This week I took part in an afternoons workshop that applied the ‘Decomputation’ theory to kites. In particular we were thinking about kites in science such as those used by Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Graham Bell.
Working with Jelka Kretzschmar, Chenyi Liao and Meret Vollenweider we devised a kite to listen to flight. This involved constructing a kite and attaching a recording device, all in under and hour! Flying a kite has distinct phases. The set-up and communicating of the launch, the launch itself and the rush of air, then the gusts and movement of air in the flight and finally a graceful, or maybe not so graceful, return to earth. The recordings we gathered very clearly helped us experience these phases. They have the feel of something in between an air traffic control room and a black box recording during a crash.
The next stage was to translate this data into something more meaningful. We chose to take the waveform of the audio recordings and layer it with flight video and the audio to make a video that helped give a pluri-sensual experience of the kite flight.
Video to follow shortly.
Object Questions 