'In the flight path' by travelinlibrarian





http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inBrRdIaJtw (part 1) and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PJn6KDNSuU (part 2)

Animation of falling on to the Sainsbury's Richmond car park



Using google satellite images.

Flash source file: sainsburysrichmondfall.fla (1.2MB)

'Flight Paths' by dompitot

'Global Plane Flight Paths' by gletham

'Boeing 777 landing at Heathrow' by sunilr007

'How to be a Mad Scientist' by Dr SkuLL

Sound Up



From Sun Up, by Lebusque and Airport Announcement
by NOISE.INC @ Freesound.

Flash source file: soundup.fla (660KB)

Words



Click here to view full size

Flash source file: words.fla (62KB)

Duty Free by Lebusque

Feel free to join in our conversations by adding comments to anything on this website. You'll be asked to register when you post in the comment box for the first time, and there may be a delay between when you make your first post and its appearance on the site pages.

We would very much like you to submit your own material to this site, including photos, memories, ideas, stories, music, video, or anything else you think might be of interest or relevance to the project.

You can e-mail us your contributions to kate[at]flightpaths[dot]net or chris[at]flightpaths[dot]net.

Or you can upload contributions to this blog - in the Table of Contents you will see posts for each media type - text, audio, video, and images. These posts contain instructions for uploading your work.

If there is a type of media or method of participation not mentioned here, e-mail Kate Pullinger at kate[at]flightpaths[dot]net or Chris Joseph at chris[at]flightpaths[dot]net and we'll see if we can help!

He crashes into the roof of my car.”

The car park of Sainsbury’s supermarket in Richmond, southwest London, lies directly beneath one of the main flight paths into Heathrow Airport. Over the last decade, on at least five separate occasions, the bodies of young men have fallen from the sky and landed on or near this car park. All these men were stowaways on flights from the Indian subcontinent who had believed that they could find a way into the cargo hold of an airplane by climbing up into the airplane wheel shaft. It is thought that none could have survived the journey, killed by either the tremendous heat generated by the airplane wheels on the runway, crushed when the landing gear retracts into the plane after take off, or frozen to death once the airplane reaches altitude.

‘Flight Paths’ seeks to explore what happens when lives collide – an airplane stowaway and the fictional suburban London housewife, quoted above. This project will tell their stories.

Through the fiction of these two lives, and the cross-connections and contradictions they represent, a larger story about the way we live today will emerge. The collision between the unknown young man, who will be both memorialised and brought back to life by the piece, and the London woman will provide the focus and force for a piece that will explore asylum, immigration, consumer culture, Islam and the West, as well as the seemingly mundane modern day reality of the supermarket car park itself. This young man's death/plummet will become a flight, a testament to both his extreme bravery and the tragic symbolism of his chosen route to the West.

The initial goal of this project is to create a work of digital fiction, a ‘networked book’, created on and through the internet.

The first stage of the project, from November 2007 to May 2008 took place on this blog, opening up the research process to the outside world, inviting discussion of the large array of issues the project touches on. Contributions to the project - both multimedia and more traditional, including images, sounds, memories, and ideas began to arrive and we began to collect and curate them on a netvibes universe site, a web aggregator that allows curation of the web via the collection of fragments, RSS feeds, blogs, etc.

As the project grows it becomes more challenging to collect and order new material, and with the May-July 2009 relaunch we have revived the original blog for the project, and re-organised the material on the netvibes universe, hoping to make the project more accessible so that we can continue encourage and include all manner of contributions, from discussions to pieces of multimedia art.

Partners for this project include the IOCT at DMU (Institute of Creative Technologies at De Montfort University). if:book, and Refugee Week. The project has been funded by Arts Council England, London.

There is no memorial to these young men, and this piece will seek to address that. We would like to work towards creating a permanent memorial in the car park itself.


As you can see, this is an exciting project that could prove to be ground-breaking in its engagement with the networked environment and all the possibilities this environment offers to writers and readers.


Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph