At Last, The Robot Flies

Ornithopter, from the Greek ornis (meaning “bird”) and pteron (meaning “wing” or “feather”), refers to aircraft that fly by flapping their wings. At Last, The Robot Flies is a book of images of ornithopters. From hobbyists to aerodynamic and biomimetic professionals, ornithopters are designed and produced in a wide range of forms and for various purposes.

The interest in birds and their ability to fly has its own history. Humans have been watching them long before technology advanced enough to make such attempts possible. And with the advent of mechanical apparatus, observation was no longer only a matter of sight. Flight movements were first deciphered with a gun pointed at the sky.

To watch, then, is never neutral. It is shaped by the tools that extend it, and by the intentions that sustain it. Ornithopters emerge from this expanded field of looking: as objects of study, as engineered solutions, as experiments, and as projections of desire. They are funded, designed, and circulated within different economies—scientific, educational, military, recreational—each determining how and why these bird-like forms take to the sky.

A man watches a bird; a bird watches a man; a man finds himself watched by a bird-shaped device of his own making; a bird encounters, perhaps, another bird that is not a bird. If a bird-shaped figure in flight may also be a machine, recognition falters.

Like the birds in the tale of the Greek painter Zeuxis, the ornithopter watcher seems to share similar reactions: to be fooled by appearances, frightened by their sheer existence, or to maintain a contemplative distance. In the tale, birds were watched by the idle yet observant painter—would the birds know of his existence? Would the flying ornithopters know that they are being watched, whether by birds or humans?