The Cool Couple's machinima Flyin' High explores climate crisis through Microsoft Flight Simulator

Italian artist duo The Cool Couple created Flyin' High, a machinima filmed inside Microsoft Flight Simulator. The one-hour work depicts a boring Alitalia flight from Milan to Rome, with robotic voices discussing environmental collapse. The film draws on James Bridle's New Dark Age, which traces the intertwined evolution of computing, meteorology, and aviation from the Harvard Mark I and ENIAC to Whirlwind I and the SAGE air defense system, which later became SABRE airline reservations. The work links military computing to civilian aviation and video games, noting that Spacewar! (1961) was developed at MIT on a computer by former Whirlwind engineers. Flyin' High is streaming free as part of VRAL, a series by the Milan Machinima Festival, until September 16. It is in Italian with an English interview by philosopher Matteo Bittanti. VRAL Season One, a collection of interviews, was published by Concrete Press, edited by Bittanti and Gemma Fantacci.