Therapeutic Aesthetics- the example of aircam.

Posted: January 8th, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | No Comments »

“There is no fundamental difference between perception, hallucination and cognition” ( Brian Massumi, Parables )

aircam on Emirates (ICE) System

aircam on Emirates (ICE) System

So this is what I wrote in my journal just after I took the first video of a landing at Bangkok Airport at night as mediated through an in-flight entertainment system that transmits live feed from a CCTV housed in the nose of an airplane. It is a little overblown as unedited me tends to be, but i present it as documentation of a series of sensations rather than poetic analysis (although I suspect that is what I was trying to do).

“I am flying. The darkness unfolds before in a jerky motion steadied by the symmetrical glow of the airport and its runway lights below. Thick drops of rain dash against my surface as I descend  toward earth. The array of glowing lines rise like a blob and blur before me, then everything begins to shake  and slide as I, cocooned and dry, meet the hard wet surface of another non-place night.

bangkoklanding Movie

My live stream remains until the aluminium tube of the plane rests close to the glass tube of the airport terminal which extends another tube in the form of an air bridge which locks onto the open orifice of the plane. A continuous pipe across vision to matter has been secured, as I am entubulated in multiple dimensions. Folded and looped into a tunnelled perspective of layering perception, this experience is inherently synaesthetic, involving the cross referencing of perception and sensation across hard and soft, dynamic and inert, material and informational. Moving from the tube of the plane to the tube of the airport while staring at the tubular vision on the screen before me, forwardness is both ineluctable (the must move forward or drop from the sky) and elicited (by all the cultural tropes in which ‘forwardness’ is loaded with values of social and personal success). ”

So my first thoughts about this seemingly obscure phenomenon of avionic culture were about tubular dynamics and how despite the fact that everyone laughed when Senator Ted Stevens describes the internet as a series of pipes, he was actually ‘kind of’ right. There is a distinctly tubular ‘look and feel’ to the ’space of flows’ ( of which both airports and the internet are both base parts). In many ways it is hardly surprising that the space of flows would look like a tube. Tubes are of course very ancient technologies to facilitate flow. And yet the literalness with which tubular aesthetics articulate is , to me at least, curious. What are the perceptual, political and corporeal ramifications of entubulated dynamics?

the siberian tundra looks like an MRI of a stomach
The whole world becomes a body under scrutiny of some kind of imaging- if not for security surveillance, then for orientation or entertainment or comfort, or some convergence of all the above?
Tundra Air Camera Movie
In the plane you don’t really feel forward motion, you shake a lot ( my videos testify to that) but you don’t feel forwardness, partly because you don’t see it. Strapped in you feel inert, even if you know you are a packet of infoflesh crammed into a speeding airborne tube. The vision of movement- of landscapes and clouds and distant city shapes and tones - is in some way calming- creating a therapeutic subjectivity- which gestures way beyond the hospital style food, plastic knives and swaddling of buckled up passengers ( although it includes all these) but towards the complete control of the wholly convergent sensorium.