»Escape Vehicle no.6« shows the launching of a weather balloon with a domestic chair dangling in space beneath it, making a journey from the ground to the edge of space (30km up). The footage shows the chair first rush away from the fields and roads, ascend through clouds and finally (against the curvature of the earth and the blackness of space) begin to disintegrate. By Simon Faithfull.
Gravitation Zero is a theatre performance staged in a weightless space on board of a parabolic airplane. Russian scientists use parabolic planes in order to train astronauts, since the plane enables one to experience a gravitational vacuum inside its body. In order to create zero gravity conditions, it’s necessary for the aircraft to fly in a parabolic arc not dissimilar to the trajectory a rocket makes as it escapes Earth gravity. On December 15. 1999, a massive high-winged Ilyushin-76 aircraft, which normally serves as a training plane for the Russian cosmonauts, took off from the Star City airfield with a cargo of fourteen actors and spectators, and about the same number of Russian trainers and crew members. At the back end of the plane an intricately designed set had been constructed-one component of what director Dragan Živadinov calls an “inhabited sculpture”.
