This edition of The Radio Art Hour features the work "Satellite Séance" by Open-Weather. A séance, in its widest sense, is a meeting between two or more bodies. In this radio piece, originally commissioned by Afroditi Psarra for the Transmission Ecologies series on Movement Radio, open-weather (Soph Dyer and Sasha Engelmann) explore satellite séances: meetings between humans and satellites through the medium of radio. The weather satellite NOAA-19 orbits over central Germany on a balmy day in July, its analog signal translated by a DIY antenna and relayed to an unknown number of listeners. Apollo circles the moon. Voyager meets the turbulent storms of Jupiter. These satellite séances move through radio environments filled with many other meetings. A ghostly voice emerges from a sea of white noise. Magnetic fields and moving particles produce the ‘electromagnetic dawn chorus’, a phenomenon long compared to the sound of birds greeting the rising sun.

Open-weather is a feminist experiment in imagining and imagining the earth and its weather systems using DIY tools. Co-founded in 2020 by designer Sophie Dyer and geographer Sasha Engelmann, the collective produces artworks, workshops and educational resources. Out of these activities a network of more than 100 DIY Satellite Ground Station operators, from Berlin to Buenos Aires, has grown around the project. In the tradition of intersectional feminism, open-weather investigates the politics of location and interlocking forms of oppression that shape our capacities to observe, negotiate, and respond to the climate crisis. In doing so, the collective challenges dominant representations of the Earth and environment while adding complexity to ideas around the weather beyond meteorology.

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Welcome to "The Radio Art Hour," a show where art is not just on the radio, but is the radio. "The Radio Art Hour" draws from the Wave Farm Broadcast Radio Art Archive, an online resource that aims to identify, coalesce, and celebrate historical and contemporary international radio artworks made by artists around the world, created specifically for terrestrial AM/FM broadcast, whether it be via commercial, public, community, or independent transmission. Come on a journey with us as radio artists explore broadcast radio space through poetic resuscitations and playful celebrations/subversions of the complex relationship between senders and receivers in this hour of radio about radio as an art form. "The Radio Art Hour" features introductions from Philip Grant and Tom Roe, and from Wave Farm Radio Art Fellows Karen Werner, Jess Speer, Andy Stuhll, José Alejandro Rivera, Tyler Maxin, and Iru Ekpunobi. The Conet Project's recordings of numbers radio stations serve as interstitial sounds. Go to wavefarm.org for more information about "The Radio Art Hour" and Wave Farm's Radio Art Archive.