Dreams of flying

On a morning in April 2008 our Agent was collected from her hotel room on the Volga in the centre of Nizhny Novgorod, once the closed city of Gorky. They drove to the Sokol aircraft plant where the MiG fighter was invented. In WWII they produced one plane an hour. By 2006 the MiG -29 was deployed in twenty-five countries including Peru, Eritrea and Bangladesh. After our Agent’s briefing and a blood pressure check, which registered a little higher than normal, the paper work was signed. The Agent was suited up and told she would now be referred to as a Pilot. She laughed out loud… So begins Dreams of Flying. The video combines footage from a flight in a MiG with a narrative that interweaves both the individual and collective dreams that coalesce around taking a ride in a military jet fighter. The idea of flying in a MiG-fighter evokes that ancient, almost primal human desire to fly reformulated in the C21st through military technology and entertainment. The association of military conflict with entertainment is long-established through games of all kinds, from the strategies of chess, fairground carousel rides to watching movies involving flight (which reach a spectacular apex on Imax screens) and current computer games. Such entertainment is not just concerned with simple fantasies and escapism but also reflects the world we live in.