Satellite Travel Interpretations at ESC

Once our mursat1 will travel in orbit, it will send different types of data;
worklab june 2011

a CW beacon with its name, battery status, solar cells, and a counter of its beacons sent out for GX, on the other hand also the collected data from the camera and the piezo, wishes of children and the condensed “Vapor trail of Europe”.
SatelliteListening

In the current worklab we are working with the data that we get due to the pure fact of mursat1 flying. There is software around that allows us to “know” or rather predict, where it is gonna fly and where all the others are. Gpredict and predict are the ones that we have implemented.

We connect these data to OSC (opensoundcontrol) and from there we can connect to Pd (or fluxus, processing,…)
SatelliteDataServer

At this stage, we work on the following ideas:
Norbert managed to read out 14 different inputs from each satellite via predict, at this moment it is running locally at ESC, we will serve this on one of the mur.at-servers soon, so people can develope their own interpretations of satellites travelling.

Peter has developed a simulation in GEM, in which mursat1 is travelling in its Leo (low elevation orbit); Reni interprets the debris of the Iridium33 – Cosmos2251 in a soundcloud – whenever parts of the debris pass over Graz, they trigger noise that gets denser the more of them pass over.

In the next worklab end of August, we are going to finalize ideas, so they can be immediately installed, once mursat1 launches.

In the next few months we are planning to develop a series of interpretations that can be installed everywhere, in a modular way, so people can choose, if they want to have visual and/or audio information or if they even want to write their own application.

The main challenge at this moment is to find accessible and at the same time poetic translations that allow us to understand, what is actually really happening around us, above us. There is such an amount of dependencies on satellites meanwhile that it is amazing how little we care.

About reni

artist and activist, researcher and explorer
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