A Digitally Constructed Landscape. 4000 years ago, Mesopotamian mythology described King Etana being carried to heaven by an eagle. Half a millennium ago, Leonardo da Vinci made brilliant engineering sketches of flying machines that never flew. 

In the meantime, more than one child has jumped ambitiously from a garage roof, and generally landed with no greater damage than a broken leg. In the present day, photographers like me may use drones to capture sublime aerial images, but we keep our bodies planted safely upon the earth.

For sure, to imitate the birds is a universal aspiration. And some nights we may even dream that we’ve done it. But too often those dreams end with us in free fall. Awake, though we’ve managed to build complicated machines that lift us into the air, it’s always the airplane that does the flying. Not us.

Even the university’s clever incitement to escape the mental bonds of gravity is never going to enable anyone’s body to flap its way into the sky. So maybe this digitally constructed landscape is the closest I’ll ever get.

And maybe a descending robotic dog is the most frank representation of the limitations of human flight. Meaning that it’s always temporary. And if we’re smart, we’ll pack a parachute to slow our descent.