Agreed, great ad!
It was also an art project in 2004 by Simon Faithfull. Apparently there is already some talk on youtube about whether or not Toshiba was "faithfull" to the original artist. I am not sure either way. But interestingly, it seems that the 2004 footage was collected wirelessly on the ground during the flight rather than collecting the recorders upon their return to earth.
from
http://www.artscatalyst.org/projects/space/airshow.htmlA highlight of day was Simon Faithfull’s Escape Vehicle no.6. No.6 consisted of a full-scale chair suspended beneath a weather balloon with a camera and transmitter positioned so that the lens frames the chair dangling in mid-shot. This apparatus was released from a launch pad - on an extremely windy day - and rapidly rose above the earth ultimately into the blackness of the stratosphere on the edge of space. With the naked eye, the audience on earth at Farnborough watched the balloon and chair recede and disappear into the sky, but they were then immediately able to follow the rest of the journey on a giant screen via a live video downlink from the escape vehicle. The chair can be seen precariously swaying beneath the balloon on its desperate journey into the void - desperate because ultimately the journey will end in heroic failure. As it reached the edge of space, the pressure dropped, the balloon burst and the chair fell back to earth on a red parachute, landing in the vicinity of Wye in Kent (tracked by GPS). The faltering image of the empty chair, transmitted increasingly weakly back to earth, asks the viewer to imagine occupancy. But at the same time, rather than offering conceptual escape, the madcap vehicle ultimately presents a chilling vision of a kind of death. Even before the collapse of the balloon, with the temperature reaching minus 600c and oxygen long since thinned, to imagine occupying the chair is to imagine a realm beyond life.
JP
