Hybrid Radio: A parasitic molecular infrastructure
This work opens a dialogue around the possibilities of re-thinking radio communication as an open tool for transmitting and receiving in order to create streams for civic communication, engagement, and expression. This text explores the history of radio, as well as free radio theories around the world, and proposes to re-appropriate the space of the airwaves that has been drastically regulated, privatized and institutionalized. Radio acts as an invisible and mobile architecture, having the characteristic of breaking down boundaries, territories, and walls. Understanding radio as a parasitic system can provide a setting to grow in an organic and molecular way. The objective is to explore the potentials in radio infrastructure, its invisibility and the possible ways of using it to foster expression, and trigger discussions about decentralized communication networks and open streams of coexistence.
Hybrid Radio was curated by Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas for the Swamp Pavilion (Lithuanian Pavilion) at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2018
Tardigrade Radio, The Radio for Almost Invisible Beings
This project is in the form of an installation and a series of community engagement and hybrid-radio building workshops. This project has the objective of deploying an open radio infrastructure and a layered invisible architecture of sound in the city. By combining sonic compositions and narratives from an interspecies perspective, the Tardigrade Radio works as a platform to give voice to different organisms (micro/macro/meta), humans, non-human agents, and matter.
This piece proposes to re-appropriate the airwaves space, which has been drastically regulated, privatized and institutionalized. Radio pieces are caught by a “parasitic radio receiver module” built with biolab tools an installed in public spaces. Sonic compositions and narratives are taken from the inside of research laboratories to common spaces, blurring the boundaries between inside and outside, lab and nature, fiction and reality. The first installation consists of 1 “parasitic radio receiver module” and three sonic pieces inspired by the Lab Tardigrade’s story and environment. These compositions are meant to be absorbed in a non-linear narrative dispersed on space. Future iterations consider the installation of many “parasitic radio receiver modules," creating a large-scale choreography of radio transmitters and receivers. The piece uses radio as a spatial medium for mobile spaces, transversal structures, and build layered invisible architectures.