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In this special broadcast (January 7, 2012 on WGXC 90.7-FM), short works by 14 artists respond to Guglielmo Marconi’s pioneering experiments with radio transmission in Dungeness and at the South Foreland Lighthouse on Kent’s South Eastern Coast.

The Lighthouse Relay project celebrates the significant contribution to both saving seafarers’ lives and the development of global communication systems that lighthouses have made throughout history. The significance of lighthouses to coastal regions is, in part, due to that history but also due to the emotional response their architectural prominence creates. As well known landmarks their austere beauty combines with the practicality of their signals and light to produce a recognized worldwide phenomenon. Many existing lighthouses originated as ancient beacon sites, reflecting our human desire to communicate and a historic connection, a communicative DNA, with sites that enabled this.

In 2011, Folkestone Fringe invited more than 40 artists to create site-specific sound and visual work for over 20 lighthouse sites around the UK and in Europe, Asia, South America and the Antipedes. Each artist began by creating a sound artwork in response to a lighthouse of their choice, with an accompanying visual component. The artists were also commissioned to collaborate on the Lighthouse Relay - the creation of a set of transitional sound pieces, via the exchange of site or concept related sound samples, that were developed as the work moved from one lighthouse site to the next. Tonight's broadcast, organized by artists Jonathon Wright and Diane Devers, presents a special selection of these radiophonic works.