Collective Listening Across Distance
At Women in Revolt: Radical Acts, Contemporary Resonances conference, Tate Britain, March 2024.
This performance-presentation shared the praxis and the thinking behind our methodology of listening across distance. We use radio-listening as a way to consider together the situatedness and the material and cultural ecologies of radio, as well as how we understand what listening is and can be, within a collective feminist practice.
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A short extract from the performance script:
Radio is not a sound or a station - it’s a range of frequencies on the electromagnetic spectrum. Radio waves are both human-transmitted, and natural phenomena - they are bursts of energy emitted by solar storms and lightning. Radio waves are carrier waves - audio, images and data can hitch a ride and travel across the globe, bouncing off a part of the Earth’s upper atmosphere: the ionosphere.
When our collective meets, our faces and voices are transmitted to each other via wifi signals. They become data loaded onto radio waves that can travel vast distances. Our individual selves become collectively enmeshed in the electromagnetic commons.
As a collective, we learn together as equal non-experts. We think about ways to oppose the gendered language of these technologies, and interact with them through a feminist lens. Part of our ethos is ‘learning through doing’: practice, sharing knowledge, and curious exploration, as well as failure, help us to demystify aspects of technology.
We work at distance, across time zones, between or alongside our other commitments, connected through digital conversations and online meetings that often take place during the unsociable hours when our paths can align. At in-person events like this one today, only a few of us are present, but the whole collective has been part of the work that we are sharing and the sounds we’re transmitting.
Radio is not a sound or a station - it’s a range of frequencies on the electromagnetic spectrum. Radio waves are both human-transmitted, and natural phenomena - they are bursts of energy emitted by solar storms and lightning. Radio waves are carrier waves - audio, images and data can hitch a ride and travel across the globe, bouncing off a part of the Earth’s upper atmosphere: the ionosphere.
When our collective meets, our faces and voices are transmitted to each other via wifi signals. They become data loaded onto radio waves that can travel vast distances. Our individual selves become collectively enmeshed in the electromagnetic commons.
As a collective, we learn together as equal non-experts. We think about ways to oppose the gendered language of these technologies, and interact with them through a feminist lens. Part of our ethos is ‘learning through doing’: practice, sharing knowledge, and curious exploration, as well as failure, help us to demystify aspects of technology.
We work at distance, across time zones, between or alongside our other commitments, connected through digital conversations and online meetings that often take place during the unsociable hours when our paths can align. At in-person events like this one today, only a few of us are present, but the whole collective has been part of the work that we are sharing and the sounds we’re transmitting.