Ann-Cecil Thiesen & Petra Charvatova

 

Abstract Reality

 

Life is like watching a plane from the ground. You don't know how fast it is flying or how high it is above you. You can only guess where it comes from and where it is going. And there is always a steady distraction, challenging you to keep your focus on that flying plane that changes its position with every second and every breath you take. Don't give up, you have to concentrate on the movement. If you keep concentrating, you won't lose sight of it. The drama, the pain, the horror will not overtake you, you will be and stay in power of yourself. Sometimes it seems that you lose track of your plane, that you can't follow it anymore, that you are not even able to keep your thoughts together... what was important? Where it was going? Or how high it was flying? What was your destination? To let loose and adapt your wills and needs to the fast moving plane or to direct it, make up assumptions and rules and determine yourself, where it was heading? And was that even possible? Surrounded by white spaces, nothing can stop you, but the force is there. It is not stopping your plane or crashing it, but it is in your subconscious.

A war aeroplane. Why war? There is absolutely no objective evidence that the plane has something to do with war. It's in the distance, indistinct, almost nothing except the shape is visible. It is not because of the way it's shot, that is just neutral unmarked documentary shot, not showing anything else just an ordinary aeroplane. It might be a war aeroplane, but there is no way to find out. There is nothing on the screen which would support or disprove this claim because it is not a fact, it is a claim, an opinion. Facts can be proven, it is a fact that the film is black and white, the screen ratio is a fact but nothing concerning interpretation of the seen is a fact. Why do I see a war plane?

Probably because it fits the visual stereotype of a war plane I have. It may look similar to the war planes shown in the reportages from the world war two, but I haven't seen that much of such documentary footage. My visual stereotype is probably more based on the depiction taken over and transformed by mainly Hollywood filmmakers. Objective (the real aeroplane in WW2 as shown in a reportage or a documentary) made fictional (in fiction films) and subjective (a mental picture of a war plane). But what is objective? Once anything is mediated, through lens of a camera, or any other medium, it is not objective. Even if an object is shot in a neutral, unmarked way it was chosen from million other possible objects which could be filmed instead, the choice behind it makes objectivity impossible. Thus my subjective mental image of a war plane is made up by many mediated, thus also subjective and fictional instances of it (- I don't think I have ever seen any real war plane ever in my life).

But all this is a speculation because I don 't know, on what is my mental picture of a plane based. There might be hundreds of influences which participated and still participate on this notion, not all of them are conscious. As if a huge orchestra is playing and you hear different instruments in different moments.

An objectivity is very subjective. To one, a plane is a realistic object, to another one, a plane is an abstract symbol. There is no right or wrong. There is both, the abstract and the real, there is just a different perception of it.