Kitestring

Flying is mostly about holding a line, becoming grooved from its wraps around your palms, getting choked up around the fingernail by a thinness. Going looped. Pulling tight around the idea of a lift.

Kitestring is a taut intensity, expressive of a spatiotemporal actualization. A circumstance: free time, desire, the crook of an arm at 4pm in texas, the flick-out of a gesture, a weather, an mph. 

Kitestring is a lively tension, a resistance to both the wind and your work. Despite its seeming simplicity, it’s a madman posing a defiant physics, one who attempts weightless aerial drapery and the broad spread of surface above its thin self. it’s a balancing edge, a precarity held up by working knuckles.

The attentive hand of a flyer wraps and unwraps kitestring slack as a direct response to things the wind is doing. A length is imposed by a method built of retort and counterpoise, impulses towards movement and relation.

Flying makes you need something tight, want a flex-out, a stress, a tautness. 

Taut things hold firm, make reliable shapes out of thin air. They’re sure cuts, hems, things distinguished in a zone of expression. 

A taut kite string is a collaborative tension, as much beating down from the air as yanking up from your stance. It scaffolds an extension of you both, setting you apart from the rest of that turbulence. It’s a zone of control, marking the reach of your arm and the power of its grip on a technique. It seams itself up through the air by means of the kite’s weird hunger to float. It’s a yearning on up.

Kitestring becomes a thing that’s not at all stringlike when the whole contraption’s working well. It becomes indistinguishable from straightness. Decent and inflexible, rigid and pointing. Promotional, very present. It insists: A firm way to connect in a moment of indeterminacy, like one made of wind with big mph. Clear and brash in the tumult of what’s going on in the air.

I think it makes two halves of the world as much as it joins body & troposphere. Between hand and kite, that space is a split at the same time its a joining, a stitch. “Intra-actions enact cuts that cut (things) together-apart (one move)” (Barad somewhere)…

This compositional practice pulls linearity out beside itself, lumps both ends with excess and body, the needs of aerodynamics, a strain. For flight, no loose ends: always caught between the two points, body and aether. String gets thrown into a pull, into gravity, to the edge of a snap.

To stay stable in a fight against the wind takes a lot.