A joyful workshop at Soundcamp13 - perhaps fourty people working in pairs to make 20 Open Wave-Receivers, tested at sunset on the mound next to Stave Hill Ecological Park in London. 

We had a joyful visit to Chicago on invitation of the Experimental Sound Studio at the start of April. Whilst in town, we delivered two Open Wave-Receiver workshops for Northwestern University and ESS's Patchbent series, and made many new friends. We also gave a presentation at Univeristy of Chicago's 'Critical Sounds' conference. 

We're delighted to be delivering a performance lecture at Auto Italia in London on 21st May at 7.30pm. Attempting to engage the sculptural work of Zahra Malkani in her exhibition Noorani Metal Sound  as a giant antenna, we meet in time for dusk, where radio signals are most likely to be captured. The metallic elements of the exhibition will be conducted in our search for sounds from near and far, transduced into a collective demonstration of DIY radio-making.
This event is part of the engagement programme Metal x Metal curated by Dr Syma Tariq. 
Link: https://autoitaliasoutheast.org/events/shortwave-collective-are-metal/

In February, asimtria, an organisation based in Peru, coordinated a series of online workshops with us building Open Wave-Receivers. Working with nine participants we constructed DIY radios, and reviewing radio recordings made in locations around Urubamba, Piura, and further afield. As part of this project, asimtria have translated our instructional zine into Spanish, and we are very happy to be able to share this in another language now!

In January 2026 we were invited by Thalia Raftopoulou to deliver a presentation to BA Fine Art students during their 'Art, City, Sound' elective, at Athens School of Art. We were able to join both online and in person, and shared a version of our latest work 'Radio-Dreaming into the Electromagnetic Commons' with the class. 

We are delighted to have been selected through open call by tekhnē, a collaborative project exploring the emancipatory potential of technology in music and sound art, for their online residency programme. 

For three months, we are experimenting with Citizens Band (CB) radio, it's culture and potential, testing in different atmospheric conditions and seeking out the poetry and community amongst it all. We're working towards a sound work, coming out early next year. 

Thank you for your support OUT.RA and Skaņu mežs!

Folkwang University in Essen, Germany, invited us to deliver a three-day workshop for students during their Sound Practice Research seminar series at SANAA. We invited participants to explore the political, creative, and ecological possibilities of radio as an artistic medium, through workshops on DIY radio construction, WebSDR composition and a range of practical and discursive activities. We plugged our DIY radios into the long metal walkways of the ex coal mine Zollverein, a UNESCO World Heritage Site located next door to the University campus. Through our fragile wires, we could hear transmissions in German, French and Chinese, perhaps bouncing off the ionosphere to reach us.​

We had a great time at Radio Music last week, a residential course by Dyski in Lizard, UK! After visiting the site where Marconi's first transatlantic transmission took place, we made and tested Open Wave-Receivers in a windy but beautiful location on a cliff. As the sun set, new stations drifted into our range of reception. We were also joined online for a talk with Shortwave Collective members participating remotely, and shared our approaches to using radio in performances and compositions. 

A selection of our audio works are featured in the exhibition ‘The Spell and the Dream’  by Tai Shani, first at Somerset House (London) and now at Jupiter Artland (Edinburgh). You might catch them online via the exhibition website here:  ​https://www.dreamradio.net/

We spent the weekend at 'Plug It Up', a sound art festival put on by the Bradford Sound Women network and part of UK capital of culture 2025 programming. We were invited to put on one of our Open Wave-Receiver workshops in an old mill at the University of Bradford, and this was one of those times where we really had to work for signal, trying out lamposts and fences and other metal fixtures around campus, with mainly local footie and some sferics beaming in. In a little twist of serendipity, we found signal through this plaque that says 'Party on the Amp'!

In September we devised a new performance, collaborating for the first time with artist Amanda Gutiérrez visiting from Mexico City. During the performance we read texts related to radio and women's voices - some humorous, and played with micro-transmission, sound diffusion via handheld radios, modulation and feedback loops.

The performance took place during an event celebrating the 20th anniversary of Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP) titled 'An Evening with CRiSAP', at Cafe Oto, London.

Thanks to Jess Gell and Jonathan Crabb for the photos.

Reduced Listening, an independent radio production company in north London, invited us to lead a workshop building open wave-receivers in September! Working in pairs, we built simple radio sets out of everyday materials. Later on, we went out to a nearby playground and picked up tons of signal, with 5 Live coming in strong.

We were invited to lead an OWR-building workshop by a group learning queer survivalist skills! This workshop was so sweet and so fun. We were able to find ground in Gordon Square, and with the help of an extra-long antenna and the power of greyline, we picked up loads of signals: a K-drama, French news, Spanish and German talk radio, along with mysterious mechanical-sounding textures, likely from nearby infrastructure. The OWR pictured below was built on a book on the 'Power of Communication' and we discovered that keychains can work nicely as diodes!

We were delighted to return to Soundcamp to deliver another Open Wave-Receiver workshop. Our collective was founded at Soundcamp in 2020, and we returned the following year with our project Fencetenna, so we are grateful for the support! This year's workshop was packed - 35 radios constructed from scrap materials and tested at sunset on Stave Hill, London. Stiching wires together into long antennas allowed us to hear three stations, in three languages, at once. Magic!

Our latest audio work was broadcast on Radiophrenia at 8am on 15th April 2025. Originally a live performance, Listening Across Distance shares the praxis and the thinking behind our methodology of listening across distance. We've now shared the piece via Soundcloud, and you can listen to it here.

We are delighted to share that our text 'Plural Radio-Listening' has been published in Bodies of Sound: Becoming a Feminist Ear (2024), an anthology text from Silver Press, edited by Irene Revell and Sarah Shin.

​The book is available here.

Pic from the launch at Southbank Centre. 

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.