Single-channel HD video with sound
Duration: 5:05
Director of Photography: Balin Williams
Soundtrack Composition: Tim Mahony
2024
Video stillsTerminal Velocity is a meditation on the merging of human perception and machine intelligence, framed as an AI dream of flight. Written in collaboration with a neural network, the text of the work emerged through a process of dialogue, ideas generated and reshaped between artist and machine.
The imagery, recorded in a single take by Balin Williams during a joy flight, comes through the analogue headset feed of a drone operator. This low-resolution signal, favoured over high-definition video for its reduced latency, acts as an optic nerve linking body and machine. The resulting footage, mediated through distortion and immediacy, captures a unique point of connection where human skill and technological apparatus align in a fluid choreography of control.
Set against a score composed by Tim Mahony, Terminal Velocity reflects on how technological development continues to collapse the boundary between body and machine. It wonders if there is an end point to this dialogue, or whether the desire for flight, vision, and speed will keep human and machine locked together in an ever-accelerating dance.