On 29th September, we spent the day at Wysing Arts Centre in Cambridge (UK) making Open Wave-Receivers with d/deaf young people supported by the Sensory Support Service. Nine teenagers made radios and explored the gorgeous grounds at Wysing, searching for  signals. The session was part of a wider project led by one of our Shortwave members, for 'A Language of Holes' - a series considering access in galleries initiated by Voices in the Gallery. 

Listening in…at the Library is a project based at Sefton Libraries (Liverpool, UK) that 'tries to extend our ears into places they cannot get to, to listen to voices that we might not ordinarily hear, unburdened by preconceptions around how things look'.

Listening in... invited us to run a workshop showing local residents how to build an Open Wave-Reciever on Thursday 15th September 2022 at Crosby Library. We shared our radio recipes and then searched for radio transmissions, new and surprising experiences of the radio spectrum!

The workshop was a collaborative listening experiment, with participants hooking up their radios in special sites around Crosby. We experimented with super long antennas that were swung, hung and thrown. New types of diodes were tested, from silver rings to glasses, two pence coins and even a pair of pliers, plus the  many ways that we became part of the circuit too - as the antenna, the diode and the ground!

Talk Sport radio station was consistently loud ... there must be an antenna boosting the signal near by, but come grey line time (sunset or sunrise) hopefully the radios set up at home will start to hear the magic of the Open Wave-Receiver - multiple layers of transmission all at once! (At "grey line" radio transmission moved more easily around the globe, bouncing off the ionosphere, meaning more radio can be heard). Everyone left with their radios, so we're looking forward to hearing more. 

For added listening fun, we put together some late night VLF (very low frequency radio waves) antennas to explore the lower end of the radio spectrum, and we rigged these up at the end of the day for a little listen. We're also very pleased to find that the thinner width of this cable works just as well as the thicker cable, which significantly reduced the price of these! Success! The next step is to find an electrical recycling point from which we can source second hand cables rather than buying new.... Let us know if you'd like instuctions on how to make one of these.​

Thanks for having us Dave, Faye, Jodie and all at the library!

We had the pleasure of joining Amanda Gutierrez and the group at Sono-(soro)rities, Materia Labo, Montreal, to talk about our Shortwave Collective feminist ways of working with radio. Thanks so much for the invitation Amanda :)

Had a very nice chat yesterday with Mack Hagood for an upcoming episode of Phantom Power podcast!

Great to connect about making radios, listening, failure, fragility, collective & feminist processes, constellations, sci-fi, sunlight, meteors and lightning .. amongst other things :)

Stay tuned for the podcast episode coming out in October.

Mack will also be making Open Wave-Receivers with his students at at Miami University, Ohio - looking forward to seeing and hearing these in action.

The Listening Academy aims to bring together participating scholars, researchers and artists, to share knowledge, practices, and research activities, and to collectively investigate creative and critical questions of listening. Listening is emphasized here as a transdisciplinary subject, one that moves across the humanities and society, and which contributes to fostering interpersonal and community relations.

Three members of Shortwave Collective participated in the Academy throughout the week August 29 – September 4, 2022, and shared our work during the 'networking day' on Saturday September 3. We set up a stall in the garden at Iklectik and strung up an Open Wave-Receiver, and in a presentation by members in the room and contribiting remotely via Zoon, we shared sounds and reflections on our recent work with homemade radios. 

After a remote introduction to the Collective and our Open-Wave Receivers by Alyssa from the South of France - which included a live radio listening session based inside a car, antenna attached to the neighbours fence - we all moved outside to the nearby park to listen to transmission locally.

Georgia and Lisa set up two Open-Wave Receivers and together with the MA students, Salomé Voegelin and Irene Revell, we explored the listening possibilities within the park - attaching antennas to fences and lampposts, switching in new metal objects for diodes, grounding through the playpark and throwing antennas in the air.

The recordings will be featured in our upcoming Radio Art Zone broadcast "Constellations of Listening" on Friday 12th August between 9-10pm - at the hour it was in Central European time when these were recorded. Listen online here.

Sharing our snake plant radio & a bunch of our other models of homemade radios at the Great Exhibition Road Festival today! With Hackoustic at the Royal College of Music, London. 

Shortwave Collective contribute 22 hours of radio to Radio Art Zone - a 100-day radio art station for Esch2022, broadcast in the south of Luxembourg by Radio ARA on 87.8 FM.

Over the course of 22 hours during Radio Art Zone, we shared our processes of making radios and listening through our devices. Listeners tuned into Shortwave Collective engaged in collective and solitary listening experiences as we searched for radio reception through Open Wave-Receivers and other devices such as VHF and VLF receivers, software-defined radio, walkie-talkies and electromagnetic detectors.

Our collective material was sourced over many months and seasons, and across different time zones, from listening sites that connect environments, technologies and voices. Each recording was broadcast at (or close to) the hour it was originally heard. In two live sessions taking place during the Perseids meteor shower, Shortwave Collective members filtered recordings made by the group through their home environments: between 18:00-18:30 CEST on Friday 12th August from a garden in Crete, and 11:00-11:30 CEST on Saturday 13th August from a mountain in the south of France.

​Our DIY radio building how-to guide 'Open Wave-Receiver' will be broadcast  on the Matters of Transmission programme on Colaboradio on 26th April at 3pm (GMT+2). Listen out here.

In May 2021, we ran a workshop building DIY radios at Soundcamp in Stave Hill Ecological Park, London. The session shared radio recipes, inviting participants construct their own and join us to search for radio transmissions. The workshop was the basis for a collaborative listening experiment, with participants hooking up their radios to the Stave Hill mound at dusk.

An extended cut of our audio how-to guide to make an Open Wave-Receiver will be broadcast on Movement Radio on the 15th March 202, 22:00 EET - listen as we make homemade radios and search for signals. Find us on Afroditi Psarra’s Transmission Ecologies programme. 

We're very pleased to have been invited to share one of our sound works with RAD Performance group who'll be staging a Sound Ride through Vienna on March 8th for International Women's Day's #TakeBackTheStreets. 

Receive-Transmit-Receive will play out across the 6 bikes. Catch the ride by at 5pm from Wien Mitte to Praterstern (Kaiserwiese).

RAD Performance presents concerts in public space, on the road and in motion, composing and playing while on the move. Pieces of music by different sound artists, the choral movement of the performers on the bicycle and the dynamics and distance between the moving sound sources create unique soundscapes for the audience. The concerts take place along cycle routes in the city of Vienna. The visitors are accompanied by a mobile loudspeaker orchestra on wheels. The acoustic, urban space complements, overlays and extends the electronic composition.

https://radperformance.at/​

Radiophrenia is a a temporary art radio station broadcasting intermittently from the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow – a two-week long festival exploring current trends in sound and transmission arts. The station is managed by Mark Vernon and Barry Burns and is funded through Creative Scotland’s Open Project Funding with additional support from CCA Glasgow. For their 2022 edition, we produced an audio 'how-to' guide, creativity inviting listeners to build their own radio, first broadcast on 20th February.