The second radio show on thursday, 22nd of September focuses on interpretation of satellite positioning data and their transformation, into sound, into animation.
Peter Venus, Norbert Math, Jogi and Reni Hofmüller work on sonifications for this years’ musikprotokoll, a festival of contemporary music founded by ORF, the Austrian State Radio.
Radio Helsinki in Graz on 92,6FM and online at live stream.
Sonifications of satellite data such as used in gpredict (elevation, azimuth, footprint, …) will be part of ESC’s exhibition “Possibility grid”, alongside with other sonification projects based on the interpretation of windtime.
Exhibition opening on Sat, 24th Sept, 7pm
opening times: tuesday – sunday, 10.30am – 7pm
until Sun, 16th Oct
live Concert on Sun, 9th Oct, noon
ESC im LABOR – Jakoministrasse 16, 1st floor
ESC im LABOR is the experimental art venue in the center of Graz that hosts the worklabs and exhibitions around the development of mursat1.
It is a place for installations, performances, lectures and meetings, open all year long. Since some years now, ESC im LABOR has organized programm in co-production with steirischer herbst (the yearly festival on contemporary art in Graz). And sometimes also in cooperation with musikprotokoll, the festival of new music by ORF, the Austrian national broadcasting company.
During the third worklab, we had been looking more deeply into the possibilities of interpretation of satellite data into art.
Among the ideas that came up already in the preparation, our guests from Ljubljana – Maja Delak and Luka Princic – had expressed their interest in integrating our findings into their realtime online performance set.
Maja is a performer and dancer, Luka is a soundartist and programmer. With transmittance, they throw their capabilities into a pool and develop pieces together, sometimes also in collaboration with other artists.
And this is what they did! Congratulations!
If you want to know more about transmittance and upcomming developments, have a look!
tansmittance.si
Here a short excerpt of the live chat on Friday, 26th of August at 9pm, that accompanies transmittance performances. Online audience can chose out of a set of given choices which module of the performance should be realized next.
[20:59] on the left side [of the online interface] you can see the list of choices
[20:59] we would like to take your suggestions, slowly, as
we will go about 10 minutes with each
[21:00] we’ll go with the flow
[21:01] anyone can propose any item from the list on the left.
[21:02] we are open and ready. you can influence on the
flow of things.
[21:02] some of our parameters are already controlled with
data from the positions of some satellites
[21:02] some of this you can already hear
[21:04] i suggest: sound of invisible man
[21:04] ok
[21:04] first come first served
[21:04] here we go with “sound of invisible man”
[22:16] in the stream you see our
manipulation of the image… real time Pure Data patches
[22:17] the sounds (how it is coming in and
out, right this moment, the frequency) are controlled by latitude and
longitude of some satellites
Day 2 at the worklab – we searched for good satellite passes beforehand, and then decided to go out from 6pm on (much too hot before that).
We took the equipment, we had at hand, packed our people and some food and and went to Augarten.
2 netbooks (eee-pc), 1 funcube dongle, 1 logperiodic antenna (from Patrick).
Then with other people, also came more equipment: another laptop, a battery driven amplifyer, a handheld receiver.
All types of smart phones have shown to be quite handy as well – with compasses, and seeing the angle (for manual elevation precision control). Also data comparison about when precisely a satellite passes.
And in any case it is always nice to share all this noise and cracking and the hope to hear something – which we managed to hear some local radio amateurs, which was great already!
But not yet with satellites.
A lot of patience needed, experience needs time. The aim is to get a working routine for spotting and listening, recording and interpreting. We are learning a new instrument.
A range of new machines and software, of course, to be learned, to be understood, and then the question, what to make out of it.
What will we hear?
Beginning with tomorrow there will be a regular mur.sat show on the community radio station Radio Helsinki. The show starts at 8pm and takes 1hour. Radio Helsinki is on 92.6 MHz in Graz and can also be listened to via the livestream. The show repeats on a 4-week basis bringing news and background information on the project.
Here we go again! Worklabs have shown to be a nice form for us to develop things further, and to involve more people.
Many, many people involved and the team is growing.
For the first day of our third worklab, we had invited two artists from Ljubljana, Maja Delak and Luka Princic, to join us to learn about possible satellite data interpretation, that we have started some months ago; here you find more technical information and further links.
We are in the preparation phase for a monthly radio show at Radio Helsinki, the community radio in Graz, on 92.6 HZ.
Every last thursday in the month at 8pm, we will talk about news and updates around mursat.
From details about single work packages to interviews with involved people and IOS, we want to share information. Understanding more about satellites and frequencies, is one of the reasons why we regularly meet at the amateur radio clubstation in Inffeldgasse, where all these pictures were taken.
As usual, if you know how things work, it is simple and easy to do. In order to get used to catching the signals from an object, that is only a few minutes somewhere above you, that you cannot see with your eyes, we have started listening on a regular basis.
We will also do that in the city, to get all sorts of different experiences.
This time we were: (in time of appearance)
Reni, Patrick, Jogi, Bernhard, Christian
Graz hosts the 2011 International Space University ISU.
A fix part of the ISU’s program is the construction and launch of newly developed rockets.
6 teams finished their rockets, with support from a NASA engineer, and they were launched from the park at the ORF Steiermark.
The challenge was: the rocket has to reach at least 30m, and maximum height 109 meters. That’s the height of the Herz Jesu church tower, and limits the flight security maximum in Graz. Its payload is an egg, that shall survive flight and landing.
The start of the rocket with 4 engines. Observed by: Professor Koudelka (left), TU Graz, head of the satellite building team in Graz; the NASA engineer (middle) supporting the ISU-satellite builders, and the local fire brigade person from TU Graz (right).
Only 2 of the 4 engines worked, but stil it was a great flight.
the faculty rocket, built by some professors, outside of competition.
Parts of some rockets landed in trees, so not all “eggonauts” could be recovered.
Apart from technical requests there was also a price given for aestetics, it went to “eggcellence”, for its nice design, over all the fins, and also for the fact that it wore the names of numerous ISU-participants and therefore got a price for its social awareness and communication factor.
Update from the deployment of ARISSat-1:
The antenna was found – it obviously is a different type of antenna, a coil which is inside the satellite, for more information, best to look at the amateur radios’ website amsat.org
Elvis has left the building.
But no fotos – the video connection was broken, when they let the sattelite go.
Maybe they could film it and will put some footage online somewhen…
bad luck.
As the moderator of NASA-TV commented, the following steps were taken:
After getting back to the builders of ARISSat-1, the cosmonauts deployed it from the back side of the Russian compartment.
We are all set for watching two Russian ISS-cosmonauts.
Expedition 28 Flight Engineers Sergei Volkov and Alexander Samokutyaev will leave the ISS, and set ARISSat-1 free.
All images here are screenshots from NASA-TV Live Stream.
Sitting savely at ESC, Jakoministrasse 16, we have connected a computer to the beamer, set up the PA-system and now we are waiting.
With a delay of about 25 minutes, the two leave the space station – wow, it is impressive! To be able to watch them in “realtime” is indeed touching.
Their first task for the 6-hour-space walk is to deliver the amateur radio satellite. It is amazing to see how complicated it is to move an object the small as a nano-sattelite out of the hetch of the ISS.
They moved the satellite in the right position, and were already set to switch it on.
And then they realized that they had only one antenna mounted, the second one is missing. Now the mission is postponed, see http://amsat.org for updates.
We sit here at ESC and imagine people searching the ISS now for the missing link.
And meanwhile we are still watching these amazing people connecting things outside the ISS. Since the live transmission started 3, 5 hours have passed, that means, that they surrounded Earth more than 2 times. There is a stable HD-video stream, we hear them talk in Russian and there is a synchronous translation into English. So we can follow what they do, constantly.
Like two little ants the two cosmonauts Sascha and Sergej move around the ISS and connect cables, and have to deal with shortness of them.
There must be a lot of people sitting at NASA head quarters wathing and following, what their Russian collegues are doing.
Would you rather be at headquarters on Earth or outside the ISS?
