SHORTWAVE COLLECTIVE x SONCITIES x EMPRES x MODERN ART OXFORD: ART OF NOISES VIII
May 2023
SONCITIES welcomed Shortwave Collective to lead a radio making workshop, an urban listening session and to exhibit their works at the EMPRes event Art of Noises VIII at Modern Art Oxford on May 25th. The Art of Noises VIII event shared sound works by staff and students of the University of Oxford’s Music department, plus guest artists invited by SONCITIES. Each contributor explored the themes put forward in the gallery’s solo show by artist Carey Young, which centred on power, space, feminism and justice.
Shortwave Collective is an international group of 10 creative practitioners from various backgrounds and disciplines (sound and radio art, activism, social science, media and artistic research) brought together by an interest in feminist practices and the radio spectrum. ‘As a collective, we have a desire to learn together and to open a space to learn together-with-others as equal non-experts. We spend time in each other’s company making, testing, listening and sharing; sometimes ‘failing’, but more often laughing our way into serendipitous results that lead us to new practices and new situated ways of listening. Part of our feminist ethos is ‘learning through doing’. This is a way to de-mystify aspects of technology, which enables us to share our experiences more easily with each other, and with others.’ The collective’s approach aims to create an inclusive, collaborative, tech-based learning environment, one which acknowledges and attends to gendered education gaps and one that purposefully removes potential hurdles, such as unexplained components lists that assume knowledge.
Radio Making Workshop
On May 9th the Collective ran a radio making workshop with MA Music and Fine Art students at the SONCITIES office, led by Lisa Hall (SONCITIES PhD Researcher), Hannah Kemp-Welch and Georgia Muenster. The Oxford students each learnt how to make their own Open Wave-Receiver radios. These simple devices listen broadly to the electromagnetic spectrum and are open to new components being included into the circuits. The students each brought found materials to the workshop to customise their radios, these included plastic plates for bases boards and various pieces of cutlery to replace the radio’s diodes.
Urban Listening Session
Following the radio building, the Collective led an urban listening session across the city with the newly built radios. The Castle Mound was the first location, an excellent spot to test each radio and to explore the creative sonic potentials of antennae play. On the Castle mound the group were level with the tops of the nearby buildings where the radio signal was easy to access. A mixture of signals could be heard through every radio. The group gathered together to stretch the antenna in various directions, to swing it like a skipping rope and to take it in turns throwing it high into the sky, listening to the whooshes of radio signal caught with each movement.
The second location, outside Modern Art Oxford, investigated the connectivity options on the street by the gallery. The group attempted to ground the radios where weeds broke through the tarmac, and to utilise a tall metal rain pipe as a vertical antenna which could reach to the top of the buildings. Unfortunately the conditions were not right for radio transmission and no sound was heard.
Christchurch College’s gardens were the third urban listening location. The students spread out and explored the sonic options that metal fences, barriers and bins provided when added into the circuits to replace the radio diodes. Each metal object worked well, allowing radio listening through these metal structures.
Exhibition at Modern Art Oxford
Following the workshop the students explored the city with their radios, taking recordings of their experiments. These recordings, together with their radios were then exhibited at the Art of Noises VIII event on Thursday 25th May at Modern Art Oxford. Shortwave Collective’s Georgia Muenster and Brigitte Hart installed the radios in the industrial loading bay area of the gallery, hooking each radio up to large metal sheets and piping that acted as experimental diodes and antennae. Radios made by the Collective were also on display, playing back sections from the Collective’s artwork Constellations of Listening. During the event Georgia and Brigitte took part in an illuminating Q&A session with SONCITIES’ Gascia Ouzounian, discussing the radios, urban listening and feminist practices.
With many thanks to Gascia Ouzounian and Diana Rodriguez Perez at SONCITIES, to Dan Hulme and EMPres research centre at University of Oxford, to Sara Lowes and the curatorial team at Modern Art Oxford, and to Zach Di Lello and all the other artists involved in the event.
Image credits: Photography at Modern Art Oxford by Helen Messenger. Photographs at the workshop by Shortwave Collective.
Event report by Lisa Hall and the Shortwave Collective.
