Today, the first in our five readings from Connecting Flights, a meditation on contemporary art, territory and travel by the writer, George Alexander. The readings are conceived as a set of projected slide images. The slide you can t see is by Australian artist Rosemary Laing. It s a time-lapse picture of an airplane taking off. Using a digital camera on computer printed vinyl, the plane is given the spectral quality of condensed ground fog.
Speed makes it equally a material and immaterial thing.
It appears to be both accelerating and motionless at the same time. We re not sure yet whether this extends our information of the image or eclipses it. Our whole century has been in transit, a wind tunnel of pressures making cities drift weightlessly in electronic ether. Super high velocity of airplanes and airwaves produces instantaneousness. Places then become placeless.