Trajectory was a sound installation commissioned by the austrian new media festival “liquid music” which took place in August 2002 in Judenburg, Styria.
the installation uses the realtime position of polar orbiting and geostationary satellites to control shortwave radio receivers, creating a sound environment that reflects the actual movement in the sky over judenburg. In the projection the satellites currently passing the visible sky are displayed, showing their influence contributing to the sound environment. by marking certain satellites the visitor could take influence on the soundscape.

“When you ask someone in Los Angeles how far it is from the beach to downtown, he or she will answer with the number of minutes it generally takes to traverse the distance rather than noting the number of miles. This system of defining and representing distance has recently been codified for use on the California Department of Transportation’s large LED “Freeway Condition” signs, which offer up-to-the-minute projections of estimated drive times: “8 minutes to downtown;” “22 minutes to 605 freeway,” and so on. Intrigued by the shift from the absolute units of distance traditionally used to describe space to the relative space of approximate drive times, Dietmar Offenhuber undertook an investigation of other examples in which data about the city is visualized in relative terms. The result of his work is Wegzeit, which uses six 3-D mapping paradigms – or cartograms – to visualize the city according to a range of conditions and interests.”

from the introduction of Vectors Online Journal

Link to the original Version of the Project

wegzeit project page at medienkunstnetz.de

i continued the work in the Projects 5 minute places and loopcity