tune with his own.
“I got into this business to do something different, do something more. I don’t go up to people and ask them to pose. That’s an aesthetic transgression, and a violation of the safe space for artistic expression and indigenous genius which resides inside myself, my inner ‘Howl.’”
In line with his exclusive use of Polaroid film, and the importance he puts on the physical photograph, Brexton does not have a website. But if you visit his storefront in Seattle, you might ask if he’s got any openings in 2019.
