ARCHIVE

A 60-minute mix of recordings from SPAM New Media Festival which took place at the Georgetown Steam Plant in Seattle in September 2025. SPAM is a collective of artists and researchers seeking critical discussions around digital culture and technology-driven art, bringing together practitioners working from a postdigital perspective.

This mix contains excerpts from radio and transmission artworks that were presented at this year’s SPAM as performances and installations. It features the works of Afroditi Psarra, Maria Thrän, Alemseged Bishu, Hans Kuzmich, Abram Stern, and Merve Ünsal.

Through different embodied antenna systems — a swinging wire tuned to the electromagnetic field, and diy/handheld/wearable antennas — in Live signals, live bodies (in conversation), Afroditi Psarra & Maria Thrän receive and process transmissions at the Hertzian spectrum in real time. Their performance is a practice of co-tuning, interference, and spatial resonance; an improvisation with invisible fields — received through software-defined radios, and processed through live electronics and SuperCollider. Grounded in the broken harmony of the Georgetown Steam Plant’s architecture, bodies, machines, and noise converge in a listening practice that resists control and invites uncertainty.

Versioned Memories is a sound performance by Alemseged Bishu using field recordings from urban soundscapes and personal moments combined with live radio and live electronics.

Radiant Center by Hans Kuzmich is a four-channel sound installation examining the convergence of security practices, media technologies, and geological environments at the Russian-Lithuanian border on the Curonian Spit, a peninsula along the southeastern Baltic Sea. Engaging with the site's cultural history as a UNESCO World Heritage Site known for its wind-blown sand dunes, the project investigates how borders and wind function as media infrastructures that are simultaneously local and global, geopolitical and ecological, mobile and emplaced.

In Abram Stern’s numb.station, collected utterances of numbers are broken into very short segments and reassembled. Several historical speech-to-text methods “listen” to the reassembled sounds. A speaker plays each sound as it is tested. Sounds recognized as numbers by software are broadcast using a software-defined radio transceiver over an analog radio. This recognition, however, might more accurately be understood as misrecognition, as these sounds functionally become gibberish. The selected sounds are also archived and logged with metadata about the model, source material, recognition confidence, timestamps, broadcast location, and other details.

Afroditi Psarra’s Altar reflects on the idea of portals as objects of intergenerational, interdimensional and celestial connections. It materializes through a series of knitted tapestries which depict Al-generated images of portals imagined as tunnels, or caves, or black holes. Each tapestry activates a sound recording of a composition of radio signals sourced from personal field recordings with handmade antennas, as well as open-source recordings from the Signal Wiki repository. The sounds are subtle and directional, as moving away from the tapestries they disappear.

Kirigami Antennas by Afroditi Psarra & Zoe Kaputa is a research exploration centering on e-textile meta-materials, designing antennas that are cognizant of their use and relation to space. Eight free-standing lace antennas embroidered with conductive thread resonate within a cavity of the Georgetown Steamplant by receiving encrypted radio signals of nearby military bases and the Boeing Field.

Maria Thrän’s Aeolian Tree is an electromagnetic–kinetic sound sculpture and ritual performance on a living oak outside the Georgetown Steamplant. The ritual frames the work: a practice of caretaking and shared attention that treats the tree as a sacred, living archive—a portal between spiritual and physical worlds, between ancestors and the present.

Glitching Sinkholes is built on field recordings that Merve Ünsal has been gathering at and near sinkholes to compose a speculative recording that imagines an underground vibration and resonance-driven kinship among sinkholes across the world.  

SPAM was curated by Sadaf Sadri and Anna Skutley.

https://spamnewmediafestival.com/

Curated by Afroditi Psarra, "Transmission Ecologies" explores the turbulent world of radio signals which propagate around us. Each show features a guest sound artist who broadcasts their radio experiments using EMFs, interference patterns from devices, HAM, RF field recordings, satellite signals, space astronomy research, etc. to formulate their interpretations, compositions, and translations of the invisible and unheard layer of telecommunication technologies.

"Transmission Ecologies" is commissioned by Stegi Radio / Onassis Culture.

Afroditi Psarra is a multidisciplinary artist and an Associate Professor of Digital Arts and Experimental Media at the University of Washington where she runs the DXARTS Softlab. Her research focuses on the interweaving of art and science through the creation of artifacts with a critical lens. In her projects she explores energetic phenomena like electromagnetic radiation, and technologies such as radio-frequency sensing, fractal antennas, and software-defined radio. She is particularly interested in the use of the body as an interface of control, and the revitalization of tradition as a methodology of hacking existing norms about technical objects. Her art practice builds on and extends the work of Cyber and Techno-Feminism(s) and the idea of bodies as archives of information, and manifests through e-textiles and wearables, performances, installations and sound art.

She has exhibited her work internationally in venues such as Onassis Stegi, Bozar, Laboral, EMST, Ars Electronica, Transmediale and CTM, Eyeo, Amber, Piksel, and WRO Biennale between others, and published at conferences like Siggraph, ISWC (International Symposium of Wearable Computers), DIS (Designing Interactive Systems), C&C (Creativity and Cognition), and EVA (Electronic Visualization and the Arts).