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!

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.

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!

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. 

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.

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.

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 :)