30Km by Simon Faithfull (b.1966, London) is a video artwork and installation that captures a continuous, hypnotic ascent from the human to the cosmic. The film opens with a quiet, overhead image of a man seen from above as he adjusts a camera mounted on a rig. Without warning, the camera begins to rise—suspended by a weather balloon—leaving the figure below to shrink into the landscape. What follows is a single-take journey through layers of atmosphere: the man becomes a red dot in a green field, the field becomes part of a geometric patchwork of South England, and eventually, the Earth curves into view, surrounded by the endless black of space. Over the course of 32 minutes, the viewer is drawn slowly but steadily away from the familiar, transported into a place rarely seen with such stillness or simplicity.
This ascent was made possible through a handmade launch system composed of a meteorological balloon, a video camera, a GPS transmitter, and a mobile receiving station on the ground. As the camera rose, it broadcast its signal in real time, allowing the team to track its position and maintain a lock on the transmission. The film’s soundtrack is composed entirely from the raw packets of GPS data transmitted alongside the video—normally silent and functional, here transformed into a rhythmic, insistent pulse.
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This haunting soundscape not only conveys the technical foundation of the project, but also echoes the sense of distance, fragility, and disconnection that grows with each passing kilometer. The journey ends at an altitude of 30 kilometers, where the balloon bursts in the thin upper atmosphere. With no way to recover the device, all physical components were lost to the sky. What remains is the video—a ghostly artifact preserved only through signal, transmitted and received, never physically retrieved. This loss becomes part of the work’s meaning: a reflection on impermanence, on the tension between human ambition and natural forces, and on the idea that sometimes what endures is not the object, but the memory or record it leaves behind.
30Km commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella in association with the NOW Festival, and supported by the National Touring Programme of Arts Council England, 30Km is a meditation on perspective, impermanence, and the fragile connections between earth and sky.
