A Chair in the Sky

Grainy seat-back-camera landscapes bound by hand

Hello Walkers—

Right now, I’m nowhere near a sidewalk: I’m wedged into seat 29C, somewhere over Mongolia, on my fifteenth long-haul of the year. Flighty, my preferred enabler of jet-lag mathematics, tells me that tally already loops the planet a couple of times. With no Netflix account and no tablet to distract me, I pass these hours by reading, coding, or enduring the flight with eyes fixed on the seat-back camera that stares straight down at the earth.

Daylight departures from Tokyo are my favorite because the aircraft chases the sun all the way to Europe. When the clouds part, the screen offers a private atlas: the wavy rivers somewhere in China, golden planes of Mongolia, my own Georgia suddenly busy now that Russian airspace is closed, and finally the web of cute Italian villages as the plane banks toward Rome. Whenever the feed shows something, I lift my phone and photograph the screen. Two years of flights have filled an album called “Airplane Views” with these low-resolution frames.

A few weeks ago, my bookbinding course reminded me that every student, rookie or veteran, must enter its annual competition. I already had the pictures; all I needed was a reason to print them. So I sequenced the frames and then turned to Japanese stab binding, letting the stitches sketch an airplane icon on the edge of washi paper with a gradient mimicking high-altitude haze.

There is exactly one copy for now, sitting with the judges until early August. I am under no illusion that it will be recognized as anything, but the project reminded me how happy I am when my hands are busy—and how deadlines, though as pleasant as turbulence, keep me moving forward.

This urge to make something out of accidental imagery isn’t new. In 2021, I discovered that the doorbell camera in my Tokyo apartment quietly archived every visitor; those clips became a book too. Apparently, I have a thing for unintended surveillance imagery and the tiny screens they inhabit.

More soon—probably from another narrow chair in the sky.

—Toto