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.

Topographies and Tales

This is me in a still from a video installation shown at Render, in Ontario, Canada recently...

My friend Alice has finished a film entitled Topographies and Tales she's been working on for a few years now, filming in Canada and Scotland.

The Proboscis website says:

A film by Alice Angus and Joyce Majiski using music, oral recordings, drawing, animation and storytelling to playfully unearth local and personal stories, memories and myths against a picture of how concepts of space and environment are shaped by ideas of belonging and home. A personal exploration of the intimate way people form relationships with their environments, Topographies and Tales takes a journey through the myths and perceptions the filmmakers encountered on their travels in the west of Scotland and the Yukon.

Topographies and Tales, 12.52min 2009 from Proboscis on Vimeo.