November 2020 • System Integration • Made for : Felix Lenz

Political Atmosphere

→ "Political Atmosphere" by Felix Lenz traces the invisible connections between flight turbulence, climate change and war. My task was to write the code for this installation.

Siren in a dark room — Siren at the exhibition

"Political Atmosphere" traces the invisible connections between flight turbulence, climate change and war. Flight data is captured by an antenna and sent to a controller. Felix asked me to visually display the flight data and correlate the measured flight density in the sky with the speed of a DC motor. This motor turned a gearbox which ultimately triggered a siren. The more planes in the sky, the more frequently the centerpiece of the exhibition - the deafening siren - is triggered.

antenna and a plane — Antenna captures flight-data

The Code

The open source software dump1090 was used to translate the antenna data to json data. This data was then sent to an Electron UI. If there was a change in flight-density, the App emitted the data via a websocket. The controller was therefore able to set the speed of the DC-Motor by changing the pwm signal. This was done by using a double-h-bridge board.

Siren and interface are outside — Installation setup at ARS Electronica 2020

All images are © Felix Lenz 2020. The Project “Political Atmosphere” was designed by Felix Lenz. If you want to read more about it, visit his website. Learn how to run a React App inside Electron here.