- Imagine You Are Falling -

— scroll to see video and stills documentation —

↑ Snippets of animation from How to Deal with Difference, installation at Artspace, VCA,2018

It was an essay by Hito Steyerl that began “Imagine you are falling, and there is no ground”. She goes on to talk about the relevance of free fall and motion in our social and political world-making. It’s really good. She talks about things like ‘what if we were all falling together? Simultaneous movement. I mean you woudn’t notice, right? I guess usually the horizon’d be a giveaway, but what if someone took it and didn’t put it back where you thought it’d be. People can be real jerks like that. And if we were all falling all it would take is one jerk and we’d be lost, not knowing. And when isn’t there at least one jerk? I guess it wouldn’t really matter. If we didn’t know. But even the idea makes me uncomfortable. It’s like the matrix, yeah? Like, screw you laws of physics, we’ll move however we want. Or at least, like, how important is reality? And how do you decide what is real, and who falls? Cos someone always falls. Hito didn’t say any of that. She was mostly talking about a philosophical groundlessness. You should go read the essay.