ESCAPE VEHICLE NO.6

by Simon Faithfull (2004)

Documentation of live event at Artists Airshow, color, sound, 25 min



Live event - Artists Airshow, 12 September 2004, Royal Aeronautical Engineering Workshops, Farnborough, Hants, UK

Commissioned by Arts Catalyst, "Escape Vehicle No.6" started as a live event developed from the previous balloon film 30km. The live audience first witnessed the launching of a weather balloon with a domestic chair dangling in space beneath it. Once the apparatus had dissapeared into the sky they then watched a live video relay from the weather balloon as it jouneyed from the ground to the edge of space.

"Simon Faithfull’s works can be seen as an ongoing investigation into the incomprehensible scale of the earth as an object. The Escape Vehicles employ video cameras, transmission systems and drawing devices as measuring tools to define size, time and distance, and the experiments often involve travel either by the artist himself or by cameras sent out as surrogate, dispassionate eyes.

Since he was a child, Simon Faithfull has suffered from “a melancholy awareness that I was tethered to this mundane realm. Like many young boys I was annoyed to find out that other things could fly and I couldn’t. Flies could even walk on ceilings! That didn’t seem fair.” And for more than a decade now, the 42-year-old artist has been expressing his beef with the forces that keep him earthbound through a series of quixotic films and sculptures to be exhibited as Gravity Sucks at the BFI gallery in London as part of the “One Giant Leap” summer season celebrating the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. “I made my first Escape Vehicle back in 1996,” says Faithfull down the line from his home in Berlin. “It was a chair, fitted with rockets and designed to be a heroic failure. But I wasn’t prepared for how anticlimactic it was when the chair just turned upside down and exploded.” It’s like a Top Gear experiment as filmed by a desperate castaway. Even though you know the chair – looking so lonely against a wide, pink sunrise – will fail to leave our planet’s atmosphere (possibly even the ground) it’s hard to suppress that little flutter of irrational hope that perches in the soul. Faithfull’s Escape Vehicle No 2 was, he says, “a truly pathetic object” – inspired by a Victorian plan for a flying machine. But by Escape Vehicle No 4 Faithfull’s ideas were really taking off. His boiler suit tethered to a hot-air balloon made of dustsheets “actually flew off, and disappeared!” he says. “Although it later came down on an elderly couple’s patio while they were taking tea in the garden.”

But it’s the 25-minute film of “Escape Vehicle No 6″ that sends the emotions on the giddiest trip. You watch, in horrified fascination, as a generic office chair rises 18 miles (over South East England) dangling from a weather balloon. The sound of static is ritualistically punctuated by a bell-tolling noise (which is actually sending back a GPS signal) as the chair twitches vulnerably in an environment where there’s no oxygen and the temperature is minus 60 degrees. Suddenly there’s a violent spasm and a leg hurtles off into the void. “At that point, the pressure has burst the balloon off camera,” Faithfull says, “and the chair is actually falling. Only you can’t tell because there are no reference points.” While captivating at its most basic, physical level, Faithfull’s work also speaks of the futility of human attempts to escape “the trivial, the mundane and the self”. And also of the beauty in the soul’s constant attempts to soar beyond “the forces of everyday reality”.    Helen Brown, Telegraph.co.uk

To fly off and disappear, simply click 'play' below. Enjoy.

[brightcove vid=29032933001&exp3=25560314001&surl=http://c.brightcove.com/services&pubid=1348423968&w=486&h=412]

PS: Here's the projects follow up: a Toshiba advert.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6PSbUl_68k&feature=player_embedded

With eight HD cameras used to capture the film, it makes it the highest high-def advert ever shot. The biodegradable chair was only a model, the eight cameras were used to have as many different lens types as possible.

Looks nice, but.. whatever.