Kiting at Artefact - Day 1

The first day at Artefact, the weather was nice and sunny - a pleasure to spend time on the roof. After some trial and error, the kite got up in the air quite steadily in the latter part of the kiting session. The kite pulling strong.

The wind in the city seems to be rather irregular, probably as the wind comes from the south, south-east, it has to be over the other part of STUK's building, thus becoming unpredictable.

While attempting to get the kite up, I play with the microphone, to find other sources of sound - as the kite is up in the air, and I listen to the sound on my headphones, ideas are shaping for adapting the composition slightly - prolonging the pitch shifted layers of the sound during the composition.

Fri, 12 February, 2016

Delta kite

The delta kite is based on the Vogels of the Musicaerial project.

The kite is relatively small (much smaller than the Hata kite). After the first design (see Too complex to get symmetric), I simplify the design a lot, and simplify it even further when the yellow fabric is not in stock, so I have to use what fabric I have. Similar to the hata, there is a black horizontal band in the middle of the kite, which will be used to make the pressure sensor in. The other two colors are red and yellow. The black returns at the bottom of the kite as the lower band.

The delta is tricky to fly and definately needs a tail to be stable in the air, something I also noticed in the first version. Some experimentation will be needed to find the right length of the tails - or perhaps I should check the Vogels again, for the tails that that version has and copy these.

Thu, 04 February, 2016

Sensing tail

The sensing tail will have several elements: a small pocket to hold the wireless sensing board, a round tube made of fabric to hold the flow sensor, and ribbons of black conductive foil which form a kind of chaos or air fluctuation sensor.

I try to improve upon the designs of the version of 2012 - by making the pocket out of blue kite fabric, and the round tube out of yellow and red fabric. The black conductive foil is attached to the end of the tube.

Wed, 03 February, 2016

Sewing the pillows

For sewing the pillows, I needed to find a good place for a seam - in the end I figured out that if I continued the black fabric all the way over the lower layer of foam, I could fix it with velcro to the base gray fabric and also use velcro to fixate the fabric for the two pointy ears of the pillow. At the very end I decided to sew corners into the black fabric as well, so it would be really tight around the lower layer foam, and stay tight.

In this way, the pillows can still be opened up to fix possible issues with the wiring inside, or for transport, as it turned out when I had to pack the suitcase.

Mon, 01 February, 2016