Shortwave goes to Rotterdam! The wonderful WORM and A Tale of a Tub invited us to lead a 2-day workshop over 26-27 October (2024). We spent the first day at the arts and culture space WORM, where we gave a presentation about our collective work and then built Open Wave-Receivers with 20 particants. The second day took place at A Tale of a Tub, an arts organisation in the former laundry of a 1920's Dutch housing estate, where we were able to test our radios on the roof. Afterwards, we went to a nearby stadium at greyline and extended our antennas with the enormous sporting infrastructure. The air was dominated by a sound we called 'the Rotterdam Hum' - a sort of highly textured waving sound - but we also heard Turkish football, talk radio in Russian, and music that was described as 'chipmunk disco'. We then went live on Radio WORM to talk about our findings with the organisers and a few workshop participants: upload upcoming!

We're fresh from a workshop with Multitrack, a charity working in improving accessibility in the audio industry, hosted at the luscious Dalston Curve Garden in London! It turned out to be a gorgeous day, and we had a romp building radios with particularly unconventional materials, such as using the rings on our fingers as antennae. A wide range of signals were overlapping in the air that day: local talk radio, the odd waves from communications equipment, two sports stations on top of one another, among others.

We're fresh from the Sound 2024 exhibition at LCB Depot in Leicester, where we have a piece titled 'Edges of Transmission', alongside which we ran two Open Wave-Receiver building workshops. We found multiple radio stations in the air onsite and had loads of fun attaching our antennas to everything we could find: a giant metal cistern, fencing, empty kegs, and the buildings themselves, to name a few. The exhibition is on through Friday 20 September, if you're in town! Also, we sat down with Rob Watson from Radio Lear for an interview: you can hear 'Transcending Traditional Boundaries' on the Radio Lear website.

We're looking forward to delivering a series of workshops with TACO! this autumn, with artists and local community groups in Thamesmead. We'll start with a day of programme for ​this year's cohort of artists taking part in Syllabus, a collaboratively produced alternative learning programme. The secord is an open workshop for local residents and anyone interested in listening practices and DIY radio (tickets here). And finally, we've organised a transmitter-building workshop and sonic treasure hunt for families, in collaboration with The Hundred Club. 

We're delighted to be one of three artists/collectives in residence at Yarmonics this year! From September, we'll be spending time in Great Yarmouth and working with local community groups to create a small publication based on our site-specific and DIY radio experiments. We kick off the project with a workshop on 20th September. More here: ​www.yarmonics.com/residencies

We're delighted to be delivering a DIY radio builiding workshop as part of this three day audio arts festival in St Leonards On Sea (UK).  Our workshop will take place on 27th September 2024, and tickets are live here: https://www.xmtr.fm/friday27th/radiomaking

In July 2024, we visited Soft Touch Arts in Leicester (UK) to deliver an Open Wave-Receiver (OWR) workshop. Radio signal is strong in Leicester - the moment we plugged in, we had an incredibly loud signal! Some things we noticed...

• Very long antennas are good! Ours were at least 12 meters. 
• We still got signal when pulling out the ground - it was just less ‘clean’. 
• When touching a scraped end of our very long antenna to a round fence (circling a tree), we suddenly got a secondary station playing alongside the first. Perhaps this extension of the length of antenna caught different frequencies.
• The OWR had a very loud signal through the combo of Zoom H5 + Marshall speaker, so loud we had it on half volume. As soon as the Zoom was removed from the circuit though, the Marshall refused to relay any sound from the OWR. Guessing it has some sort of overdrive protection built in that makes it unfriendly to the fluctuating power of the waves.

We hope this is of some interest to fellow OWR experimenters! We'll be back in Leicester throughout September for more workshops and to participate in an exhibition - more on this soon.

Shortwave Collective were invited to present our work in making DIY radio recievers at 'Strange Tramissions', a salon organised by The Wire magazine and the avant-radio label World Service, held at our favourite Cafe Oto in Dalston. We spoke about the Open Wave-Receiver, managed to find signal in a live demo, and then took part in a panel discussion, alongside live performanes and music by our friends, The evening was broadcast live on Resonance Extra! 

We were invited to lead an Open Wave-Receiver workshop at R-Urban in Poplar, east London as part of a summer solstice event called Earworms, a day of music, performance, lisening and radio in the community garden space. Luckily we had sunny weather, and we managed to pick up both Grerman and French radio at greyline. We loved plunging into the sauna as well!

On 26th April, we hosted an 'art chat' at Tate Modern, as part of their series Tate Lates. The theme of the event was 'sonic disruption', to coincide with the launch of Aura Satz's Preemptive Listening film earlier in the week and the Yoko Ono exhibition on display. 

During the chat, we offered some thoughts on DIY methods, collectivity and sharing. There were lots of engaging questions from the audience, and the room was packed! The talk was also live-streamed, and is now archived on Tate's YouTube (we're on at 01:14:30).

Cooinciding with their exhibition, Tate Britain hosted a two-day conference on performance-based arts, sound and moving image practices that were an integral part of feminist creative and campaigning activities of the 1970s and 1980s.

Shortwave Collective presented as part of the Beyond Her Noise: Feminisms and the Sonic panel, convened by Creative Research into Sound Arts (CRiSAP). Our contribution took shape as a performance-talk where the four of us able to be there in person took it in turns to read a new paper, collectively authored for the event, with amplified interjections from Shortwave members contributing remotely.

We also riso-printed 100 Open Wave-Reciever how-to zines and gave these away at the welcome desk - these were much appreciated!

In March, we were invited by Nikki Sheth from Open School East in Margate to run an 'ultra DIY' workshop in building Open Wave-Receivers. We had a blast playing with alternative materials and testing our sets both on the beach and at a nearby park. That day, the airwaves of Margate were filled with a drone sound, and we're puzzling over what it might have been. Mysterious!

The Orpheus Institute invited us to be part of their Sound Arguments laboratory-atelier series in Belgium this month. We enjoyed spending two days with this group or artists, musicians and researchers, doing some shortwave practice together in Ghent.

We began with a radio building session, where all 25 attendees built their own Open Wave-Receiver radios (OWR) and followed this with listening and discussion sessions.

In the listening session every radio was first tested, before groups went out into the city to explore the urban landscape and the listening possibilities there. Listening experiments included using the river as a ground, a stick and a hair band as an antenna stretching device, connecting with fences and lampposts, and throwing the antenna high into the air. Many things were heard including talk radio, music, mains electricity, data packets, and the fuzzes and buzzes of electromagnetic radio waves.

Regrouping at the Orpheus institute, each group discussed their listening explorations and the urban conditions that they encountered. As a group we then listened to a short excerpt of an OWR recording taken by the collective at 'grey line' on the summer solstice in Scotland, the recording includes sferics and the gentle appearance of radio stations that seemingly float in on the waves of an electromagnetic tide.

Our final time together was spent discussing the idea of hearing our connection to our environments, just as we do with our OWR's and the 'constellations of listening' that inform their use. We asked the groups to discuss how, in their own artistic practices, they can also hear their connection to their surroundings?

In February, we hosted a workshop at Wharf Chambers, a creative space in central Leeds. 16 participants made Open Wave-Receivers, and as coils were wrapped we talked about radio in an expanded sense and heard about some of the creative projects that participants had brewing. We got some strong signal from the radios immediately - overlapping UK stations broadcasting news and football updates, and then, to much excitement a French station wafted in. Unfortunately, extended listening got rained off - but we hope to hear about more listening experiments in Leeds in the coming weeks. 

The Digital Writing and Research Lab at the University of Texas in Austin organised a workshop building radios, based on our Open Wave-Receiver resources. We were very excited to see the documentation they shared with us from the event - and to hear that everyone was able to listen with an Open Wave-Receiver by the end of the day. The workshops were developed and led by Trent Wintermeier, who sent us these photos and videos from the workshop. 

Back in November 2023, we had collective discussions in response to prompts proposed by Agnès Pe, who then beautifully edited together this podcast titled 'Is There Really a Place on Radio for Experimentation?'. Listen here: ​https://radio.museoreinasofia.es/there-really-place-radio-experimentation

We are in a book! Edited by Sarah Washington, Radio Art Zone explores the central themes, concepts and techniques of artist-made radio. It brings to the page live long-form works from the world’s largest exhibition of radio art, which took place as part of the European Capital of Culture Esch22. Interspersed with micro-essays on radio form, practice and poetics, and illustrated throughout with unique images, the book performs an exquisite transformation from airwaves to paper and provides a treasury of ideas about radio as art.

To celebrate the launch, we took part in an evening even at the London launch, 4th November 2023 at Iklectik Art Lab. Artists involved with the original Radio Art Zone radio art festival in 2022 delivered short performances, broadcast live on Resonance Extra. Two of our members read out a collection of listening experiences, overlaid with sounds collected from our radio-listening experiments. 

The Western Balkans branch of forumZFD invited us to participate in a series of events taking place in partnership with CRiSAP at the Centre for Narrative Research in Pristina, Kosovo. We delivered a hybrid workshop in September 2023, building Open Wave-Receivers with MA students, supporting their ongoing exploration of sound, memory and public space.

We travelled to West Yorkshire in August 2023 to speak at the Wuthering Bytes festival of technology in Hebden Bridge. 
Info here: ​https://wutheringbytes.com/whatson/festival-day

Shortwave Collective recently worked on a new commission for Struer Tracks, a biennial of sound and listening in Struer, Denmark. In the lead up to the festival, we were supported by volunteers from technology company Bang & Olfsen, based in Struer, as remote resident artists. We were able to make use of the company's e-waste during the project and build DIY amplifiers.

Throughout the biennial, we ran a Living Radio Lab, inviting visitors into the process of developing and listening with Open Wave-Receivers – simple radio receiving devices that provide site- and time-specific access to the sounds travelling on the invisible electromagnetic waves surrounding us. The lab was open from 23rd-27th August 2023. Please see our project page for more...​

As part of Hackoustic's All Day-er, we ran an Open Wave-Receiver workshop at Ikectik in London on 17th June 2023. Participants scavenged the site and made some new designs, picking up LBC Radio from Archbishop's Park in Waterloo, London.