See you soon at the Roskilde Festival on June 26th!

PROGRAM (german)

Zeitplan bzw. Flugplan in Arnsberg vom 23.08. bis zum 29.08.2010:

• Montag, 23.08.2010

Abgabe der gebastelten Bahnen und der Plastiktüten im Bußmeyer-Gebäude, Steinweg 13, von 10 bis 10 Uhr – 2 Helferschichten a 2 Personen

Arnsberger Museo Aero Solar II entsteht in Turnhalle (zu bastelnde Fläche: 30 x 15 m – 450 m2) Laurentianum, Luftschleuse einsetzen; Pappe auf Neumarkt auslegen, am Abend aufblasen auf Neumarkt; ab 14 Uhr bis 22 Uhr Mitbasteln

Ermöglichen in Bußmeyer, Mutterballon bleibt in Turnhalle sichtbar für Publikum, 6 Helfer

4 Uhr Wecker klingelt, 1 h Gebläse verwenden, ab 6 Uhr Leute einladen; um 7 Uhr für ca. 1 h Museo begehbar, Arnsberg Ballon II auf Neumarkt starten lassen, 6 Helfer

Jeweils für die Turnhalle Galerieaufsicht (KS-Helfer), falls Museo-Team nicht dort

at the Alter Flughafen (AERONAUTEN WERKSTATT)

June, 22nd – 27th 2010

THE PROGRAM

Here’s a sketch of the activities for the museo aero solar week. Every day the Aeronauten werkstatt is open and the museo aero solar group is waiting for you to take part in the balloon-making, discussions and other activities. There is no age limit or any particular ability you are pretended to have to give your contribution.

All the activities are taking place at the Aeronauten werkstatt in Bonames/Kalbach

(read more below about how to reach the place)

tuesday, 22nd

2pm – 5pm >> The first day we are setting up the Aeronauten werkstatt, preparing all the materials and making the “do-it-together museo kits”. But if you want to take part you are welcome to join us since today!

wednesday, 23rd

9:30am >> pupils will  build a balloon

2pm – 5pm>> Open collective work on the museo aero solar – making. Come to learn how to make solar balloons (easy!) from reused plastic bags (if you can, collect the ones you have at home and bring them with you, any colour-any size-any shape) and start preparing new sections that will be added to the museo. There could be also some tests and attempts to improve the balloon structure, the rope-system and other technical solutions.

>> The “do-it-together museo kits” will be on sale from today !

6.30pm>> There will be an open discussion about museo aero solar, its story and practice. We’ll take some decisions about the next steps and discuss how to realise museo aero solar with a different approach and in self-organised ways, starting from alternative fundraising.

[> 20:30 public viewing gemany-ghana at the towercafe, nearby the Aeronauten werkstatt]

thursday, 24th

9:30pm>> pupils will build a balloon

2pm – 5pm>> The collective work on the balloon continues.

[You are welcome to join us for the dinner, but remember to bring something to share]

20:00 >>Plastic planet (documentary)

friday, 25th

9:30pm>> pupils are building a balloon

2pm – 5pm>>We’ll repair together the balloon and continue in the making of new sections. We’ll prepare also a new kind of entrance, made of cardboard, that should facilitate the entry inside the balloon.

6.30pm>> First benefit dinner for museo aero solar: bringing food (also fresh meat for the grill) and drinks to share or buying a hand-made “museo kit” you are welcome to have dinner at the hangar. The money will be used to finance the construction of a new solar balloon.

saturday, 26th

11am – 4pm>> The work on the new sections for the balloon continues. In the afternoon these new pieces will be added to the structure of the museo aero solar.

[ Possibly, the balloon will be partially inflated inside the hangar ]

6.30pm>> Benefit dinner for museo aero solar. Bring some food and drinks to share or buy a “museo kit” to have dinner together at the hangar. Only tonight with Music!

sunday, 27th

(only in case of good weather conditions)

from 7am to about 9am >> Museo aero solar Flight !!!

We’ll see if it’s possible to lift a person, trying to calculate the weight lifted by the balloon.

As soon as you come, you’ll have the best chances to help in the preparation, learn how to fly a solar balloon and enter inside the museo (it’s worth of it!) few minutes before the launch.

>> If you can, bring coffee and something to eat and after the flight we’ll have breakfast together.

11am – 4pm>> It’s the “Bird Day”: the Aeronauten werkstatt invites you for the construction and flight of bird-kites!

————————————

HOW TO REACH THE PLACE FROM FRANKFURT>

From the main train station (frankfurt hauptbahnhof), you’ll need to take any “S-Train”
going to the stop called “hauptwache”. it is only two stops away.
From hauptwache, take the “U-train” (underground) U2, direction “bad homburg/gonzenheim”
Your stop is called “kalbach” (it takes about 20 minutes to get there).
At kalbach, exit the platform and walk in the opposite direction of the train.
It’s about a five minutes walk to the aeronauten werkstatt (see the map below)

for more informations write to aerosolar@gmail.com

After our visit to Hamburg, it took more time than we expected to give you an answer about accepting your invitation or not.

Not only because it was difficult to decide, after some discussions among the group, but also because we had to think about how we could answer to your kind proposal to work in the Elbe Island, inviting museo aero solar to take part to an art event (“Aussicht auf Veränderungen/Looking for Changes ­ Art across Hamburg”) organized by your group, founded for and financed by IBA-International Building Exhibition, that is the first step for a huge urban project going to reshape the whole Island and its image.

We decided to write you this letter, which we don’t consider as a private message, but as a possibly helpful statement for those who are in the same situation: being (considered) a cultural producer, or working in the so-called “creative” field, and as such being invited to produce art inside an urban development process.

We met only one time, and three members of the museo group (the same that are writing you this letter) visited the Elbe Island for two days, in order to take a look to the place and understand if it was possible to work there. After spending one day with your group – and we really appreciated your openness to discuss several aspects of the situation – we also did our best to go over the “first impression” about the place, collecting information and talking to a good number of people, walking around almost every neighborhood and corner of the Elbe Island, from Veddel to Wilhelmsburg to Kirchdorf.

We discovered that the situation of the Elbe Island was much different from the one you described to us, often using the rhetorical approach that looks at the urban present condition in terms of “development”, “connecting the isolated people of the far-away neighborhoods to the city-centre” and so on in the direction of “helping the poor”.

So, who are “the poor” here? The inhabitants of the island, many of them against the IBA projects because they think this is going to slowly kick them out of the place, or maybe even worse, to let them stay while imposing a new “creative lifestyle” for them?

Who are “the poor”– the artists and curators called to promote with optimistic enthusiasm and cultural events this “growth of the city”, providing images similar to the ones in the IBA brochures, or melancholic reflections on the island’s “old times” while the “creative district” is arriving? Or maybe IBA is “the poor”, who needs all these advertising, posters, promotional campaigns, art events, pictures of smiling people appearing everywhere saying IBA is good, the Elbe Island will be good? Why all these efforts?

Why are we so pushed to be optimistic?

We don’t live on the Elbe Island and we are not from Hamburg. We can’t tell anybody how the island should be, what has to be built, what has to be changed there.

But IBA projects are an enormous effort made to convince middle-class, creative people from the city-centre that the Island would be a good place to move soon.

If even the organizers of this art event are telling us that IBA is not taking care so much of the imminent gentrification process, why should we support all this?

We are refusing a lot of money, but why was this money here for us? To convince us that this was a good opportunity, despite the situation? To have pictures of a “big multicultural artwork” which documents that IBA is with the people and life is easy if you say yes?

We don’t think that the artist’s approach should be driven by “hope” and “optimism” when they are clearly two other words for “irresponsibility”. We refuse. We say no, thank you. And we suggest to the other invited artists to think about this possibility.

If we should come back to the Elbe Island, it will be when there will be no artists needed to create and/or sell an “atmosphere”. We believe the artists are simply not a good thing for the island right now, because all they could do would be exploited by IBA.

We are not particularly interested in promoting the ill relationship between art and gentrification (these are the basics that no one should never forget), but simply to assume that working with art in these contexts should be defined as one of the final stages of the subsumption of art to the field of capitalist urban marketing, where the object of exchange is no more the art piece but the artist itself, who is the new “promoter” for any kind of real estate operation.

We found a very interesting manifesto recently written about what’s going on in Hamburg, called “Not in our name. Marke Hamburg!”. This text became a petition, signed by thousands of people, and in it you can read lines like the following:

“We don’t want to “position” local neighbourhoods as “colourful, brash, eclectic” parts of town, nor will we think of Hamburg in terms of “water, cosmopolitanism, internationality,” or any other “success modules of the brand Hamburg” that you chose to concoct.”

“Look at Wilhelmsburg, Neue Große Bergstraße and Hafencity: artists are expected to follow the funding money and interim-use opportunities like donkeys after carrots – into development areas that need life injecting into them, or investors or new, more solvent residents. You obviously consider it a matter of course that cultural resources should be siphoned “directly into urban development”, “to boost the city’s image”. Culture should be an ornament for turbo-gentrification. St. Pauli and Schanzenviertel are shining examples of what this means: former working class districts become “trendy areas” and, in no time at all, exclusive residential areas with adjoining party and shopping neighbourhoods, where food and clothing chains like H&M milk the amusement-hungry hordes.”

“There could not be a more unequivocal definition of the role that “creativity” is supposed to play: namely of profit centre for the “growing city”. [...]And we don’t want to increase their value now. We don’t want to discuss “how we want to live” in urban development workshops. As far as we are concerned, everything we do in this city has to do with open spaces, alternative ideas, utopias, with undermining the logic of exploitation and location. We say: A city is not a brand. A city is not a corporation. A city is a community. We ask the social question which, in cities today, is also about a battle for territory. This is about taking over and defending places that make life worth living in this city, which don’t belong to the target group of the “growing city”. We claim our right to the city – together with all the residents of Hamburg who refuse to be a location factor. ”

We found this document very clear about the situation in which we have been called to take part. And the fact that the “Infoladen” on the Fährstraße in Wilhelmsburg was kicked out by “SAGA” is just a further symptom of the situation.

But is “utopia” the only viable and acceptable way of considering work and life out of the capitalist rules? Can we stop thinking about peoples’ involvement from the category of participation, that even in the “alternative way” means: pushing people to collaborate with us, because we like to have a “community” around our art project, giving it the aura of consensus?

Is it possible that one day  “good-willing” artists could turn into self-organized groups of non-producers, instead of unconscious producers of culture, market value and gentrification?

museo aero solar April, 20^th 2010

aerosolar@gmail.com

To read and sign the petition “Not in Our Name”:

nionhh@gmx.de

http://www.buback.de/nion/

http://www.signandsight.com/features/1961.html

More information about:

http://gentrificationblog.wordpress.com/2010/04/15/hamburg-kundigungsgrund-aufwertungskritik/

http://www.mitwisser.net/system/

http://www.iba-hamburg.de/en/00_start/start.php

museo group in Aeronauten werkstatt (Bonames/Kalbach 2009), picture taken by Cristhian Raimondi.

download the Italian version

I have been invited to follow an experience of MUSEO AERO SOLAR, held in Carmignano, Parco Quinto Martini, on Sunday October 4^th 2009.
The following principles allow for the museo’s flight: first of all Archimedes’ law, dating back to the 3^rd century b.C., whose simplest assertion states that “a body in a fluid is lifted upwards proportionally to the weight of the fluid it displaces”. Widely known for its application to liquids, the principle nonetheless holds of all fluids, including air. It is actually the weight difference between the warm mass of air within the balloon and the mass of external, colder and hence heavier air, that allows its upwards lift and accounts for the possibility of lifting the wrapping alongside whatever it is hanging from it. In conventional hot air balloons, warmed by a gas heater, internal air temperature reaches around 120 °C: but how warm will it get through sunshine alone? And how can the density difference between internal and external air be measured?

This can be answered by the law of perfect gases, expressing in a constant the relation between pressure, volume and temperature. Rigorously speaking air is not a perfect gas; nonetheless this degree of approximation will not be relevant when dealing with the measurements involved in this experiment. We’ll moreover assume, to calculate the balloon’s lift, that external and internal air has the same pressure; this could be justified by the wrapping’s extremely low resistance. The equation will then be:

Where P is pressure measured in Pascal, V is the volume in cube meters, T is the temperature in Kelvin degrees, n is the number of  gas moles, and R is a constant whose value for dry air is 287 J/ kg*K. This value induces a marginal error since air will presumably contain a variable quantity of water vapour which will slightly alter it. The equation can be written as: Where R is air density expressed in kg/m3. It is immediately evident that density grows proportionally to pressure P and inversely to temperature T. The balloon’s lift can hence be easily obtained, in kg, by multiplying the difference in density between internal and external air, expressed in kg/m3, by the volume of the balloon itself.

From theory to practice
We have been able to gather data on this experience by installing a weather station at ground level to keep track of temperature, humidity and air pressure; wind speed and direction have been measured 8 meters above ground to avoid surrounding obstacles. The balloon’s inflation has begun around 6.40 am, at an external temperature of 12 °C, relative humidity of 53%, and atmospheric pressure of 1011 hPa. The wind has been calm throughout the whole experience. The balloon’s inner temperature has been constantly monitored by a radio-controlled sensor. MUSEO AERO SOLAR’s current circumference is almost 70 meters. Since its shape is only approximately spherical, its estimated volume is of around 3500 m3; this has subsequently been confirmed by experimental data. The balloon was fully inflated at 8.17 am; the pipe connecting it to fans was sealed closed. At the location’s latitude the sun should have risen at 7.14 am, but the presence of natural obstacles postponed effective sunrise to 7.39 am; the sun then started to warm the balloon up. At 8.39 am MUSEO AERO SOLAR lifted itself from the ground; its floating lift was then obviously higher then the wrapping’s weight, which was around 75 kg.
After slowly rising up to around 50 meters above ground, adequately anchored, the balloon was drawn back to earth, ending its flight at 9.21 am.
The following graph plots external temperature, internal temperature, and lift – as determined by the aforementioned parameters.

We can now analyse the three curves. External temperature, following its natural course determined by sunshine, has risen in an almost constant progression, climbing from the initial 13.2 °C to 17.7 °C as measured at 9.30 am.

The progression of internal temperature is more interesting to discuss; it has constantly risen until the flight’s height peak, to subsequently stabilise around 24 °C. This induces a variety of remarks. First of all we know that air, being transparent to sun-rays, isn’t warmed by direct exposure to light, but through its contact with land – this is also why temperature drops at higher altitudes. For the same reason air inside the balloon got warmer trough its contact with the wrapping’s polyethylene surface, which itself was heated by the sun in an uneven fashion according to its varying colour.

We should then presume that, although we measured external air temperature at ground level, the air immediately around the balloon should be cooler. The curve’s plateau then represents an equilibrium point between the sun’s warming of the inner air and the heat dispersion induced by the wrapping’s contact with cooler outside air. It should be remarked that the sensor was placed on the inner side of the balloon’s surface, and therefore was particularly sensitive to this effect.

The lift curve is valid for its initial part, but becomes less representative and undoubtedly under-estimated after the balloon reaches 50 meters of altitude. First of all, air pressure gradually decreases by an average of 11 hPa every 100 m: air will then be slightly less dense at that height, hence reducing the balloon’s lift. This effect, however, has little quantitative relevance. On the other hand, the error implied by the comparison between the balloon’s internal temperature and the air’s temperature at ground level (which, as we have seen, is warmer then at 50 meters of altitude) is of a wholly appreciable scale. At 50 meters above ground air, being colder and denser, is heavier. This error is further enhanced by the sensor’s positions on the wrapping, which makes its findings scarcely representative of the whole balloon’s inner air condition. It is hence very likely the balloon’s absolute lift has reached slightly higher values then the graph’s 120 kg. This hypothesis is partially confirmed by the inner temperature’s rising in the landing phase; the same holds of the lift, which ultimately reaches over 130 kg.

Conclusions
We have seen how an experience of this kind can offer a practical representation of various principles governing natural phenomena.  We have also seen how experimental measurements – even when dealing with a simple phenomenon such as this – must keep track of many different factors to reach a significant overlap between theoretical prediction and experimental data. If the experience were to be repeated, the gathering of experimental data would be dramatically improved by placing the temperature sensor at the balloon’s centre; a second sensor, mounted on the balloon’s external surface so as to measure in-flight air conditions, would also be of great use. A more precise measurement of the balloon’s lift could be obtained by applying a dynamo-meter to the balloon’s anchoring ropes.

During the last flight in Seano we measured:
- wind
- air temperature inside/outside the balloon
- temperature on the balloon surface (according to the shoppers’ colour)

Soon we will publish graphs and visualisations of the data we collected.