Flight Diaries is an interactive digital poem built around GPS recordings of the author’s glider flights throughout 2025. The tracking data of each flight is visualised as a tracing overlaid onto a map of the area it traversed – in this case, within the vicinity of the city of York, UK.
Flight Diaries operates as a form of speculative, more-than-human media, considering how human and more-than-human entanglements can be narrated in registers that more closely adhere to their unfolding – and in this regard, how they can play a direct role in generating and driving this narration, rather than being a set of processes that are only ever articulated after-the-fact. In short, Flight Diaries considers what it means to tell a story about the experience of flight by using the act of flight itself as an instrument of its own inscription.
Flight Diaries is an evolutionary outgrowth of the author’s previous work Lines of Flight, employing 3D visualised flight data and generative processes to present a multimodal depiction of the languages, histories, and socio-technical contexts of gliding flight as an exchange between the human and atmospheric domains. Both pieces are complementary in form and affect, although Flight Diaries perhaps bears out more strongly a sense of the swirling traces of gliding flight as a mode of ephemeral inscription – as a form of asemic poetry, but one that is concurrently bound up with more conventional registers that have their own poetic potentials.
Flight Diaries was published in a special issue of the The Lit journal, dedicated to experiential storytelling: Slipstream. It is available here, or directly, via this site, here. A mirror is also available at itch.io.