Ever get onto a flight, sit between a snoring Grandma and an uptight executive, and have nothing to read?

Happens all the time. So you pull out the brightly-colored in-flight magazine from the seat pouch in front of you, and begin reading. But all you can find are articles about planes being hijacked. And photographs of planes being hijacked. And interviews of people who were on a plane that was hijacked.

Wait. This isn’t United anymore.

“Inflight,” Grimonprez’s startling video lounge installation about airplane hijacking, is one of four main exhibitions at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center. Released in conjunction with the 2001 Boston Cyberarts Festival, these expressive digital presentations again pose the controversial question, “What is art?”

Grimonprez’s art is more atmospheric than digital. The exhibition’s aims scream high-tech, cool, innovative—but aesthetically, all the gallery offers is three white walls, a yellow lounge seat, a bunch of airline flight magazines and two televisions with a video stand. But then you pop a video into the VCR, take a seat on the lounge cushion, and while waiting for the video to load, grab a magazine. There the art begins.

The airline flight magazine compiled by Grimonprez is (conveniently) titled “Inflight.” However, the picture on the cover makes it clear that whatever is inflight will not remain so; the symbolic airplane is inverted and its nose is pointing to the floor. Also on the cover is a picture of an airplane exploding. This picture, with its bright cartoon-like colors and grainy television texture, is representative of the rather graphic pictures in the entire magazine.

An emphasis on facial expressions—particularly anger, fear and insanity—seem to foreshadow death throughout the magazine. The articles and interviews, which are all exaggeratingly concise and dramatic, seem to have a similar effect. What is most startling about the exhibition, however, is not the grotesque pictures or the descriptive stories; but the cartoon-like symbols Gimonprez employs. A disturbing logo that looks like a hybrid between Mickey Mouse, an alien and the infamous Napster logo is dispersed throughout the exhibition.