Shortwave Collective

Workshop at Soundcamp 10, 2023. Photograph by Ivo Blackwood

Shortwave Collective is an international group of 10 people from various backgrounds and disciplines interested in feminist practices and the radio spectrum. As a collective, we have a desire to learn together and to open a space to learn together-with-others as equal non-experts. We spend time in each other’s company making, testing, listening and sharing; sometimes ‘failing’, but more often laughing our way into serendipitous results that lead us to new practices and new situated ways of listening. Part of our feminist ethos is ‘learning through doing’. This is a way to de-mystify aspects of technology, which enables us to share our experiences more easily with each other, and with others. The collective’s approach aims to create an inclusive, collaborative, tech-based learning environment, one which acknowledges and attends to gendered education gaps and one that purposefully removes potential hurdles, such as unexplained components lists that assume knowledge.

Members:

Alyssa Moxley is a sound artist currently based in France. She accesses narratives of identity, place, space, and embodied experience through sound. She utilizes microphone techniques, field recording, interviews, composition, digital and analog sound design, speaker placement, and sculpture to create detailed sonic interventions and environments that relate memory, emotion, and landscape.

Brigitte Hart is an Australian sound artist working across performance and installation. Currently based in London, her practice explores relationships between voice, objects, histories and ecologies, often engaging text, environmental recordings, remnants and archives. Brigitte has developed installations, performances, and workshops for Supernormal Festival, Wysing Polyphonic x Somerset House Festival, Resonance FM, Soundcamp/Reveil, David Roberts Art Foundation, and Tate Britain. In 2022, Brigitte is developing a series of experiments around the Thames, sound and listening, and is a member of the London Bulgarian Choir.

Georgia Muenster is a New York-born and London-based independent contemporary art curator with a focus on urbanism, sound, video, and collectivity. She has programmed work at museums, commercial galleries, pop-ups, and DIY exhibition spaces, including the Palais de Tokyo, Royal College of Art, Copenhagen’s Dome of Visions, Hackney Picturehouse, Elsewhere, and ARoS. From 2008-2013, she was Press Writer & Curatorial Fellow of the artists’ residency and collective Flux Factory in New York. She completed an MA in Curating Contemporary Art from the RCA in 2015, in addition to a BA in Art History from Bard College from 2008.

Hannah Kemp-Welch is a sound artist with a socially-engaged practice. She produces audio works with community groups for installation and broadcast, using voices, field recordings and found sounds. She also delivers workshops, makes zines and builds radio antennas, aiming to open out sonic practices and technologies for all. Hannah is currently conducting PhD research into collective listening and socially-engaged art, based at Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP), University of the Arts London.

Kate Donovan is a Berlin-based artist and researcher working with radio, listening and the more-than-human. She means radio as an elemental, collective, and artistic medium. She is part of CoLaboRadio (Free Radios Berlin Brandenburg) where she helps coordinate and produces a regular show called ‘elements’; the Datscha Radio Berlin team; and together with Monaí de Paula Antunes she founded the ongoing artistic research project Radio Otherwise (Berlin). She is currently working on a PhD project within the research group SENSING: the knowledge of sensitive media (Potsdam).

Karen Werner is an artist and sociologist living in Bergen, Norway. She creates radio works for national, community and micro-FM stations and was the Inaugural Radio Artist Fellow at Wave Farm in New York in 2019-2020. In 2021, Karen created SkottegatenFM, a three-month micro-FM radio station transmitting from her apartment in Bergen. Since then she launched Radio Multe 93.8FM, a city-supported experimental, community AM FM and online radio station in Bergen. Karen is an Artistic Research Fellow at the University of Bergen, where she develops her project re- radio about radio and relationality.

Lisa Hall is a UK based sound artist exploring urban environments through sound installations and participatory works. These works explore the connections we have within our sonic environments and aim to make space for something new. Collaborative and solo works have included air pollution sonification on sonic bikes, curation of urban sound performances, sonic wilding installations, DIY radio making and reenactments of sonic trends. Lisa works with the Bicrophonic Research Institute and CRiSAP developing sound based research and arts practice. Lisa is currently conducting PhD research into urban sounding with SONCITIES at the University of Oxford.

Maria Papadomanolaki is a transmission artist and composer based in Greece. Papadomanolaki has studied linguistics and literature at the Aristoteleion University of Thessaloniki before moving on to sound art and sound studies, having completed a PhD on the topic ‘Sonic Perceptual Ecologies’ at CRISAP, LCC, UAL. Her work and research focus on the role of sound in the way we engage with our environments, with memory, placemaking and perception. Special importance is placed on the synergy of electroacoustic and electronic music, transmission art and creative ecological practices.

Meira Asher is a composer, performer and Human Rights activist. She primarily uses the medium of Sound art and Radio art. Graduate of CalArts and KonCon, she was co-founder of the bodylab art foundation with Guy Harries (2001-11) where they produced several projects including ‘Infantry' and 'Woman See Lot of Things'. She is a former lecturer at Haifa university's Art School (2012-22) and producer of the independent Radioart show ‘radioart106' since 2014. Her works were released on Crammed, Sub Rosa, Auditorium, Raash Records and Ultima Ratio labels.

Sally A. Applin, Ph.D. is a Silicon Valley based anthropologist, artist, and Sr. Researcher, who explores the domains of human agency, algorithms, AI, and automation in the context of social systems/sociability, and the outcomes of network complexities as modeled by PolySocial Reality (PoSR). Sally holds degrees in Conceptual Art, Interactive Telecommunications (NYU/ITP), and Anthropology. Her large-scale analog Xerography artwork has been shown at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Peninsula Open Studios, and others.

Associate members:
Our associate (or *rainbow* members) were instrumental in setting up the collective and remain our dear friends, contributors and advisors on an ad-hoc basis.

Sasha Engelmann is a London-based geographer exploring interdisciplinary, feminist and creative approaches to environmental knowledge making. She is an active member of the Aerocene Community and a co-founder (with Sophie Dyer) of the feminist satellite imaging project open-weather. She is Lecturer in GeoHumanities at Royal Holloway University of London where she teaches at the intersection of geography and the arts and humanities.

Franchesca Casauay is a cultural worker with an interdisciplinary research & arts practice, often oscillating between creative and curatorial roles. As an artist, she works mostly with new media, performance, and various hybrid formats; as independent creative producer, she leads and provides production and curatorial support for local & international initiatives. In different capacities, Franchesca has participated in numerous festivals and art projects in the Philippines and across Asia, Europe, UK, and Australia, most recently as artistic collaborator for Eisa Jocson’s The Filipino Superwoman Band premiered at the 14th Sharjah Biennial, UAE, and Tanz in Bern, Switzerland, and as guest curator for public programs at the 22nd Biennale of Sydney: NIRIN.