In The Air Tonight
2020 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
11:10 minutes
Andrew Norman Wilson
On the first day of the Covid-19 lockdown in New York, Andrew Norman Wilson was evicted from his sublet and decided to board a $30 flight to Los Angeles that evening. From a cottage that faces the Hollywood sign, he began to dwell on an encounter he had with a woman driving alongside him on the highway, emphatically singing along to the song he was listening to through the same radio station. That song was Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight.” For Wilson, the uncanny synchronicity of this encounter with a stranger tuned into the same frequency resonated with the inspiration for Phil’s song, which he first heard as a teenager while getting high in a friend’s basement. As an urban legend, the ritual involves playing “In the Air Tonight” at a low volume while telling the story behind the song and synching the narrative climax with its infamous analog drum break. Wilson’s teenage friend loaded a Phil Collins greatest hits album in his Aiwa Stereo System, and began to describe a night in which Phil stood atop a seaside cliff and watched a man refuse to come to the aid of a drowning swimmer. While the mysterious stranger escaped him that night, the encounter inspired Phil to write what became his first breakout hit as a solo artist, a haunting soft rock masterpiece that propelled him into superstardom and helped shape an era of pop music. Online, details of the story behind “In the Air Tonight” are scarce, so Wilson decided to flesh out the narrative in the form of an 11 minute video, titled In the Air Tonight , and share it with the Phil Collins fan community subreddit.
Andrew Norman Wilson is an artist, curator, and filmmaker whose practice is mostly based in research and documentary. His works—ranging from videos, sculptures, drawings, and performance lectures, to photography and mixed-media—investigate and critique the aesthetics and inequalities of the corporate world and the myths of technology. He often explores the effects of globalization in the realms of labor, capital, and information, highlighting cases that involve misconduct. The aesthetics of his work often knowingly employ the same digital mechanisms produced by the corporate systems he critiques. Gaining access to and exposing the internal systems of corporations is a key element for the artist’s earlier work. His most well known work that investigates these themes is Workers Leaving the Googleplex (2011). In his most recent works, Wilson has taken an interest in nonhuman entities, including mosquitos, dinosaurs, puppets, and oil pumps—using them as stand-ins for humans to explore human morality from a more “objective” perspective. They are often presented in endless loops to break the linearity of a traditional model of time, in which past, present, and future follow each other in a consecutive fashion.
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