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Firmament, 2001-3
Zina Kaye & Mr Snow
 An audio visual representation of the data colleted by a radio telescope.
about
Firmament is Java application / PD patch that was built to interface with data coming from a radio telescope, built by Zina Kaye & Mr Snow. If you happen to have java 1.3.1 and the java3d api's installed (windows/linux/mac os x only, see below), you can view version 0.31 of the applet here. Otherwise, take a look at this Quicktime movie (~800kB) or view some stills from version 0.2 and listen to the sound track.
This work was developed during the acoustic.space.lab project at Ventspils Starptautiskais Radioastronomijas Centrs, the VIRAC radiotelescopes, Irbene, Latvia, in August 2001. The project was organised by RIXC and involved more than 30 artists from all over the world.
Firmament has been exhibited as part of [RT-32] at World-Information : Exploring the Network Society of Control in the Oude Kerk, Amsterdam, and in the All Star Data Mappers, as part of Data Terra, Future Screen02 at Artspace in Sydney. [ Review by John Conomos ]
Firmament will be next exhibited as a part of e-lab's contribution to World-Information @Serbia. The dates are 2 March to 5 April, 2003, in Novi Sad and 19 April to 5 May, 2003, in Belgrade.
tech notes
Firmament reads in data coming in to the dish which is interpreted by a computer at the facility. Each line of data includes a UTC timestamp, the azimuth (the angle around the horizon) and the elevation of the dish(the angle up from the horizon towards the zenith, the point overhead) and the dish temperature or the strength of the signal received at that point in space. The 32m dish we were using was 'listening' at a frequency of 11GHz.
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15 4.725333333
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54229
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1965
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47470
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hour minutes
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elevation (0-65535)
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azimuth (0-65535)
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temperature
(0-65535)
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3:04pm
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297.9°
clockwise from North
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10.8°
up from the horizon
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72.4%
or 3.6 Volts
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(Why zero to 65535? Because 65536 is 216 or 16 bits or 2 Bytes)
The diagramme below shows the 'three days' data set. That is, an aggregate of all the data sets captured during the three days the group spent at Irbene. The first samples taken were of Venus, followed by an 'acoustic pan' of the horizon. The satellite dish was at an elevation of 11° and was rotated through nearly a complete 360° arc with an acoustic microphone near the sweet spot in front of the feed horn. This scan took about half an hour.
On the following day, an early morning scan of Jupiter was made. Later in the day, a hi resolution scan of the sun was taken. This was made up of multiple sweeps of the suns surface, each time re-aligning the dish slightly to compensate for the suns motion in the meantime.
The next iteration of Firmament will take and display live data from multiple radiotelescopes. If anyone can assist in the provision of such data (radio astronomers perhaps?), please contact me at mr [dot] snow [at] laudanum [dot] net
requirements
To run Firmament as an installation, the following set up is required:
contact
To contact the artists, or see more of their work, please email them at
house [at] laudanum [dot] net
credits
Thanks to John Tonkin for all his technical assistance, and thanks to Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits for getting this whole thing rolling, and supporting it ever since . Check out what they do at RIXC and find out about John's own work at johnt.org.
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