vehicle: white_sovereign
project: naked_bandit / here, not here / white_sovereign
location: Nuclear Fusion Laboratory, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland, 2006
audio sources: scripted dialogue, voice

The project investigates the formal mechanisms of power. It places an agent of control, the white_sovereign, in an environment where others become the subjects of its surveillance system.
The white_sovereign is an autonomous flying robot with a vision system that allows it to navigate independently. Here it surveilles a space of scientific research in which the engineers of knowledge and power construction themselves act as the objects of the controlling mechanism.

The project is based on a hypothetical scenario in which so-called naked_bandits are defined by a sovereign agent as being 'here': under surveillance and control, and simultaneously being 'not here': disconnected from a legal territory where they can claim their basic rights. While the naked_bandit is held in this dilemma, the white_sovereign enacts its symbolical power by manoeuvering and supervising the surrounding space. In previous versions of the project, the scenario has been constructed in the form of a software process and as a spatial installation with balloons and the flying robot.

The flying robot system was developed in the context of scientific research by Autonomous Systems Lab, EPFL, Lausanne.