Images: Installation views of the exhibition Goodbye Vile Earth!, South Hill Park, Hollington & Kyprianou
1. Archival photograph of RAE employee adjusting wall mounted model and postcard of ‘Britain Seen from the North’, Tony Cragg, 1981. 2. Physical model section with cctv camera. 3. Model section in background, miror map, monitor playing archival flight simulator footage interrupted with live cctv.
In one corner of the exhibition Goodbye Vile Earth!, an archival photograph of an RAE employee adjusting the wall mounted model simulator is paired with a postcard of Tony Cragg’s ‘Britain Seen from the North’. This wall relief features the shape of Great Britain, oriented so that East is up and North is left. The wall relief features pieces of found rubbish, leaving some to interpret it as commenting on the considerable economic hardship of the time, which particularly hit the North. At the left is the figure of a person, possibly the artist (who had himself left and moved to Germany), ‘seeing’ Britain from the North. For us, the employee of the RAE was seeing the ground from a reoriented position, this time, above.
Getting the mechanics of the original simulator rigged up was impossible as we were unable to fit the whole model into the space. We ended up taking just one ‘slice’ and brought in a static cctv camera that gave a live feed on the accompanying monitor. We used a video switcher to intercut this live feed with archival footage of the view that was originally sent to the simulator cockpit.
In order for the simuator to look realistic for the pilot, they placed mirrors around the model, making it appear that there was a realistic extended horizon. The map on the floor is a mirror image map (Visual Flight Attachment Map, RAE Farnborough with Names, Scale 1:50,000) that the pilot used for navigating this mirror image world. For the avoidance of doubt, there is a box with all caps lettering: ‘THIS MAP CONTAINS FICTICIOUS INFORMATION’.
For me, the map functions as a sort of Rorschach inkblot test for the psychological functioning of the RAE. The simulator and its map are what Jean Baudrillard called a simulacra, shifting the relationship between reality, symbols, and society. The simulated war televised to the fighter pilot cockpit echoes the televised view of the First Gulf War, with cameras mounted on bunker busting bombs televising to a public shielded from the blast by the glass of their screens. The RAE simulator, put together lovingly by a seemingly demented landscape modelling hobbyist, depicts something that had no original. Its mission – delivering destruction from the air of the real- is an attempt to ensure that there no longer is an original. All military maps in this sense would like to live up to something akin to the writing in the box, in that this map now contains ficticious information.