OPEN CALL:
Aerocene HACK 2
NOVEMBER 26-17, 2016 | EXHIBITION ROAD, LONDON
Aerocene together with Exhibition Road institutions announce an open call for an collaborative hack to imagine and prototype the future of the Aerocene Explorer. We are looking for developers, designers, artists, data scientists, and creative technologists.
Aerocene is an open-source project for artistic and scientific exploration. Beginning from the vision of artist Tomás Saraceno the project centers around the Aerocene Explorer, an evolving air-fuelled sculpture for personal exploration of the air. Becoming buoyant from the heat of the Sun and infrared radiation from the surface of Earth, and carried by the jet streams, Aerocene Explorer aims to achieve a carbon-emissions-free journey around the world. The project is embedded in a community of collaborators and partners from around the world, pushing the development of new solutions and technologies for sustainable Aerocene travel and living. Aerocene is a movement, an invitation to shape a period of time, a new epoch. Aerocene is a response to – and a way to transcend – our current Anthropocene era.
This is the second of a series of hack events taking place as part of Aerocene at Exhibition Road (documentation of the previous hack here). Through October to December 2016, Aerocene is working together with members of the Exhibition Road Cultural Group – 17 prestigious cultural and scientific institutions, among them Imperial College London, the Natural History Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Serpentine Galleries – to create an open and collaborative research platform.
THE CHALLENGES
The Aerocene Explorer, our tethered-flight starter kit currently in beta version, will enable anyone to launch their own personal exploration of the atmosphere. This hack will be about imagining and prototyping future extensions, iterations and supporting tools for the Aerocene Explorer under three specific challenges:
FREE FLIGHT
This challenge is about helping future iterations of the Aerocene Explorer, already in development, to fly free by mapping, visualising and predicting Aerocene Explorer flight paths. In a test earlier this summer the free-flying Aerocene “Gemini” traveled from Berlin to northeastern Poland, a distance of 800 km, without burning any fossil fuels! We can offer trajectory data from this and other free-flights, access to a prototype flight predictor based on public NOAA GFS (Global Forecast System) data developed with our collaborators at MIT’s Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Science Department (EAPS), and the possibility to iterate further on projects developed in the previous Aerocene Hack, 29-30th October. We invite mashups with other data sources, beautiful visualisations, and intuitive user interfaces that imagine new ways to interact with the data.
LIFE IN THE AIR
The air above us is more than just empty space. This challenge is about extending the sensing capabilities of the Aerocene Explorer to study airborne ecosystems: microbes, fungal spores, insects… Currently the Aerocene Explorer carries a camera for streaming live aerial footage and a sensors for collecting bariometric pressure, humidity and temperature data. Under guidance of experts from the Natural History Museum, this challenge invites the development of new sensing tools, traps and devices for sensing and sampling aerial biodiversity.
AEROCENE SOUNDING
Since the early 1960 balloons have been used to ‘sound’ the atmosphere: communicating atmospheric data at different altitudes and locations through radio. 100s of radiosonde balloons are launched around the world daily for atmospheric research and to monitor weather systems. Similarly, radio communications have been crucial for Aerocene Explorer test free-flights for tracking, recovery and data retrieval. This challenge is about exploring the technical, scientific and artistic potential of sounding and radio communication with the Aerocene Explorer, both in the air and on the ground: From mesh communications, to data science and atmospheric fluid dynamics, visualisation and sonification of data, infrasound and aero-acoustics…
WHAT TO EXPECT
The hack will run over the weekend 26-27th November. It will begin on Saturday morning with an introduction to the project and challenges, and initial brainstorming as part of the Aerocene Campus event at the Royal College of Art Senior Common Room. After lunch the hack will move to the Imperial College Advanced Hackspace (ICAH) to refine project ideas, form interdisciplinary teams and begin prototyping hacks. Expert guidance, feedback and help will be provided. We will provide food, drinks, tools and equipment, hardware and basic prototyping materials.
In the spirit of open source all teams will be encouraged to openly document their progress and share their final documentation. Teams will automatically become part of the Aerocene community.
TIME FRAME
23/11 – application deadline (midnight GMT)
24/11 – notification of selected participants
26/11 AM – kick-off as part of Aerocene Campus
26/11 PM – 27/11 – hack continues at Imperial College Advanced Hackspace
HOW TO APPLY
Sign up below and tell us why you should be part of the Aerocene Open Call. You will be notified on 23rd November whether you have been accepted to join the project.