“The role of experimentation is important. Students see, firsthand, that creativity is a process involving trial, error, failure, and the unexpected.”
In an interdisciplinary project incorporating STEM disciplines, students in Toni Pepe’s Experimental Photography course set a weather balloon aloft, visually chronicling its ascent to the upper atmosphere. With the help of collaborator Don McCasland, Director of Blue Hill Observatory, the students used a weather balloon kit configured with a satellite GPS for retrieval, and attached to a GoPro camera, to launch the balloon over Wachusett, MA, where it traveled for nearly two and a half hours before landing in a swamp near Bridgewater, MA.
“The project has both theoretical and practical goals,” says Pepe, Photography Lecturer at the College of Fine Arts. “The students are exposed to technology they have either never used, or have very little practice with. Few students in the class had ever used a satellite GPS unit, and none had ever handled a weather balloon.”
More importantly, students come away with an understanding of the limitations of human sight and appreciation for how the camera has opened up new worlds previously unseen or rarely seen. “I can’t go into space. I can’t personally get an aerial view,” continues Pepe. “The camera gives us a perspective of the Earth that we otherwise wouldn’t have access to.”
Akin to the scientific process of trial and error, the Wachusett launch was the students’ second attempt at the project. The first launch, from Littleton, MA, resulted in an overestimated trajectory. That balloon landed twenty miles off of Provincetown, MA, in the Atlantic Ocean. The GPS unit became water logged, and attempts to retrieve the balloon by the U. S. Coast Guard, the Provincetown Harbormaster, and a local whale watching crew proved unsuccessful. A physical oceanographer at Woods Hole Observatory plotted and estimated GPS coordinates of the floating payload over the next few days, and hypothesized that the balloon would most likely wash ashore in Nova Scotia.
The students worked together as a team to reconfigure the design of the payload, where the camera should be placed, and how the different components (balloon, parachute, and payload) should be tethered. “The role of experimentation is important,” adds Pepe. “Students see, firsthand, that creativity is a process involving trial, error, failure, and the unexpected. We send this balloon up taking care, prior to the launch that it would be successful, but there are elements that were out of our control. Students learn to be flexible, and to work with instead of against spontaneity.”
Pepe plans to further develop the weather balloon launch for the Spring 2016 semester, but hopes to schedule the project earlier in the syllabus to allow students to create an art piece that explores what the project means and how they can respond to it.
Additionally, Pepe’s spring Digital Photography course plans to continue collaborating with the School of Music in a project called The Sensory Photograph, in which students work with graduate students from School of Music to create a visual response to musical pieces (from improv music to prepared pieces) in different environments.
“The project drives students to think creatively about what a photograph can be beyond the 2-dimensions on paper,” continues Pepe. “The result is an extraordinary intersection between the oral and visual world.