The Eye Was Watching and Then My Drone Landed Behind the Fence

Thirty feet of eyeball sits on a lawn in downtown Dallas, and it does not blink.

Locals call it the Giant Eyeball. The artist calls it simply Eye.

Either name fits. It is a 30-foot human eye planted on a lawn in downtown Dallas, surrounded by buildings that seem almost ordinary beside it. The blue iris belongs to artist Tony Tasset. The red veins spread across its surface. From the street, the sculpture looks like something that rolled loose from one of the skyscrapers above and came to rest on Main Street.

I went there to film it from the air.

The evening began with dinner alongside my creative group. Afterward, I grabbed my drone and walked over to The Eye. The first few minutes went exactly as planned. I launched, established my position and started collecting footage—left pan, right pan, gimbal up, gimbal down.

Fan-freaking-tastic.

Then I tried descending while raising the gimbal. I held the stick down a beat too long, and the drone did exactly what I had unintentionally told it to do.

It landed.

Right on the lawn.

Behind the fence.

An Eye With a Past

Before I explain how I got the drone back, The Eye deserves a proper introduction.

Tony Tasset created the sculpture as a monumental replica of his own eye. It is made from fiberglass, resin and steel, and its scale turns a familiar part of the human body into something surreal.

The sculpture made its public debut in Chicago’s Pritzker Park in 2010 after being commissioned for the Chicago Loop Alliance’s Art Loop program. Three years later, it arrived at its current home across from The Joule hotel in downtown Dallas.

Tasset has connected the image with everything from the eye of a pharaoh and the Masonic eye to Big Brother, God and human consciousness. He has also resisted assigning it one fixed interpretation. The work can mean whatever the person standing before it brings to the encounter.

That openness is part of its power. Humanity has attached ideas of knowledge, authority, protection and surveillance to the eye for thousands of years. Tasset simply made one too large to ignore.

It has since become one of the most recognizable sights on Main Street. People photograph it, practice yoga beneath its gaze and even hold wedding receptions on the surrounding lawn. The Dallas Art Fair’s closing celebration is appropriately called the Eye Ball.

On the night I filmed it, however, none of that was on my mind.

My drone was stranded on the other side of the fence.

“Re-calibrate Compass”

I pressed the launch control.

Nothing.

I tried again.

Still nothing.

Then a message appeared across the top of my screen:

Re-calibrate compass.

Shit.

At first, I thought the downtown buildings and trees might have blocked the connection. I moved closer, hoping the signal would return. It didn’t. The drone wanted a compass recalibration, and it could not perform one while sitting motionless on the grass.

There was only one solution: I had to physically retrieve it.

I found a man at a nearby bar and asked how someone might get over the fence to recover a stranded drone. He told me that The Joule owned the property.

Fine.

I walked next door, found a security guard and explained exactly what had happened.

“My drone landed on your property. Can I go get it?”

He looked at me and said, “Oh. I was wondering what that was.”

Thankfully, he let me retrieve it.

Relief does not quite describe that moment. The drone was hot when I picked it up. I shut down both the aircraft and controller and decided I had carried enough gear through downtown Dallas for one night.

That should have been the end of the story.

It wasn’t.

The Scooter That Wouldn’t Unlock

I found a Lime scooter and tried to rent it for the trip back. I scanned it and thought the rental had started, but the scooter refused to unlock. After another attempt, the app finally explained why: I was outside its operating hours.

Great.

I left the scooter and started walking. A few steps later, my chest went cold.

My drone bag.

I had walked away from it.

I turned around and moved quickly toward the unattended bag. A man nearby noticed me approaching it with purpose. A police officer had apparently been watching it too. When he realized it belonged to me, he said he was glad I had returned because someone had left a drone bag sitting there and nobody knew whose it was.

That someone was me.

My fellow creators stayed with me through the entire ordeal, and we walked back to the hotel together. It was only about ten minutes away. I was full from dinner, carrying all my gear again and soaked through with nervous sweat.

The finished footage looks calm.

The person operating the drone was anything but.

What the Flight Taught Me

Every expedition teaches me something. This one delivered two lessons in quick succession.

First, dense urban surroundings can complicate a flight. Concrete, steel, trees and restricted access leave little room for correcting a mistake. A landing that would be a minor inconvenience in an open field becomes a recovery operation when it happens behind a fence.

Second, small control inputs matter. Hold the descent command a little too long and the aircraft may land regardless of what you intended.

That was the entire education: one hot drone, one scooter that wouldn’t unlock, one temporarily abandoned bag and a shirt soaked through by the time I reached the hotel.

Cheap tuition—if you are the one reading about it instead of living it.

The Eye itself remained perfectly still throughout the whole episode. Fifteen feet of blue iris, fixed on the lawn, watching me turn a short filming session into a downtown recovery mission.

Maybe that is what the sculpture means to me now.

It saw everything.