mursat1 at Metalab Vienna Metaday #53

Christian Pointner – mursat’s central technical brain – was invited to give a talk in Vienna at Metalab, the Viennese hacklab, to present current and general ideas around our mursat1 and maybe find some collaborators in Vienna.
He did get contacts to an astronomer who will give us some meteorite dust for Leo Kreisel-Strauss’ project “giving back”. We will send it back to orbit.

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Metatalk @ Metalab vienna, Sept 7th 2012

In the series of reaching out to other hacklabs for our ground station network, Christian has taken the possibility to present mursat at the Metalab in Vienna, and give a in depth talk.

Join him there!

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Worklab VIII 23. – 26.8.2012

As usual, there are more topics than time. 🙂

mur.sat Dongle 0.2
Elektronic of Satellite Bus
Documentation
Telemetry beacon
Balloonvideo. meeting with Richie and Maru thursday, 2pm
work on open things (faq, folder)

make a plan for “Non-Newtonian Characters”

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Funcube dongle satellite fishing station, the new engineering model and ballon video compositions for the Interpenetration Festival 2012

The 7th worklab is coming to an end.

We have been further experimenting with the Funcube Dongle to do satellite fishing, will post the software combi package asap.

The highlight was definitely Peter Zurk’s presentation of the new renderings of the current state of hardware.

mursat rendering June 2012, by Peter Zurk

mursat rendering June 2012, by Peter Zurk

In the past months, the hardware team GĂĽnther Jernej, Christian Pointner and Peter Zurk have been discussing, calculating, designing, re-calculating improvements around the shape and interconnectibiliy of all parts of mursat1.
On Saturday, June 23rd, we had a general meeting, discussed current stage of things and saw the new renderings. And we dont want to withhold them from you!

the inside of mursat1, June 2012, by Peter Zurk

the inside of mursat1, June 2012, by Peter Zurk

The material is metal, it holds 6 accus now, for much more power and power safety, and it will not have any cables inside, all connections will be made directly. The camera will be mounted insde, in some sort of small bed, and look out through some sort of window. On the outside there will be a little tongue, in an angle of 30degrees or so, with a mirror placed there. So the fotos that mursat will take, are selfportraits in the temperature shelter of the inside of the satellite, as the guess was: it would be too hot and too cold outside for the camera itself.

There are more renderings that can be seen/found at sat.mur.at/renderings.

The collaboration with Interpenetration Festival 2012 is fix, we’ll invite musicians to sonify parts of a weather and ham radio ballon flight. The festival will happen from 13th to 15th of december at forum stadtpark.

balloonflight

balloonflight


The Graz/Styrian ham radio community sends a weather ballon equipped with some transmitters every summer on their fieldday (July 7th, at Dobl). This year they will send even 2 HD-cameras and record the sounds as well. This will be the raw material that we can use to sonify. More info on that soon!

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Satellite Sonification with OSC in python, Workshop ICAS/ECAS @ Mutek, June 2nd 2012

Soon after we knew we were going to launch our own little satellite into orbit, we started thinking about how to make mursat1 and its flight accessible to others. We wanted to come up with a set of diverse interpretations of the fact that this and many other satellites are travelling above us.
About a year ago I was invited to a one week worklab in El Laboral, Gijon, by Pedro Soler, under the poetic title ot “Orbitando satelites”; he brought together an amazing group of people from different fields, among them David Pello. He wrote a software, that would allow to use the TLE-data used in Gpredict to be filtered through OSC and therefore be handable in a big range of software used to generate sound and music like PureData.

After experimenting with this software, we found that the CPU-load due to the grafical presentation in Gpredict was very high but unnecessary for what we wanted to do. So Jogi came up with the idea to leave out the step via Gpredict and go to the TLE-data directly. He wrote this in python and is using it now for his own work Coallision, Peter Venus and Marian Weger use it in their installation in caelum.

explaining the structure of the OSC python module

explaining the structure of the OSC python module


This is what we showed to our workshop participants to share the possibilities. We are already looking forward to getting to know their results and outcomes. You can find it here:

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Satellite fishing at Montroyal, Friday 1st June 2012

Part 3 of our work cycle in Montreal is a field trip to Mont Royal, the hill in the center of town.

montroyal satellite fishing

montroyal satellite fishing

We are lucky with the weather, it has been raining quite often, and that would make a trip outside really unpleasant. I really like going out of the “usual” festival surroundings like stages or conference rooms. First, one needs to bring all necessary equipment, including food and drinks. An of course antennas.

satellite fishing with antenna

satellite fishing with antenna

It was nice to be there at “Belvedere”, seeing the city with a bit of distance and by being there, also sharing ideas and information with other people who just went there to enjoy the view.

The satellites we are looking for are mostly either amateur radio satellites like HO-68 or university projects like BEESAT or ITUpSAT1 from Istanbul Teknik Universitesi; we had prepared a good list the evening before with Gpredict.
And of course, during waiting for the appearance on “our” sky, ideas come up, like building listening hats to rest the antenna on.

satellite antenna hat

satellite antenna hat


During the periods of preparing for the next one, there is always time to exchange, like discussing: what is perception, approaching the whole fishing process as something fenomenological, driven by intution rather than by so-called pure scientific information. And of course, we pass on more information about TLEs (the position data from satellites, as we can get them from celestrak.com (from NORAD), as they are used in Gpredict and also in the sonification module with python, that Jogi had written for his installation Coallision, and which is also being used for in caelum from Peter Venus and Marian Weger and will be the content of the second workshop day, on saturday June 2nd.

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Worklab VII June 21st to June 24th 2012

Hey, it’s time again to gather in a bigger round, and focus our efforts to build the next steps.

From June 21st to 24th, we will meet, starting round noon until late night, as usual. Have a look, in either ESC (1st floor) or realraum (groundfloor), both Jakoministrasse 16. You surely will meet people from the mursat-team.
In this period, we will also have a general meeting, on one of the evenings.
In the evening of the 21st, we have a concert in the first floor, Sternenstaub, by Elise Schimana.
Start: Sunset, at 20.57
END: Moonset, at 22.01

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Satellite Sonifications at ICAS/ECAS @MUTEK 2012

If you are in Montreal, Canada, come and meet us at one of our talks or workshop units!

We are two of the mursat-team, Jogi HofmĂĽller and Reni HofmĂĽller, who were invited to be at the MUTEK-festival, as one of the musikprotokoll’s input to the ICAS/ECAS festival network.

All events are free of charge, but you’ll have to register at the MUTEK site.
workshop@mutek.org

On Monday, 28th, in the afternoon, the first input is a 15 minute condensed overview of the mursat-project in the best-practice panel about Tools for an unknown future, and a first glance into what will happen in the workshop.

On Thursday, 31st of May, we give a more indepth view of our work:
ICAS/ECAS Presentation: Satellite Sonification

reni_montroyal01-satellite-fishing

reni_montroyal01-satellite-fishing

jogi_montroyal01-satellite-fishing

jogi_montroyal01-satellite-fishing


If you want to know, what the little red square on Jogi’s T-Shirt means, read his blog.

And on Friday, 1st of June and Saturday, 2nd of June, we’ll work with satellite sounds, (fieldtrip on friday), and sonification of Satellite position data called TLE (Two Line Elements, as we get them from Celestrak.com) into OSC (OpenSoundControll) at the Monument Nationale (hacking on saturday), our workshop location.
Please come and meet us in one of the ocasions or get in touch with us otherwise; we are interested in all sorts of cooperations and collaborations.

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mursat @ MALMOE, magazine in vienna

Vienna is the seat of the editorial board of MALMOE; focussing on current urban culture and critical thinking, it seemed to be a good place to let people know about our proceedings.
Go here to see where oyu can get a copy!
BTW – it is published in German.

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Exhibition “Covered Skies”, opened on 4th of May 2012

A coincidence in 2009 played the announcement of IOS, Interorbital Systems, in our hands. This small company, based in the USA, enables us to construct our own pico satellite and launch it into orbit for about € 6.000,- And suddenly – sending a satellite comes into our reach. And we start formulating our own questions. If we have the confidence to build it ourselves. What it should do. Who usually defines this. What is already up there flying around. Reflecting upon technologies, usage of technologies and their sociopolitical impacts. Enquiring – how do things work, how can they be made publicly available, the space above us is public space. We reclaim this space. And here we have our meeting point with others, in our attitudes, strategies of acting, joy of experimenting and curiosity. We claim the “outer” space as “public” space, in which other projections, wishes, concerns, desires, purposes and undertakings of different matter have authority and entitlement.
The launch itself has been postponed and postponed, and this is the norm in satellite life.
So we decided to set up an exhibition with various art projects: some that have evolved around ourt worklabs, such as Coallision, 2011/2012 by Jogi Hofmüller, and in caelum by Peter Venus and Marian Weger, and others that have already existed before, like From the Distance by Heimo Ranzenbacher and Fränk Zimmer, or Vapor Trails of Europe by alien production, also from people involved in the mursat1-developping.
And then there is a series of other works, by Bruno Vianna (A little satellite, and The ionic fountain), and El Naufragio de los Hombres, by Charly Nijensohn.

Come to ESC im LABOR to see!
Open until 30th of June 2012

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