#2: A Plan
It’s been another fun week!
I’ve set up a mood board using Miro, and it’s a brilliant tool! I gather that there are a small variety of similar apps, but the ease of use has really blown me away. I’ve quickly made a collection of research from a variety of sources, including linked images, uploaded images, online news articles and videos, even a Spotify playlist.
In my case, I’m using it to organize ideas about control components, output methods, examples of mechanical elements, and general style. I have some screenshots from Outer Wilds, Riven and Myst focusing on the general style, and particularly on knobs, switches and displays. I’ve included a generous collection on the Antikythera machine, and particular some beautiful reconstructions that are particularly inspiring. I’ve also put together a variety of examples of telescopes, including cosmic ray telescopes, neutrino detectors, and several different constructions of radio telescopes. Interestingly, I never actually collected any reference images of visible light telescopes.
In addition to the visual reference material, I’ve also created a playlist of music that all has something in common with the project. Casually, it’s a great resource to use as background noise to get work done on the project, but several aspects really speak to the way I hope this telescope will work, and I’m hopeful that they might end up in the final product too.
Brian Saia’s Uneven Oceans album really parallels the idea of this telescope as something that can distantly observe faraway objects in the past. He describes the album as “a sonic journal of [his] movements through lapsed landscapes,” and each song as a memorial to “a space that no longer exists, transformed through extreme weather or other external forces.” This device seems like a fitting corollary to that, especially with some ability to adjust the time that you’re viewing through it. This music seems to call from places familiar but just slightly too far to properly remember, see or visit – and that’s exactly how I hope this device will feel.
I’ve also leaned heavily on Public Service Broadcasting, a British band that blends live performance with archive audio and video to, as they put “Inform, Educate and Entertain.” Each of their albums and EPs tells a story of historical events using audio artifacts from those events themselves. Their Race for Space album is built around sound samples from the British Film Institute’s archives (including contemporary newsreels, NASA audio, etc.) from the launch of Sputnik in ’57 up to Apollo 17 in ’72. This has, perhaps, a more technical and direct approach than Uneven Oceans, but in its own way also realizes places and events that are otherwise a little too far away, in distance and in memory, for me to interact with.
Looking at all the research I’ve collected, I’ve been able to make a few decisions to shape the project. I’ve narrowed the list of controllable parameters to x-axis, y-axis, zoom and time, along with a TBD “tuning” or “denoising” method. That might be a fine-adjust for those x- and y- axis controls, or possibly something more connected to the audio/video outputs. The output will ultimately include both audio and video, but I have also decided to commit only to finishing the physical protoype this semester.
The physical look I’m moving forward with is based largely on cosmic ray telescopes. Their unorthodox appearance fits the unorthodox way this telescope works, and it also presents more interesting methods of interaction. As cosmic rays hit the earth’s atmosphere, they decay into a cascade of secondary radiation, and cosmic ray detectors hope to catch that radiation as it passes through a brick of specialized material. Cosmic Ray telescopes are simply a set of detectors in a line, searching for simultaneous detections that would indicate that this radiation is passing through from “in front” of the telescope.
Using this as a design for the telescope has several advantages, and I’m particularly interested in using the locations of these bricks as a way of controlling the “zoom” of the telescope. It’s a unique method of interaction with a telescope, and also (I hope) a clear visual indication, from the outside, of the “state” of the telescope. A classic, enclosed, optical telescope wouldn’t provide those same opportunities. That said, I’m also concerned that a cosmic ray telescope as-is simply doesn’t look enough like a telescope to set the right expectation, and so I suspect I’ll have to find a middle ground with the design.
In addition to the telescope, I also have a rough plan for a secondary device to adjust time. Based largely on the design of the Antikythera device, though in a form inspired by a particular device in Myst, this would serve as a map of the solar system. Turning a knob will adjust the time axis, and the map provides feedback by showing the positions of the planets – which, of course, will change where the telescope needs to point to pick up different signals.
The next step is to create some proper drafting of the telescope, based on this concept. That, I can turn into prototypes to test the ways people might interact with the telescope, e.g. how much like a classic visible-light telescope will this strange contraption need to look, and how intuitive can I make all the control parameters?