Flying Without Means: A psychogeography of practice

Book One: BURPEES

Flying Without Means offers a systematic introduction to the various registers of autonomous flying. Entering the flight mode through the body and the heart, the preliminary course offers a user manual to assist the reader in independent flying. Based on the two complementary methods of unassisted flying – jumping without landing and throwing oneself on the ground but missing it – Book One focuses on the daily repetition of one hundred burpees as a foundation for the first unassisted flight. Based on over ten years of consistent practice, the book superimposes the continuum of take-off and landing on a daily hundredfold repetition.

This book offers a series of psychogeographical insights, organised as notes, alongside a stop-motion animation of the technique. Activated by the continuity of the reader’s practice, this preliminary course in flying is a springboard of practice for beginners and intermediate practitioners. This workbook is not exhaustive and has been written alongside and during the daily practice of the technique. Accordingly, these two hundred notes on one hundred burpees form an intuitive guide with a set of reflective coordinates and a dynamic space for making your own experiences and mapping your own paths as you continue to grow through your own practice.

About the Author:

ILYICH is a pilot of ambiguous origin.

The author’s name, ILYICH, was initially lost in the early 2000s after leaving Ukraine as a refugee. Frequently changing locations, moving in and out of institutional and in-formal frameworks, and engaging with complex notions of access, space and infrastructure have become the orbits of ILYICH’s daily attention.

To ensure smooth sailing through the alternating waves of dense and spacious moments, the care and maintenance of the main means of transport – the body, Ukr. тiлo (tilo) – has become a matter of urgent and daily necessity. Developing a tilo-attentive practice, attending to and through the body, and moving through life with attention, became the starting point for exploring the practice presented in this book.

In 2014, ILYICH first took up the practice of one hundred burpees to cultivate the ease with which the multiple gravitational fields of human experience can be navigated. Years later, convinced by direct experience of the anti-gravitational potential of the practice, burpees form one of several elementary units contributing to the embodiment of a robust and nimble spaceship. Flying Without Means is the first book in the preliminary course on flying, embarking on this distant flight and transporting body, mind and spirit in the envelope of practice.