the upper limits

Thanks to some landscapes for sharing this. This is an extract from Simon Faithfull's film Escape Vehicle No. 6, 2004 where he sent a chair up into the upper atmosphere to the edge of space attached to a weather balloon. 





It appears Faithful has been subjected to the same type of blatant plagiarism that Fischli & Weiss were when Honda copied Der Lauf Der Dinge in their super-slick (and, I admit, highly enjoyable) Accord advert campaign, the Cog, claiming originality, and in the full knowledge that their commercial audience would massively outnumber that of the original artwork. Toshiba have been similarly copying and not attributing the real source of their own 2009 advert, an HD version uncannily similar to Escape Vehicle No.6 which even copies the sound beeps - the beeps on the original Simon Faithfull version were a by-product of tracking the location and positioning of the balloon during it's flight since the video footage was being relayed and collected live, whereas in the Toshiba ad, the camera and balloon were retrieved by parachute after return to earth in order to access the film, and the beeps are simply an add on.