ArtClaw TV presents Art and Ideas. What does copyright law recognise as art? A skate vehicle number six started as a live event. It was a commission for arts catalysts, artistaisha. And my project was sending a chair from the surface of the earth to the edge of space. So what people saw on that day was a chair beneath the weather balloon and the chair slowly rose through the clouds and disappeared to become a little speck. So you saw the chair rising through the clouds and then finally you saw the chair dangling against the curvature of the earth and black space. And the final thing was that the balloon eventually breaks. And so at that point the chair started getting really smashed around. And so the final moment, these kind of Icarus-like chair and camera very visibly in trouble. Great advertising subsequently made an ad for Toshiba. I think the ad was very skillfully made. It's a very beautiful piece of footage. I think the main difference is that the importance to me was one of the important things. It was the liveliness. So I was sending off this camera in effect on a kind of suicide mission. The camera, the transmitter, the balloon, everything gets lost. So it's reporting back from this journey getting further away. So the way that Gray advertising in Toshiba achieved it was differently. A small company, Red Lion, approached me and a number of other artists about the idea of commissioning new artworks by working with an advertising agency. So I went to one meeting with Gray advertising. And well, subsequently it didn't really work out. And so actually the first time that I saw the ad was when people started sending me the YouTube link. Escape Vehicle number six and the Toshiba ad are both based on the idea of sending a chair into space. Copyright law basically is there to protect the manifestation of ideas, not the ideas themselves. So he would have to make a work and argue the work that was made in its material form, the shape, the perspective, any colors involved, was fixed in a material form so that it was capable of being copied in that material form. Whereas in the case of Escape Vehicle number six, the work is more about the movement and the event and what happens. And Copyright law doesn't lend itself very easily to offering artist protection for those works against being used by advertisers. Simon Faithful is currently working on a project called Dead Sea Level. I plan to go to the Dead Sea and make a work that is in a way trying to materialize the fact that the Dead Sea is the lowest point on the Earth's surface. The sea or this body of water is 418 meters below sea level. So you sort of go down and down and down into this valley. And when you get to the bottom, you're 418 meters beneath where there should be the surface of the ocean. I've been talking to a Chinese Firework manufacturer to produce a 16 inch shell, mortar shell, firework. And to design this so that it will go up exactly 418 meters and then explode to describe with a sort of blue sheet of fire the surface of this missing ocean. Events are very difficult because from an artist's perspective, the entire event, both off camera or off any other physical manifestation or off a sound recording, may well be what the work is all about or the idea behind the work as realised by the spectator might be what the work is about. There might be all sorts of facets to a work but copyright law has been developed over the centuries only to protect things that are physically manifest in a fixed material form. The work has a sort of a number of different ways of being transferred from me to an audience. And so the first place is the proposal. So I guess I've kind of developed a practice where the proposal quite often becomes exhibited itself. Usually before it's existed as sort of enacted work. With Dead Sea Level, the next instance would be the actual event. So people standing by the shore of the Dead Sea in November, hopefully we'll see these fireworks being launched and have this feeling of depth down into the earth sort of materialised as these shells rise and explode. Once the event has happened or people learn about the event or the idea of the event, then they are free within the law to go off themselves and either recreate the event or do something similar to manifest something that captures the idea behind, say, faithfuls Dead Sea event for themselves in that location or a different location, they're free to do so. That sort of rising firework and explosion will be sort of burnt into this image as a sort of blue streak. And so that's what I imagine will be the one sort of iconic image from that event. But I will also be using video and sound recording and maybe even other people's recordings that they make might become part of how that thing is documented. So yeah, all of those instances, I think, are different facets of the work. There are certain steps he could take to give him a measure of protection under the law. For example, when the event itself happens, he could film it, he could negotiate with television broadcasters to broadcast it. He could make limited editions of photographs, photographic prints, of aspects of the event itself. Those secondary documentations could be very useful material, physical manifest material that he could use and sell and generate income from. The law only recognises certain material art forms as artistic works and artists should also be clear that there is no copyright in an idea. For further details of this program and other programs by ArtClawTV, please go to www.artquest.org.uk.