Flight
"The Television experience as distance and duration at the speed of inertia"
Flight description
Television: a form of travel experienced by the still body when subjected to durations of moving images. The televiewers activity is not so much spatial as it is temporal. As Einstein pointed out 'there is no fixed point in space', instead, the televiewers derive a psychology of the present based on the inertia of the moment. If the last century's revolution was in transportation the current revolution is in transmission, with its innovation of the 'static audio visual vehicule' whose passengers own body becomes the last urban frontier. The perceptual function of the figure and ground relationship is a fundamental in contemporary video installation; the video apparatus itself is contextualized by the viewer's relative position to its video imagery. Experienced more and more with newer forms of televisual activity (video games, CD-ROMS, virtual presence), the CRT screen effectively transfigures the object figure into the part of the subject/viewer.
In Flight the viewer figure is driven as if in flight from themself. This casual ritual of surrendering self and place to the meandering mesmerizations of tv entertainment and its affect of linear time travel are at the core of the the installation Flight. The driving should be considered literally, as in the physiological effects of watching television: nerve impulses are sent by the brain as if by some phantom presence in the television content and more importantly its edit intervals. The 60 field per second scan rate has the hypnotic effect of inducing alpha state in the brain. In this mode the 'right side of the brain' dominates. Freed from the restraints of the watchdog 'left hemisphere', the viewer's mind is in a condition to respond to any suggestion, especially those of a sensuous or symbolic nature. The viewer is fair game for the non-rational sell. In this sense, is audio-visual information an environmental projection that can be recognized tangibly as a new form of energy? Screen, 1998