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The Cultural Meaning of Freeflight

by Tazio Madliger
1999

The human being's evolution against the one of other life forms, can be conceived as some sort of liberation process from natural immediate needs and from instinctive behavior. In this perspective, human evolution is intended to be the conquest of how one relates to and experiences reality, through knowledge. But even this superior form of conscience could not resist the abrasive effect of experience and self-reflection. Knowledge always had to restructure itself, assuming new configurations and generating new values of such importance that humankind has been shaped into different civilizations.

The core of human's experience of reality, lies in the mediations that occur to be interposed between subject and object, as interpretation and explanation media (abstractions, concepts, and logical patterns). At times the importance of this developed to such a point that individuals had to achieve their own autonomy, generating amazing dimensions of consciousness and entities. Several examples in history show how dramatically these mediums have contributed to immense changes in human's lives.

Arts and theoretical sciences are just remote instances of what, in human's future history, is possible, occurring through independence from natural and concrete conditions of life. But since human beings are hardly good masters of their own future, we can still hope to take the most positive advantage of any conscience expanding medium we will be able to get. Though at times it is hard to determine how these mediums can be generally helpful, most of the time it is just a matter of horrifying simplicity. They are interesting, self-solving or ... just pleasant. That's all there is to it.

Animals are moving beings; some are conscious of this capability, others just respond to instinct patterns. Human beings have developed such a high consciousness of this motion competence, that they created the conditions to expand it beyond their own terrestrial and natural limits. We have conquered every dimension of natural environment: earth, water, atmosphere and outer space. Flying is nothing more than motion within the element air. Thanks to our intelligence, human beings are now able to body-fly in a high pressure air stream, which we call Skydiving: jumping out of an aircraft, free-falling, opening a parachute and landing. That's all it is about. And all this has a history, starting from an ancestral human desire and culminating into the latest free-fall techniques: also (generically) called "Freefly".

These techniques have a special position in the evolution of human flight. In fact, more than being just a flight technique, Freefly is a great paradigm of what was previously mentioned concerning human's knowledge mediums and its consequent liberation from natural immediate boundaries. Due to its global (multi-functional) configuration, it is the Art of Human Flight. Saying that Freefly is functional, means that its settings depend on (and fit to) a given situation, not a subjective pre-determined body position.

Freefly is immediate; it conceives air-space as it is concretely (phenomenological) given, without abstractly reducing it (just as an example) to a two dimensional site (like classic belly-flying has been doing). For these two reasons, immediacy and functionalism, it is also global; it configures itself to be totally comprehensive of the whole spectrum of imaginable motion possibilities in the air-stream-space. Freefly's greatest result is enabling humans to dominate the air element in its purest three dimensional form.

The concrete phenomenon of freeflying also pops out a new consciousness of spatial-time. On one hand, our air-time is way shorter than usual, but on the other hand our spatial dominance is much more efficient. Once again, in the liberation process from natural instincts, human beings have a chance to expand their conscience into new dimensions, distinguishing themselves from animals by their higher consciousness towards reality. Therefore, in search of pure knowledge and pleasure, they eventually chose to be flying-beings...

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