Utopia will be a long time coming, as we all know, for the construction of the ultimate utopia is a slow historical process that requires the collective effort of generation upon generation. But not everyone can live with that. And one who couldn’t was the hero of Ilya Kabakov’s installation The Man Who Flew into Space from his Apartment. He didn’t want to wait until the whole of the rest of society was ready for utopia; he wanted to head off for utopia there and then – flying out into cosmic space where he would no longer be tied to a particular place, a particular topos, but would be in an ou-topos, a ‘not-place’, weightless, floating free in the cosmic infinitude. So he built an apparatus that was capable of catapulting him straight from his bed into outer space. And the experiment evidently worked – all we see is the room the man used to occupy.
Groys/Kabakov
THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT 
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