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SHORTWAVE COLLECTIVE RESIDENCY

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As the commissioned artists for YARMONICS festival, we spent time in Great Yarmouth in the autumn of 2024 - meeting local artists, collectives and community groups, and delivering public workshops. During these visits, we used radio circuits as a methodology to learn about the area. Together with residents, we constructed homemade radios (dubbed Open Wave-Receivers) and considered the function of each component in the circuit (antenna, ground, coil, diode, phones). We turned this into a set of questions: Where do residents go to receive signals? Where do they feel grounded? We produced a zine that documents these conversations, questions, and locations. The list of locations that symbolically stand in for the elements of a radio circuit, described by participants, then acted as our guide. We took various microphones and DIY radios to some of these locations, filming our adventures on an analogue camera."

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SHORTWAVECOLLECTIVE

Radio-making is always collective. It involves doing, undoing, redoing, trial and error. Experimentation and failure are integral to the process. Radio is everywhere, and we can listen to it broadly all at once, not just frequency by frequency. We can make radios that receive plural signals and resist the clear channel. Radio is nowhere, until it can be heard. We can make radios that resist, and radios that do not receive or transmit signal, yet are not broken. Radio is everywhere, it isn’t asking to be heard. Radio waves are timeless, organic, physical. Radio waves travel through our bodies, they fill the universe. The signals and messages that we perceive within radio are dependent on our position, the weather, a state of material being, and a state of mind. Our hands can be the antennas to the intangible electromagnetic waves. Radio is relation.

Design and development by Possible Worlds