The sounds contained within this one-hour mix utilise radio as an affective medium. Introducing you to Rodriguez’s artistic approach, you will pass through the Sonoran Desert along the border of Mexico-Arizona up to the frozen back alleys of Montréal. Featuring musical excerpts from releases such as Entre Temps Perdus, Radio Therapy, and Substrat we discover an unveiling of harmonies and textures tucked between broadcast and instrument.

As a multidisciplinary artist and independent curator, Martín Rodríguez’s work emerges from his Chicanx upbringing along the Arizona-Mexico border. His practice mixes performance with interventions, and installations investigating radio as a transformative medium. After a surgery to remove a brain tumor left him temporarily paralyzed, Rodríguez searched for new meaning. When radio signals trapped in his guitar began to sing, he seized on the phenomena, and began exploring the cracks of the radio spectrum as a material for making art. Notably, his work has been presented by the Musée d’art contemporain Montréal (CA), MUAC (MX), Darling Foundry (CA), Spektrum (DE), as well as various festivals and performance venues across Canada, and the US.

In addition to producing his own work, he organizes and curates various events, happenings, and festivals. These include Undefine.fm, an experimental broadcast platform, as well as Bodies in Resonance (2021), the international digital art festival Sight and Sound Festival (2019), Ibrida*Pluri A/V Festival (2019), Amplified (2018) and PirateBlocRadio In-Situ (2017). From 2014 to 2018, he worked as Technical Director, Lab Director, and Co-director of Eastern Bloc, an artist-run centre dedicated to presenting emerging media artists in Montréal, Canada.

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).