Lines of Flight

The Leonardo Gallery section Lines of Flight presents works selected from an exhibition held as part of the Leonardo Education Forum at the 2007 College Art Association annual conference, which took place at Hunter College in New York on 16 February 2007. The exhibition, curated by Celina Jeffery and Gregory Minissale, was to provide a vantage point for an audience to engage with a range of networked installation art projects that involve taking flight from familiar cultural practices and locations. Intrinsic to the production and reception of these networked projects is the continual flight of culture and identity. These projects are also a place and non-place where hybridities may be enunciated, far from the territorial gravity of the earth and fixed borders.

In this sense, the exhibition aimed to expose the "lines of flight," the movement and exchanges between markers, nodes or locations, toward a new kind of cartography of the air. Such movement, ultimately, questions global territorializing systems of cultural homogeneity, and the fixity and closure of its compartments, with the "now" of creativity.

The exhibition attempted to create an in-between space for a number of themes, including the lines of flight between technological, scientific and artistic practices from differing cultural perspectives. The negotiated status of the (networked) artist as an agent interacting and transacting in a global context reflexively explored anarchic, free information space and its potential against the background of institutional capture and commercial exploitation. New forms of authorship and ecstasis emerged: the flight from the self in collective creativity.