Thursday, September 20, 2007

Sky Ear


This is a project Katherine Moriwaki spoke about during my presentation.
It is related to my Value Fiction research as it focuses on the usage of balloons as floating physical pixels.

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Sky
Ear is a one-night event in which a glowing "cloud" of mobile phones
and helium balloons is released into the air so that people can dial
into the cloud and listen to the sounds of the sky.

The cloud consists of 1000 extra-large helium balloons that each
contain 6 ultra-bright LEDs (which mix to make millions of colours).
The balloons can communicate with each other via infra-red; this allows
them to send signals to create larger patterns across the entire Sky
Ear cloud as they respond to the electromagnetic environment (created
by distant storms, mobile phones, police and ambulance radios,
television broadcasts, etc.).

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sky ear
sky ear
sky ear

sky ear - july 4 2004

sky ear - july 4 2004

The balloons are enclosed in a carbon fibre and net structure 25m in
diameter tethered to the ground by 6 cables and held aloft at a height
of about 60-100m where it will remain for several hours.

Using mobile phones people can listen to the actual sounds up high, the
electromagnetic sounds of the sky as well as streams of "whistlers" and
"spherics" (atmospheric electromagnetic phenomena that are the audible
equivalent of the Northern Lights). Of course, the action of calling
the cloud changes the electromagnetic environment inside and causes the
balloons to vary in brightness and colour.


For more background to the project and test flight stages please click here.

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sky ear

sky ear


sky ear

sky ear - july 4 2004

sky ear - july 4 2004


Sky Ear
has had two successful launches, in Fribourg, Switzerland (July 4,
2004) and Greenwich, London (September 15, 2004). For photos of these
two events, please see the images section


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Source: Haque

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