The Dutch art duo DRIFT brought its renowned drone performance, Franchise Freedom, to Los Angeles last week to mark the opening of the new David Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). As evening light settled over Wilshire Boulevard, two complementary explorations of form, movement, and shared space came together: one rendered in the monumental, sand-colored concrete of the new galleries, the other in a choreographed pattern of illuminated drones directed by DRIFT's swarming algorithms.
Franchise Freedom is the product of more than two decades of study into the murmurations of starlings. The work turns the night sky into a living expanse of collective motion, with each drone responding to those around it. The result is a temporary, ever-shifting structure that reflects on themes of freedom, interdependence, and the tension between the individual and the group.
That sensibility echoes the architecture of the David Geffen Galleries, whose horizontal plan proposes a model of equity free of hierarchy. In a similar way, Franchise Freedom has no central leader; its energy arises from synchronized interaction among its many parts. In both the building and the performance, form is created through relationship rather than dominance.
Taken together, the structure and the spectacle point toward an alternative to rigid systems, presenting a vision of space defined by openness, movement, and collective experience.
