Announcements
I. Plan for Thursday & Friday this week
Let’s reconsider our plan for Thursday, and hopefully use Friday as an opportunity for celebration and reflection on all the great work we did this semester.
Class is cancelled on Thursday, May 12.
Instead, we will meet on Friday, May 13 at 10am in the Lang Cafe. There we’ll do final zine assembly & copying, then place our zines around campus in the locations that we’ve specified. After we’ll walk over the University Center and place some zines in the Worldmaking Collaborative exhibition space in Starr Foundation Hall – UL102.
II. Field day report back
Our radio testing “field day” last week was a huge success! We were able to receive a signal with the crystal radio and determined it to be WNYC AM820, which makes sense because their tower is probably one of the closest to us, located in Kearny, New Jersey, near Newark (google maps pin). You can see a photo of their antenna tower on flickr from user Doc Searls. Does this area look familiar? … Jon Cohrs’ film “Back Water”? I believe they canoed right past here. That would put the distance at almost exactly 5 miles. You can view the “line-of-sight” link here:
Linking all these themes (wilderness, climate change, flooding, wireless signals, the off-grid), here is a news item from August 2011 about this tower going down as a result of flooding from Hurricane Irene. (Personal aside, the one time I ever called in to WNYC was a few days after this when I had a comment for Brian Lehrer. 93.9FM was still broadcasting live.)
We also tested some goTenna wireless communication devices and found that they lost signal about .5 miles apart, at which point we were able to re-establish communication by turning on a node in the middle to act as a “meshing” relay.
I shared some notes about the event here on twitter. (Note that some of those photos from from last year, as I didn’t take enough pics this time around.)
Project Planning
Let’s talk about the document of required zine elements that I shared with you.
Reading (Optional)
- Galloway, Thacker, Wark, Excommunication excerpts from Intro and chp 2, “Dark Media”
Screen (Optional)
- “Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles” (2011, directed by Jon Foy)