Centrifuge Flight
Can the mind be separated from the body and the physical brain? Centrifuge Flight is a metaphor for a state in which body and mind separate in space-time though remain entangled in an unknown way.
Passengers on a flight are travelling and their integrated faces become the reflection of geographies of the mind. Centrifugal motion both disintegrates them and keeps them intact as they fly around the Earth. Wearing the Sixth Sense Flight Gloves, a transportation system's device, they can be transported anywhere just by pointing to a location on the navigational map.
Many say that time seems to be moving faster these days and that we live in accelerated times. Many feel that we are busier and time is so short such that our capacity to digest information is tested through shorter and shorter video clips. Perhaps our thoughts have found a way to travel without our bodies and reach their destinations in an instance; a click away from others in remote geographies. Thoughts meet thoughts and commune, creating noetic geographies where they sometimes dance or mourn together. Great distances are bridged by thought-reading and thought-sending passengers who, like Egyptian gods and goddesses, and the dead, weave their thoughts in coded and sacred forms across the space of millions of years.
The Formal Process and Concept
Centrifuge Flight is based on a performative video entitled Flight, the first piece in which I started experimenting with the transition from live performance to video and from live performance to on-screen performance. The video camera and the editing transported the action into a partially disembodied state and a different notion of space-time. [I wrote about the transition from live performance to screen in length and depth in my PhD thesis, 2001, Middlesex University]. Although this concept currently sounds straightforward, the transition from live action to screen including the interrelation between live action and the screen, is part of an ongoing media evolution which affects the many ways through which we perceive the correlation of the body-brain and the mind. As I suggested in the thesis, although recent developments in screen-based technologies make the concept of this piece feasible for visual demonstrations, there is still the enigma of the body-mind relations as we move and learn to exist in new ways in screen-based and augmented as well as virtual space-time.
The original piece investigated the formal difference between live and filmed performative actions and, in addition to live performance, included camera movements and framing, special effects and editing. The video Centrifuge Flight is based on images and ideas from the original video piece (which will be made available in a later stage) in a contemporary context in which cyber video rooms become mediating 'locations' between the body and the mind.
This is the third blog post in the series Fields of Origin – My Journey Towards Cybernetic Futures, which includes text and images from my early work. These creative concepts are mentioned in my practice-based PhD thesis as they gradually led me to explore further.
