A day of art and flying in and around Europe's largest wind tunnel
Royal Aeronautical Engineering Workshops, Farnborough, Hants, UK
Sunday 12 September 2004
Artists’ Airshow was an experimental day of art and flying in and around Europe's largest wind tunnel. Airshow used the now deserted research facility where supersonic flight was developed and the ghosts of sixties rocket projects linger.
Artists’ installations and transmissions by Luke Jerram, Stefan Gec, Miles Chalcraft, Simon Faithfull, Tim Knowles, Flow Motion (Edward George & Anna Piva) and Louise K Wilson were sited in the abandoned wind tunnels, test tanks and life-size helicopter flight simulators. There was a programme of flying events presented by artists Simon Faithfull, Zina Kaye, Miles Chalcraft and Anne Bean, and guided tours of the wind tunnels organised by the Farnborough Air Sciences and led by the engineers who formerly worked in the facility, and a talk by artist Marko Peljhan.
A 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.
Zina Kaye demonstrated the use of the Observatine UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle). Observatine is a petrol-powered unmanned surveillance airplane created with onboard camera and computer that can be controlled via an internet browser. The airplane took off from the Farnborough airfield runway, and the audience were then able to follow the airplane’s flight by sight in the skies as well as on monitors, which showed the view from the airplane’s onboard camera as it swooped over the countryside.
Miles Chalcraft’s Tear-Rain was a two-stage, 6-foot rocket aimed to deliver a year’s worth of tears over the assembled audience (as a small burst of rain at the end of another bad summer). The momentary cloudburst was to be observed with a rocket's eye view by an onboard wireless camera and simultaneously relayed to a large TV monitor. Despite a perfect test launch on the previous day, the launch on the day itself, in difficult, extremely windy conditions, was not so successful. The rocket rose 25 metres into the air, before curving over and crashing back to earth.
Luke Jerram’s Ghost Plane was a site-specific new commission: an apparition in the wind tunnel. A ghostly spitfire summoned up by eddying air currents shimmering across a reflective bed of mercury, Ghost Plane echoed the aircraft tested at Farnborough and the engineers who once used mercury to measure the shifting air pressure in the wind tunnels. Ghost Plane is resonant of Farnborough's current status as a 'ghost' institution and the former work that was so veiled in secrecy.
Stefan Gec’s Celestial Vault, commissioned for MIR: Art in Variable Gravity, is a video installation recorded in the giant centrifuge at Moscow’s Star City cosmonaut training centre. It was sited in the return chamber of the large wind tunnel.
Tim Knowles was commissioned to create a site-specific balloon drawing machine, which produced randomised wind drawings by wind-blown balloons.
Installed in the sonic wind tunnel, Flow Motion’s Dissolve. a digital audio installation, takes as its starting point Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point. Zabriskie Point was the second of Antonioni's English language films, released after his hugely successful masterpiece Blow Up.
Louise K Wilson created Loop, a site-specific commission. This was a video and sound installation using footage shot from the cockpit of a Slingsby Firefly of a repeated aerobatic manoeuvre performed in the skies above Northumbria in August 2004
Marko Peljhan gave a talk about his ongoing collaboration with the Aerosonde corporation, which manufactures long-distance UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) for use in environmental surveys in oceans and inhospitable terrain such as Antarctica.
To conclude the day, Anne Bean literally created a spectacular drawing for the sky, using balloons, parachute flares and small rockets, in collaboration with pyrotechnicians Mark Anderson and Nick Sales.
