Gallery: Citizen Smart-Kites Check China's Air
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*Xiaowei Wang (center) and workshop participants prepare a FLOAT kite for flight. "The hardest part was probably figuring out how to publicize the projects to locals and draw a diverse group of people to our workshops," says Guler. "We were afraid that no one would come to the first one, but that was probably the best attended."* Photo: Screenshot from *Stars in the Haze.*
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*Deren Guler (right) fiddles with electronics while workshop participants look on. "We hope to give the people of Beijing and anyone who builds one of our modules (we have a tutorial on our website) the agency to monitor air quality in their neighborhood," says Guler.* Photo: Screenshot from *Stars in the Haze.*
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*"The sensors for the kite were based on air quality balloons," says Guler, "I redesigned the modules to be a bit simpler and used parts that we knew we could source locally in Beijing."* Photo: Screenshot from *Stars in the Haze.*
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*A participant admires her handiwork. "There are a lot of similar initiatives for citizen-science-based air monitoring, but many of them are more like products, or methods of communicating wirelessly," says Guler. "We hope our projects instill a DIY 'you can build your own' mentality."* Photo: Liz Phung
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*"Public participation in important issues like air quality has begun to develop in a way that is tolerated to some extent by government authorities," says Frank. "Citizens have been able to put pressure on the authorities and effect some change on how air pollution data is recorded and made public. This is a fairly recent phenomenon, which is exciting."* Photo: Screenshot from *Stars in the Haze.*
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*"Creatively showing people really flying kites was a challenge I had to grapple with," says Frank. "The problem is, a person holding a spool of line and craning his neck to the sky tends to look a little crazed if you can't see a kite in the frame."* Photo: Screenshot from *Stars in the Haze.*
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*"Both the Chinese government and the U.S. embassy in Beijing release air-quality readings, but naturally these figures are guided by very different political aims," says Frank. "Although the DIY sensors FLOAT used aren't necessarily mathematically precise in the way that finely calibrated professional devices would be, I think they offer the potential for citizens to be involved in and aware of air quality issues at a local and personal level, which is important."* Image: Deren Guler
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*The team often flew the kites at night; here a participant prepares for a dusk launch.* Photo: Screenshot from *Stars in the Haze.*
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*Though the kites were equipped with LEDs, "the lights Xiaowei and Deren put on the kites were small and hard to see once they got far into the sky," says Frank.* Photo: Screenshot from *Stars in the Haze.*
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*"The serious kite-flying hobbyists already had incredible, elaborate lighting systems on their kites already though," says Frank. "It seemed to me that there would be great potential to 'hack' these light systems and rig them up to the DIY sensors."* Photo: Screenshot from *Stars in the Haze.*
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*"To have that degree of spectacle is really where citizen science, art, activism and performance can intersect for FLOAT in what I think would be a pretty revelatory way," says Frank.* Photo: Screenshot from *Stars in the Haze.*
