Join us on 17th June for an Open Wave-Receiver workshop at Ikectik in London! Info and tickets here.

SONCITIES research project invited us to lead a workshop with University of Oxford students in April and to present radio work at the EMPRES research group's late event at Modern Art Oxford in May.

We made 10 new Open Wave-Receiver radios with students and embarked on an urban listening experiment in Oxford's city centre, connecting our radios to fences, posts and bins in order to listen through and with the city. 

Following our workshop, the students made new compositions with the radios, for exhibition at Modern Art Oxford on May 25th in the Art of Noises late night event. This late event is led by the EMPRES research group and responds to to Carey Young's solo show ‘Appearance’, which explores themes of power dynamics, relationships to space, text, feminism, and institutions of justice. What a great environment to be sharing our feminist radio practice in!

​Join us at Modern Art Oxford on May 25th, 6.30-10pm. The info and tickets (free) will be available online here soon.

We're delighted to be working with: Sonorous Cities: Towards a Sonic Urbanism (SONCITIES) a research project at University of Oxford formed at the intersection of sound, urbanism, and critical spatial practices; The University of Oxford’s Electronic Music Practice RESearch group (EMPRES) who aim to promote and advance research and public dissemination in Electronic Music Practice; and Modern Art Oxford who are renowned for their bold, progressive and international artistic programme that promotes culturally diverse viewpoints from around the world. ​

Soundcamp is a free sound and ecology festival at Stave Hill Ecological Park, London, over the Dawn Chorus Day weekend. It's our favourite event of the year, as Shortwave Collective was formed during a workshop taking place there in 2020. Three of us led an Open Wave-Receiver building workshop at Soundcamp 10, and a record 42 radios were made and tested!

We were back at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, on 10th March 2023, delivering a workshop making Open Wave-Receivers with BA & MA Sound Arts students. 32 radios were made, though testing was brief due to freezing weather!

In March 2023, we ran an Open Wave-Receiver workshop with Bradford Sound Women's Network at Fuse Art Space, West Yorkshire (UK). Participants brought scavenged parts, and made some innovative designs include a weaving-kit radio and a whale toy radio. Though freezing, we spent a little time hooking them up around town, catching Radio 'Five Live' in amongst intriguing feedback sounds. 

For the 20th edition of Pikselfest, an annual event for Electronic Art and Technological Freedom in Bergen Norway, we had the pleasure of hosting two Open Wave-Receiver radio making workshops, and having a micro-residency for the collective (aka a unique opportunity for 6 of us to be together simultaneously and connect digitally with the rest of the collective) 

For the workshop we foraged for found materials around Bergen, looking things to include into the radios as coils or diodes. This resulted in a branch and a vacuum cleaner tube both being used  as the objects for the coil to be wrapped around, and working really well (the latter as a very open spacious coil!).

Our listening spot, up the side of one of the many hills in the city, gave us textured radio static and one or two talk radio stations to listen to in the freezing cold darkness just after sunset. On the side of the open wave-radio testing we had a play with a VLF antenna, held in a loop by a group of people who danced around with it, this tuned us into a vibrant texture of humming and the occasional click of sferics - natural radio emissions from lightning!

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 :)