2019 – FHD Video, 75’00’’
HuM Base (Stuttgart) – Photo: Hannah Häußer
In August 2018, a passenger plane was stolen from a large airport in Seattle by a ground worker without flight training. He flew it without any other passengers and performed aerobatic maneuvers for over an hour. During this time, he was in contact with the airport via radio until he finally crashed the plane on an island and died.
In the following days, numerous videos were uploaded to YouTube that combined the radio messages with music under the videos recorded of the flight. There was also footage from videos that the pilot had published on his YouTube account about his private life, TV reports and memes.
With his pessimistic prognosis as a white man to receive a punishment and no pardon or even a job as a pilot for the theft and at the same time surprisingly relaxed and confident reactions, the story was directly interpreted by the right-wing spectrum as a symbol of oppressed male heroism.
In my appropriation of the numerous YouTube videos, the image swings back and forth depending on the origin of the material. The seemingly endless repetition of the same sequences in combination with the dramatizing music and video effects exposes the rhetoric and describes the nightmarish pull of the narrative.
Janis Eckhardt 