LABoral’s Plataforma Cero holds the meeting of “Orbitando satélites” from today until Friday
The meeting will investigate how satellites operate with participants sharing their knowledge in an environmental exploration of our surroundings
Working during the meeting. Photo Joanna Griffin/LABoral
Starting this Tuesday 10th until Friday 14th May, Plataforma Cero. Centre for Research, Production and Resources at LABoral will be the venue for the Orbitando satélites [Orbiting Satellites] meeting: a conference in which the participating experts provide the necessary knowledge to the creative community for the environmental exploration of our surroundings. During this meeting, in morning and afternoon courses, work will be carried out over four days, using free software and hardware in the design and construction of a vehicle and suborbital laboratory, which will be launched this July to coincide with the exhibition in which the results from this research process will be made public. The exhibition Orbitando satélites [Orbiting Satellites] will be shown at the Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial [Centre of Art and Industrial Creation] between 15th July and 7th November this year.
Orbitando satélites was conceived as a theoretical, poetical and practical encounter in order to critically deal with the diverse practices, policies politics and techniques of satellites: a technology that deeply affects our daily lives and which we hardly notice. This open and free workshop, after registration, proposes an exercise on the visibilisation of these objects which despite being concealed from the human eye hold a great and hidden influence on our day-to-day existence. It will investigate how they operate, gaining access to their signals by fabricating antennae and using radio systems, showing how to locate and observe them through the use of free software.
This is a meeting among experts and amateurs, representatives from different countries and cultures in the tradition of independent communities involved in the setting up of Free Information Infrastructures (FFII) so as to put forward a declaration which poetically sketches a map of the potential uses and meanings of satellites. In an attempt to reverse Panopticon logic, the satellites that watch over us will be observed and their political implications as a non-transparent system of control as well as their potential to be a liberating force will be explored; their poetry will be investigated through visualisation and creative exercises in order to access a mythology and even a new kind of astrology. And in the final stage, a satellite will be designed and launched by balloon in July to coincide with the exhibition where the declaration will be visualised.
The meeting will be centred on three lines of work: Satellite Listening and Sighting, under the guidance of Alejo Duque; Satellite Politics and Poetics, led by MSST (Movimento dos Sem Satélite) and Joanna Griffin; and Constructing a Satellite, under the guidance of David Pello. All of them will develop the following themes: satellites and micro-satellites; devices of power and anti-power; listening to satellites; satellite hacking, celestial voices; satellite astrology and astronomy; imagery of satellites; the development of our own system; high altitude balloons (stratospheric), drones and comets; Arduino in space; space politics; satellite tracking; hunting satellites via radio frequencies; GNU/Radio USRP Software Defined Radio; calculating celestial mechanics; and celestial letters.