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Imaginary Radio is a compilation of several improvisations using an antenna loop, software defined radio and Machine listening (A.I).

It is a machinic ecosystem produced by the dialog between the situational soundscape and the intelligent machine interpretation of the environment. Through Artificial Intelligence, specifically, sound recognition, this system creates newly imagined soundscapes based on what this machine hears and interprets from the environment, generating new territorialities based on a specific location and its sounds. The system relocates and recategorizes the information of the real-time environment, and plays sounds from other territories and ontologies, creating a speculative and imagined landscapes. Questioning the conflict of local and global, unities and the interrelationships systems, and also the territories in counterpoint with landscapes created by machines, machines that are systems based on bias, therefore machines that produce failures and mistakes.

The sounds that the antenna is capable of capturing are processed in order to recognize what kind of sounds the machine is listening to. For this purpose, the system uses a A.I Machine Listening AudioSet Ontology model (a large data set based on youtube videos with more than 2 million sounds and 527 labels).

Due to the complexity of electromagnetic field sounds, the A.I system is constantly failing, being incapable of giving the right category, therefore opening up new and unexpected paths based on machine bias, failures, and mistakes.
Using categories recognized by A.I as tags, the system constantly is downloading in real-time sounds from the collaborative repository freesound.org.

Those improvisations are finally an exploration of the radio frequency spectrum, a mix between electromagnetic field signals, noises, sound recording and text from the descriptions of the sounds that the model provides.

From the artist:
“I am a sound and electronic media artist. I am originally from Valparaiso, Chile, and I am based in Seattle, United States. I am currently pursuing my doctorate in Digital Arts and Experimental Media, University of Washington,Seattle, United States (DXARTS). My beginning as an artist was related to music experimentation, but after getting my Bachelor's in Music from the University of Valparaiso in 2007, I moved to Buenos Aires, where my curiosity about the intersection between technology and art began. In 2009 I started to study for my master's degree in Electronic Arts at the National University of Tres de Febrero, Buenos Aires, Argentina, opening up my development in media art, putting the focus on questions about what kind of paths would the technological experimentation open up, and how technology could provide a perspective to observe and understand our natural, social and political environment. Also, questioning about what aesthetical possibilities, regarding the relationship between art and technology, emerge in order to re-imagine and speculate about our environment. In those years experimenting and creating using technology in the art field, my research and artistic practices have developed mostly in sound and media installations, robotic objects, and technological performance, that have been presented in art Festivals and solo exhibitions in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, the United States, Spain, Finland, and France. Furthermore, I have been a professor at different Universities, in Chile, Argentina, and the United States, teaching and researching about sound, media, and technologies.”

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).