Absurd Intellectual

I was absolutely enthralled when Amy showed me the latest Toshiba commercial, which features an ordinary-looking chair, hitched to a weather balloon and sent to the edge of space. Watch it below — and stay past the product ID for the heart-stopping finale:

I’ve watched it now easily a dozen times — and it never stops giving me a thrill at the sense of possibility that it embodies.

So much was I interested in it that I found and watched a “making of” video, too. Although a lot of blogs cite the facts given in the Toshiba press release (it reached 98,268 feet (about 18.6 miles), and hit -90 degrees, using eight cameras, weighing four pounds, it took 83 minutes to go up, and 24 minutes to come back down) there was some other interesting info in the making-of:

Wow — that rig fell for 24 minutes, reaching a speed of Mach 1, and they managed to get HD footage out of the wreckage? I’m guessing it was a solid-state flash drive.

I was seriously impressed.

Then I saw this — an art project by Simon Faithfull from 2004:

I’m not the first to notice the similarity. This site quotes a Toshiba marketing manager as saying that Faithfull was involved from the start as “absoutely part of the team.” But his answers get a little weaker when he’s asked how a “a company which prides itself on innovation align [can] its slogan with a project that is clearly a near copy of something done 5 years ago.” So how does he square it?

“We weren’t saying that the innovation was sending the balloon up. No one had done it in HD before and not as an advert before. We didn’t use a music sound track or any celebrity voices. That’s the innovation. The fact that we created it as an advert”.

Riiight. So taking a piece of art and re-creating it in high-def “as an advert” qualifies as innovation now?

I still love the ad. But now I’m mostly glad that they’ve introduced me to the work of Simon Faithfull. From an article in The Telegraph:

“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”.

And that is so, SO much better than an ad.