While the vernacular of diagrams found in manuals and instructional guides delimit a set of conditions and actions, their reconfiguration here addresses how the systems of control that underlie formal diagrams are propagated through everyday life. As in a mockup of a control room with a multiple-image display, it mimics the screen without the inferred veracity of televisuality. Rather, it occupies a space between painting and diagram, where images are interrupted continuously across the visual field.
Encased between wood and glass, the images occupy a space between painting and diagram, where they are interrupted continuously across the visual field. Their reflective surfaces refer to the difficulty of separating out the place of this historical artifact in the lineage of contemporary techniques of picturing the world through satellite imagery and global communication. The paintings are reverse-painted on transparent sheets of Plexiglas and mounted on plywood panels. The work describes an environment alive with interconnected protocols, from attitude displays to taxi patterns, but also neutralized: a view of the twenty-first century from the perspective of a decommissioned twentieth century plane.
The curvature of the horizon across the peripheral field frames an oculus with an inactive Norden bombsight at its center. The windscreen is rendered as a diagram that cuts through both an interior and exterior view, circumscribing a visual manifold encompassing flight instrumentation, ground equipment and crew, airfield and landscape. The iconic bomber of WW2 and the start of the Cold War, the B-29 heralded a new era of globalization in which territory would increasingly be defined by targeting. In this sense, training is inherently an orientation toward both the actual and the virtual, as performance draws upon tacit knowledge according to formalized protocols.Ĭentral to this exhibition is an installation of 26 shaped paintings, under the same title, depicting fragments of a cockpit and a twenty-first century airfield as seen through the windscreen of a grounded B-29. To train within a technologized environment is to mediate formal and informal instruction-where a formal understanding of information and procedure coexists with an informal understanding gained through embodied action. This work is part of an exhibition titled Training Setting, a collaboration between Maria Park and Branden Hookway that investigates social and control protocols using a diagrammatic language of flight cockpits and table settings.
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