What do you do when you open a $742 million museum gallery? If you're LACMA, you release a thousand drones into the night sky and tell them to act like birds. Naturally.
Amsterdam-based studio DRIFT closed out the opening gala for LACMA's brand new David Geffen Galleries with a piece called "Franchise Freedom" - an aerial drone performance featuring 1,000 drones mimicking the swarming, swirling flight patterns of starling murmurations. You know, those hypnotic flock formations that make you stop dead on the pavement and stare upward with your mouth open like a golden retriever seeing snow for the first time.
Why this is cooler than it sounds (and it already sounds very cool)
Starling murmurations are one of nature's most genuinely mind-melting phenomena. Thousands of birds moving as one fluid, shape-shifting organism, with no leader and no plan - just pure emergent behaviour. DRIFT essentially asked: what if we did that, but make it art, make it intentional, and make it happen over a Los Angeles museum that just spent three-quarters of a billion dollars on a new building?
The result, according to Hypebeast, was a piece that deliberately muddles the boundaries between humans, nature, and technology. Which is either a profound meditation on our relationship with the natural world, or the most expensive screensaver ever made. Possibly both.
The venue is kind of a big deal too
The David Geffen Galleries is LACMA's new permanent collection home - a 110,000-square-foot concrete structure that just debuted as the centrepiece of the museum's long-gestating renovation. It's a whole thing. The kind of building that architecture nerds have been arguing about online for years before a single visitor walked through the doors.
Kicking off that era with a drone flock performance is a genuinely bold choice. It's site-specific, it's spectacular, and it asks real questions about what separates the organic from the engineered - especially when the engineered thing is copying the organic thing so convincingly that your brain short-circuits trying to tell them apart.
The takeaway
DRIFT has essentially built a career on making technology feel alive and nature feel algorithmic, and "Franchise Freedom" is that ethos at its most literal. A thousand machines learning to flock. A museum celebrating its future by summoning something ancient. Los Angeles being absolutely Los Angeles about the whole thing.
We're not crying. You're crying. It's just drone light in our eyes.
