This hour is divided between two recent durational transmission-based projects I’ve built using open-source software, software defined radio, and collections of media.

The first is an excerpt from “enhance-redact (cancer surveillance study #1)”, which operates on a series of medical images produced as part of cancer surveillance of my body which are iteratively looped through a process of { transcoding to slow-scan television (SSTV), broadcast, reception, image enhancement, image analysis}. Textual descriptions of objects identified in the enhanced images are broadcast as radio-teletype (RTTY). 

The second is an excerpt from “numb.station”, in which utterances of numbers drawn from collections of archived cold-war era numbers stations and machine listening datasets are broken into very short segments and reassembled. Speech-to-text methods “listen” to these scrambled, reassembled sounds. Sounds recognized as numbers by software are broadcast using a software-defined radio (SDR) transceiver over FM radio. This recognition, however, might more accurately be understood as misrecognition, as these sounds functionally become gibberish. An interference signal broadcasts into the hollow space between these two logics.

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).