Loitering Theatre /

Loitering Theatre

Loitering Theatre is the name of Loitering Theatre's first collaborative work. It used customised quadcopters to fly beyond the normal street view to access and film previously inaccessible and unseen views of Dublin city. Loitering Theatre was commissioned by The Science Gallery Dublin as part of their Hack the City exhibition.

Some of the most prevalent alternative vantage points on our streets are the security cameras, police helicopters, and traffic camera monitoring systems and high-rise boardroom views controlled by governmental authorities and corporations. These different and unusual viewing points are rarely accessible to the individual citizen or in our control.

Loitering Theatre focuses on the possible democratization of surveillance that drone flight affords. It instigates a simple but radical change of the view that arises from the detachment of the vantage point from the physical apparatus of the body. Loitering Theatre tries to imagine a more playful and poetic form of urban surveillance that might instead serve to critique the city's structures and established systems from on high. Along the way we fly by modernist pump-prime dreams, look statues of forgotten statesmen in the eye, discover an old lady's house behind hoardings, her own island of resistance to Dublin's property developers; and, in a reversal of fortune, peer in the European Headquarters of the data gathering Google and Facebook HQ's.

Loitering Theatre attracted considerable press and online attention worldwide (receiving mention in Wired, by Anonymous, New York Times, Vice magazine, Rolling Stone and the Irish state broadcaster news). The local press coverage led to complaints being made to the Irish police force. Detectives who viewed the piece asked that the work be censored sections or we would face arrest. Some scenes were obscured for gallery installation. The uncensored version has throughout this process always remained available online (A similar amount of detail can be found in Google Earth's images of the same locations in Dublin)

Original Composition by Philip Stewart. RT 4 mins 18 secs