Sculpture to be Seen from Space, Improvisation to be Heard from Space.

Moerenuma Park, the construction of which began in 1982 and that had its grand opening in 2005, is a comprehensive park designed by Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988), one of the most influential sculptors of the 20th century. It “constitutes one sculptural work as a whole.” In collaboration with ARTSAT: Art and Satellite Project and the SIAF Lab, a Sculpture to be Seen from Space, Improvisation to be Heard from Space was developed to imagine extraterrestrial intelligence. Using stratospheric balloons as civic technology, the Space Moerenuma Park (space-moere) connects Moerenuma Park to the universe/multiverse. To do this, there is a data logger that records the position and conditions of the balloon module, and the original Telecoding Module is installed in the balloons to receive the program code, execute the code to generate sounds, and then respond with radio waves from space.
In 1947, 58 years prior to the opening of Moerenuma Park, Isamu Noguchi developed the idea of a Sculpture to be Seen from Mars, which consisted of piling up earth to construct a gigantic “human face” and a nose measuring 1 mile (1.6 km). Moerenuma Park, therefore, with its artificial mountains Mt. Moere and Play Mountain, comes closest to this idea. However, what does it look like by the extraterrestrial life, what is it going to tell them , and what will it make them think about?
Art is experienced when the audience uses its knowledge, experience, and imagination to discover meaning. It has been 29 years since Isamu Noguchi completed the master plan for the park, and his aspirations and visions continue to expand into the universe at the speed of light.

Telecoding Live Performance

Solutions

In this project, we developed two softwares which simplified the payload function and improved reliability, and they led our second challenge to success.
These two solutions allowed us to make the structure of payload very simple with a dry-cell battery, 500 yen on-board computer and a sheet of Telecoding Shield, and we successfully presented live telecoding performance while checking the balloon’s trajectory.

Petal

We used 920MHz band LoRa module for communication between the high-altitude balloon and the ground station to reduce the weight of payload. But with the restriction of transmission time specified by 920MHz band regulations, we couldn’t send large data on a steady basis. So we developed “Petal,” the original language similar to “TidalCycles,” to reduce traffic of codes creating music.

VirtualFPV

For further reduction of weight of payload and integration of communication networks, we developed “VirtualFPV” which cut down the FPV camera that payload had to carry. It made it possible to monitor the balloon’s condition, which could not visually observed in three-dimensional space, in real time at the ground station by location information of payload contained in codes. Also it made a contribution to mission success as it made it easier to compare the real time trajectory with the simulation result, and to reproduce the past flight data.

PROJECTS