IL BRANCO (The Pack)
THE DRONES OF SUBURBIA (ROMA)
Lei non segue il branco. Il branco segue lei.
She doesn't follow the pack. The pack follows her.
A woman walks a Roman street after dark, dressed in black. Silver wolves move at her flank; a formation of drones holds station above her. The villas light as she passes. She is not being hunted — she is being escorted.
In The Drones of Suburbia, every street is under the Corona — the drone formation's tracking array, the suburb's way of holding a body in its sight and never letting the sightline drop. It locks not only to her but to the whole escort: her face, the two wolves at her flank, the drones overhead — each one tagged, ranged and held, the entire pack bound into a single moving constellation with her at its centre. On anyone else that geometry is a leash. Over her, it curdles into worship. Every reticle in the frame is oriented to the same woman, and the ring of drones stops reading as a cordon and starts reading as what it has, all along, been shaped like: a crown of light. The suburb meant to watch her. It ended up crowning her.
I built the Corona as a working instrument for this series — a facial- and body-tracking HUD that fixes the drones' gaze across her, the wolves and the swarm, and refuses to release any of them — so the film is shot, in the most literal sense, through the eye of the thing that was sent to police the street. Its Italian vocal track, composed for the piece, is the pack's liturgy sung up through that machinery: a hymn from the apparatus to the woman it has decided to follow.
Bella. Libera. Lei. — Beautiful. Free. Her.
Miss AL Simpson · single-channel film, 1920×1080, 3:40 · AI-composed Italian vocal · 1/1
