We tend to think of drones as either military menaces or personal helicopter-like toys. But, in Nadav Assor and Yoni Goldstein's Lessons on Leaving Your Body we get an altogether different kind of animal. Or, in this case, a cyborg.

It comes in the form of Jake Wells, a.k.a. Fleshpilot, who describes himself as "a professional tattooist, a DIY drone builder and FPV (First Person View) hobbyist, and possibly the world’s first RC (Remote Control) Christian Minister." Today, Assor screened Lessons on Leaving Your Body at HKW's Theatersaal as part of The Optimized Self programme. 

But, to call Wells' fascination with drones a hobby is a bit misleading. As Assor and Goldstein's film reveals, the man thinks deeply about parallels between a drone's physical structure and the human body. In either case, it is something to be piloted. Both the drone and the human body, in Wells' minds, are flawed and out of pilots' control. And Wells believes the drone offers him, and potentially many others, the gods' eyes view that Jesus supposedly had during his resurrection. 

While somewhat fascinating on religious level, or at least as an examination of Wells' mind, there is something far more interesting at play. It's the idea that FPV drones, which utilize video goggles to give drone operators a gods' eye view from any number of directions and altitudes, almost achieve a type of astral projection. This is notion that someone can transcend their body's limitations and travel to different geographical coordinates, effectively being in two locations simultaneously. 

It might seem like a hippie-dippie notion, but transgressive, proto-cyberpunk authors like William S. Burroughs and Thomas Pynchon both explored astral projection in their fiction. Burroughs with Cities of the Red Night and Pynchon with Mason & Dixon and Against the Day, and maybe in a few other scenes in his labyrinthine, cinematic novels. Scientifically, the idea of astral projection is dismissed, but one can't help but think of its redefinition with Wells' brand of FPV drone excursions. 

At any rate, it's something to consider as our tools of reality capture mature in the future.