Flyin’ High

Flyin’ High: making steady progress; being at the high point in one’s career or reaching a high point in historical significance or importance. We are doing it. Human beings have turned the world in a massive land-art project. Carbon dioxide flies high as well. It passed 450 ppm in 2015 and grows steady.
One day, there will be such a concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere that we will struggle to think and planes in the sky will find it hard to fly. Yet today, we look at an airplane and we are reminded of memories from another world, of the freedom we lost when the world we knew ended, hit by a global pandemic.
It’s a strange world the one we are left with. We struggle grasping its meaning. Now that life and the Internet are one thing, we are caught in a conceptual loop between reality and its representations, not so different from Joseph Kosuth’s three chairs. We look for the causes but all we can find is paranoia. Aviation impacts on the environment. Internet does so even more. NFTs generate as much carbon dioxide as a jetliner flying for one hour. And the environment kicks back. The skies fill with turbulences, and rising temperature slow the speed of data exchange.
Flyin’ High wants to be a reflection on this condition. It is a one-hour flight from Milan to Rome onboard a digital plane, perfectly simulated in Microsoft Flight Simulator AI processed reconstruction of earth. Flyin’ High is also an NFT. Buying it, theoretically, corresponds to boarding the plane for real.

A special thank you to our pilot, Uekusa Koki.