MSST THE
SATELITTELESS'
MOVEMENT On June 13, 2013, at 7:15 pm, a disabled satellite went through the small Fumaça village in the State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, at an altitude of 720km. At a ranch in the region, Pedro and Fabiane were performing a resting ritual in preparation for the International MSST, that would start the next day. It wasn’t an easy journey. A two hours bus from Rio, another from the city of Resende, which takes more than an hour winding by dirt roads to the bus stop, under an epic overpass 60 meters high, a construction that leads to the steel plant of Volta Redonda. From there, they have to be fetched by VW Beetle - the only vehicle besides the 4x4 that has the ability to rise up to the Nebulosa. To complete the picture, Pedro was bringing a 20-kilo telescope, which would be used in our observations. The vehicle cannot handle the weight, stopping in the worst rise; the passengers, ejected in the middle of the launch of the beetleship, are required to evaporate, condense and push; and thus they arrive, greeted by Luciana, one of the organizers of the meeting, and Mariana. One minute after passing through Fumaça village, that satellite flies over the city of Rio de Janeiro. A quantum entanglement, an electromagnetic resonance, spatial bewitchment, who knows that connected these spaces? The fact is that Rio was taken, at that moment, by a demonstration of unique proportion, the country's largest in decades: hundreds of thousands of people gathered in the city center, later being brutally repressed by the police. Bruno and Cinthia, the other organizers, are bowled over by chaos and almost cannot continue the production in Rio. So the International MSST begins: amid the chaos, revolt, political turmoil. On Friday almost all guests would arrive; a 4x4 was rented in Rio to bring some. Arcangel brought his 8x8 ohms instrument representing the Mexican Space Collective; Eiabel and Leila come with the Afrofuturism, Mariana with cameras, and Francisco comes to talk about the Brazilian space program, Ines and Denise bring monoculars, David and George, Marina and Teo bring ritual performances. Pablo comes with drones, Marcelo brings narratives of ethnoastronomy. Ahead of
the group, a complicated task: to define what it is, after all, the Satelliteless' Movement (MSST). Sparsely gathered around an apocryphal manifest, meeting by chance in leap events, those without satellite assume an indigenous ethos and constantly recreate its own mythology. Its name makes a laudatory reference to Brazilian social movements like the landless and the homeless; its agenda, on the other hand, is open enough to encompass themes such as technological reappropriation, democracy in communications, occupation movements, technoxamanism, the Third World spatial utopia, metarecycling, schizoanalysis, noise and entropic cinema. The meeting begins. Presentations, discussions, sessions, tensions. But our plans to watch satellites are again frustrated: slowly a mist condenses, day and night are enwrapped by drops to the point where we project a film through a filter of thick almost opaque fog. The telescopes observe the milky ball in our surroundings. This place where the more rural developments of the Cloud occur Rural Station of Art and Technology, has the appropriate name of Nebula. The most invisible radiation of the electromagnetic spectrum is all that is left: we assume an antenna becoming, connected by ether to poetic and electronic devices. The end of the meeting is approaching, and the core issue of the congress as well: should we launch our own satellite or not? Two groups catalyze the discussions. One hand the pyrotechnicians, who propose a ballistic occupation of outer space through a satellite that can carry a subversive interference on a global scale. Another group, the scavengers, suggest first recycling and then hack existing orbital devices, with less use of environmental and economic resources. And meanwhile Simone, Adriano, Glerm and Martin arrive, and we keep developing autonomous technologies for space exploration. A homemade hydrogen generation method (see box) will allow us to fill balloons to carry research probes. After days of testing and refinements full of care and risks posed by the usage of this explosive gas – we have developed our own trash bags technique of producing airships. And with these launchings, we consider the Father Adelir Aerospace Base inaugurated, a Brazilian martyr of autonomous flight, patron of the MSST. The meeting comes to an end, and after the closing ceremony, the rented 4x4 breaks down before it can pick up the last guests. And even with this small extension, once again we did not have time to define ourselves. The decision of launching our satellite or not will stay in the air. To our luck. (Text inspired by the collective narratives of MSST) 153