un Projects is based on the unceded sovereign land and waters of the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation; we pay our respects to their Elders, past, present and emerging.
un Projects

Nosedive

by

Throughout In Free Fall, Hito Steyerl proposes an ontology of falling, characterising our contemporary condition as one of groundlessness. It is an infinite free fall caused by looking down at oneself from satellites up above.

Expanding upon the text, my diagrams merge dimension, perspective and orientation; producing a cartographic tangle that is at once open-ended and definitive. The diagram unites vantages. It keeps an eye on both the vanishing point and the birds-eye-view, holding onto stable ground as the horizon spins out of control.

"imagine you are falling

“falling is relational-

if there is nothing to fall toward, you may not even be aware that you are falling.”

“The horizon quivers in a maze of collapsing lines

Perspectives are twisted and multiplied. New types of visuality arise.”

“With the loss of horizon also comes the departure of a stable paradigm of orientation...

In falling, the lines of the horizon shatter,

“Time is out of joint and we no longer know whether we are objects or subjects as we spiral down in an imperceptible free fall.”

“The viewer is mirrored in the vanishing point, and thus constructed by it.

The vanishing point gives the observer a body and a position.”

“A fall toward objects without reservation, embracing a world of forces and matter, which lacks any original stability and sparks the sudden shock of the open: a freedom that is terrifying, utterly deterritorializing, and always already unknown.”

but there is no ground”

you may lose any sense of above
and below, of before and after, of yourself

and your boundaries”

“Traditional modes of seeing and feeling are shattered.

Any sense of balance is disrupted.

whirl around,

and superimpose.”

“Just as linear perspective established an imaginary stable observer and horizon, so does the perspective

from above establish an imaginary floating observer

and an imaginary stable ground.”


Reference: In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective, Hito Steyerl, e-flux issue #24, 2011
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