[sat] bevor alles überladen wird mit dem nächsten

[reni at mur.at]

hey!

bin schon wieder im nächsten worklab, also bevors alles überdeckt wird...

lg
reni
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on the train, monday may, 16th 2011
to zidani most, then changing to zagreb... time inventors' kabinet
radio worklab

escuchando satelites/listening to satellites

before the impressions, emotions and ideas of last week get tapped by
the next ones from this week, i write some down.

when joanna asked me for the first time (will have been on monday, the
first day, so the ... let me think...9th), why i am interested in
satellites, and what i was doing in gijon, i said something like:
"well, we are going to send one this year, and it will/can be
interesting to exchange about philosophical, political, artistic and
technical questions that arise from that possibility."

i still think that, and i think, we have been doing this in very many
different ways, with different layers, with different means. 

in gijon, i was mostly listening to satellites.
the joy in listening to a satellite (among other aspects) lies in the fact that one
has to focus to hear possible patterns in the noise. (i very much like 
the german word 'rauschen'; i didnt find any good translation into
another language.)

    [i remember a beautiful sound installation by peter ablinger, where he
    worked with white and pink and other noise, and different ranges of frequencies.
    in graz he installed that in a gallery space in the ground floor, with
    big windows to the street; the ceiling are bows, and so are the passes
    from one room to another, and i think there are 4 of them. so the
    noise areas where installed in such way that you could only here them
    in the passes from one room to the other, on the schwelle, like a noise shower 
    and the space of transition.]

listening to satellites is about being atentive - first on a time level: an averadge
pass dures about 10 minutes or so, and the entering and leaving times
are usually very cracky (or: blurry, if you think of it as a picture
or grafical representation). that means that the actual, the real
listening time is even shorter. then you also have to know on which
band and in which mode the satellite is transmitting. it also helps to
know where north (and therefore all the others) are. :)
so, if you are discussing - lets say, a certain political aspect, like
the bogota declaration - it might easily happen that the satellite you
wanted to grasp, has passed. of course, it is going to pass again in
another 1,5 hours, but the corridor, the pass, its elevation and/or
azimuth, might not be too good to receive, as the earth of course is
turning under the satellite. 

now, when the antenna is pointing in the right direction, and there is
not much surrounding noise in the physical space around you, there is
quite a lot of different things to hear. for example, the NOAAs -
weather satellite. there are some of them scanning the surface of the
earth constantly, and sending these data back to earth. soundwise it
remembered me of the needle-printers, also because it has the same
rhthym, it goes line by line, and if you ahve the right
cable-connections between antenna, receiver, and computer and then
also the right software instaleld (wxtoimg), you can download the
current picture of the region where you are at the time when you are
listening/watching. it is at the same time very meditative and also
exciting. the sound is calmly more or less the same and the line
appears on the monitor. after a while you can see forms, - shapes of islands
and continents, and there is this moment of re-cognition ("ah, look, this
must be sicily!"), which is exciting and also comforting, like being
able to decode the representation of data with the knowledge one
already has. and then you can also see structures of clouds,
therefore: the weather.
as this is realtime, the physical situtation is fascinating and weired
at the same time: you look up, the satellite "looks" down. you are a too
small entity and wont appear on the scan, but you know you are there. 
so, it is as if the invisibility of the satellite (you look up, but
you cant see it) mirrors itself on to you, and makes you invisible
as well. contagious invisibilization?

    [when i spoke with joanna on the last day, 14th, and she
    asked me about what i was doing in gijon, this invisibility of
    the current technologies came to my mind again: genetic
    engineering, nano technologies, nuclear technology, satellites...
    all invisible, and we need machines to tell us what is going on
    and we control them via machines, black boxes run and interpreted
    by experts.
    as long as the machines tell us: "everything is fine", everything is
    fine. everything under control.]

anyhow, we have an idea how the land, the continent looks like
where we stand. so we know what to expect from NOAA images.
being in asturias, it means, you can see a lot of clouds from both sides. 

oh, ma, and the antennas - a universe of beauty, diversity and possibilities in
itself! 
...

of course, it is kind of a drag what you would need equipmentwise to
do that. starts with having some space outside in the open, where you can actually
have your atenna installed or moving around or pointing to a certain angle or being
moved by an (automatic) rotator. then you need all these things, like
a receiver, a compu, several antennas, cables, and probably
electricity, as batteries might be empty soon.

for example, the connection with GNU-radio can make it possible to combine the
listening (satellite signal receiving) station with the internet and
set up an automated stream with a preprogrammed set of signals that i
want to catch.

now, with the mursat, there will be the excitement to catch the signal.
i still get geesebomps, when i think of the moment when during the
worklab on 14th may, we made "first contact" to the ISS. we were
cathing all sorts of signals of ISS during the week, but on saturday,
we finally managed to haven them listen to us, and even calling back
"buenos dias, buenos dias!" - although without naming the caller, so
it does not officialy "count". well, but i dont care,. i've been
there, i've heard it. i know it was real.

mursat1 will - for the first time in satellite history - carry a
piezo microphone with him. so, there will be something to listen to
which we dont know yet what it will be. how it will sound. how it will
feel to hear that sound. hm, so maybe we wont hear it, as we dont know
what we should be listening to. 
with the beacons that every satellite has, you know, that is for
example broadcasting its telemetric
data in morse code. so you wait for sounds that can be understood as
dots and dashes. if the signal is clear, and you records it, you can
even see the morse code in the grafical representation of the audio
recording, looking at the file. 

what will we hear?

as usual, the meaning of the information will only explain itself
it the context of its appearance and herknft - otherwise it'll ber
just cracks, that might or might not sound beautiful.
we need the code to understand it, and therefore only accesible code can
make sense at all.

if saroj giri is right, the most important impact from wikileaks into
our societies is not the information in itself, but the challenge
against the power to change its structure.

the launch is planned for 2011. mursat1 will orbit something between 3
- 6 weeks, and once we have the frequencies on which we will broadcast,
we will let everybody know.
and, as gx jupitter larsson says: 
?In an age when state agencies are sending robotic explorers into
space, I think it is only natural that artists should launch robotic artists. To have
the mursat1 satellite itself perform a performance piece in space excites my mind.?