Light night is upon us.

Light Night is upon us! in about ten hours time the LSSO will be on the air, transmitting messages and getting it all a bit wrong at very slow speed.

Many thanks to the light night crew who put us on the News page yesterday!

If you’re volunteering tonight you’ll need to know the following:

1. Bring an umbrella or other wet weather gear.
It’s possible that the weather reports for tonight are wrong – be prepared! You may want to bring along gloves as a minimum. If you wish to also bring a flask, a chair or hot water bottle then please feel free to do so.

2. Tea should be available.
As should biscuits and possibly cake.

3. Steampunk clothing would be nice but not essential.
You shall get identifying marks anyway as you turn up. By which I mean brassards and badges, not brands or tattoos.

4. If you get things wrong it’s not the end of the world.
We won’t shout at you, take you off the relay station or mock you in any way. Or even notice, quite possibly. The important thing is that you have fun and toggle the switches in an appropriate manner. If the results come out like chinese whispers then that’s perfectly aceptable.

5. If it all goes to pot technically it’s not the end of the world.
We’ll just scale back a bit and rethink. It’s all good. For various technical reasons we’ve had to make some allowances, but then this is the beta version for field test (alpha was a piece of card with two torches shoved through it). The next version will be better.

For visitors who aren’t volunteering, then just turn up, expect your message to arrive at the art gallery at some point during the evening and we look forwards to seeing you. Say hello! We will give you badges and pieces of paper.

We do have some measurable aims that at some point we should have. Accuracy rate is one, as is the equivalent baud rate (are we faster than a 14.4k modem? Probably not) and other timing data. With luck there will be a little photo booklet produced at the end of the project, which should be available at the end of the month if all goes well. We also want to know how enjoyable an experience it was for you, the customer, and you, the volunteer. Hopefully nobody will be bored and frozen. For too long.

See you tonight!

Project update!

Light night is nearly upon us! This is rumour control, these are the facts.

1. We still need helpers!

If you are in need of something to do on Friday evening then please get in touch – we’re having a volunteer briefing at about 5:30 at Victoria Gardens – you can’t miss us, we’ll be the people with the 12ft high poles with lights on.

2. We have a MAP!

site 0: art gallery
site 1: town hall
site 2: top of Park Row
site 3: crossroads of Headrow and Albion St
site 4: crossroads of Headrow and Briggate

3. If you’re coming from further afield we have a BIGGER SCALE map!

For more information we also have a PDF containing maps, more details and exciting news for further events that’s freely available for you to download.

We also have BADGES that people can take away with them and some frankly genius works of art that also double up as message slips. If you’re a volunteer you’ll also be entitled to tea and cake from the lovely people at Tea and Cake!

One could almost say that one is tremendously excited about this, but then that would be uncouth.

Volunteers needed!

In order to run the LSSO we need volunteers!

There will be five stations that need people to look after, with a minimum of two persons standing by per station, so we need at least ten volunteers. If we get more than that then we can organise shifts and rotas so people can wander off and see other Light Night goodies.

All that is required is a friendly face and personable smile. A working knowledge of how to flip a toggle switch and reading a lookup table would be an advantage. Being friendly to members of the public would also help, and if you have a steampunk costume or an ability to brew tea in a crisis then you’re certainly in.

What we ask of you is the determination and stiff upper lip that comes with doing an event outdoors in an October evening. If you say you want to help out and we give you a job to do, please don’t drop out at the last moment! Everybody will pitch in doing all the tasks that are needed.

How it all works? Well, someone will write down a message from the public onto a grid, who will then pass the message onto the operator. The operator will toggle switches to match each letter on the grid (details to come), and the message will pass, letter by letter, to the next relay station, who will pass it on to the receiving station outside the Art Gallery, where the message shall be chalked up onto a board for people to read. The tech is a bit like an old-school semaphore rig only done with lights and encoding into Morse. Don’t worry – we’ll provide full training.

We can’t pay you, but can provide tea and cake, and some badges and insignia to keep afterwards.

We need message-takers, operators, char people and runners who can operate in a rapid response fixing team. There will be the need for other people to join in as we get a jobs list finalised too, so please! Get in touch and we’ll sort out who does what in a big meeting at the end of September.

If you have friends or relatives who are into the idea then please, sign them up too

So please get in touch! Tweet @Nalsa or email semaphoreofficeleeds@gmail.com if you’d like to be part of it.

About the project: blurb

Before wireless internet, mobile phones, landline phones and even
before radio, messages were sent from place to place using smoke
signals, flag waving and by lights over a series of relays – like
beacons on mountaintops. The Leeds Steampunk Semaphore Office will
give people the opportunity to see their messages be sent along the
Headrow using flashing lights and a variant on Morse code. Our crack
team of operators will be ready to take your message and transmit it
from relay to relay, with it ending up on a chalkboard outside the Art
Gallery. Will it arrive in time? Will it arrive the same as it left?

We are encouraging members of the public to join in, to give us
messages to send and watch the messages passing from station to
station. This is text messaging from a bygone era – or tech from an
alternative future, where mobile phones were not so ubiquitous and yes
the need for communication was just as strong.

Artists Geof Banyard and Mike Wallis have put together a celebration
of vintage technology, the need for communication and an
over-elaborate solution to a problem that doesn’t exist today, but
could quite easily have done without the development of computers.
Please, take part and explore a world where the technology of instant
messaging is still needed, but has reached an evolutionary fork in the
road. With thanks to all our volunteers – the LSSO runs on tea and
cake.

Felicitations, Empire!

What ho, chaps! This is the distibuted binary telecommunicatins service presence of the Steampunk Semaphore Office, Leeds Branch, or LSSO for short.

More information with soon be forthcoming, but in the meantime, cultivate those handlebar moustaches and polish your cybertronic eyesight enhancement apparatus!