[Image: Courtesy Capella Space.]
The Geocinema group is hosting a six-week class this spring called Signals and Storms, a kind of planetary-scale media studies workshop. Participants will research and critique what they describe as an emerging super-system of always-on recording technologies, from “geosensors” and street-level surveillance cameras up to weather satellites—tools that suggest a future possible medium for “largely distributed infrastructures of filmmaking.”
The image above, meanwhile, comes courtesy of Capella Space and depicts a new satellite design—as of January 2020—that allows the company to produce “on-demand observations of anywhere on Earth” (what they have elsewhere called “persistent monitoring from space”).
These sorts of technologies—though currently out of reach for the typical budgets of a film studio, let alone an arts group—are part of an increasingly omnipresent media-production infrastructure, one that continuously records the surface of the Earth in real time and in great detail, or where Geocinema gets its name in the first place.
Read more over at Signals and Storms.
(Spotted via @wmmna.)
Costs are coming down. A 6cm cubesat launch costs maybe $100K today. It would be in low earth orbit and have a limited lifespan, but could be used for an art project. There was a proposal to use an array of cubesats to monitor the weather using earth tangential radar. I expect the price to decline as more rockets come online and start offering competitive economy fares. The cost of the satellite itself has been plummeting as the capabilities that can be packed into a modest space have been increasing.
Now to come up with an appropriate art project.