This hour-long compilation features recordings from 5 interactive/reactive ‘hertzian art’ installations by Stelios Manousakis. These works investigate radio and microwave communication media as spatial phenomena. Stripped of all other elements that constitute these installations, this episode reveals various types of interactions between electromagnetic waves and their infrastructure, body, movement, space, architecture and weather purely through sound.

The Network Is a Blind Space (2011-12) is a distributed, micro-telematic, interactive sound installation that explores the physical yet invisible electromagnetic spaces created by WiFi networks. It features a special ‘network echolocation’ system with which a wireless local network can be probed as an acoustic resonant space by tracing the time it takes for messages to travel from one device to another. Using WiFi-enabled mobile devices – optionally running sound producing software - visitors explore this hidden hertzian dimension as it unfolds within a particular site. The piece reveals the network as a dynamic navigable space, as an open score unfurled in that space, and as a large, invisible, collective idiophone – a collaborative distributed instrument which devices of connected visitors excite into resonance.

Music for browsing (2015) is an interactive software for generative soundscapes; it is subversive ‘furniture music’ for Internet servers; it is a roadtrip soundtrack for the web traveller. The piece is powered by the energy of browsing – of doing useful things, and of wasting time on the Internet. Whenever you land on a webpage, your computer temporarily connects to servers around the world to fetch content. It thus becomes an active part of the Internet’s network space, with data moving to and from it. Such transfers are quick, but not instant; it takes some time for information to move through the network, especially if a server is far, if the infrastructure is old or congested, if you are connected wirelessly and if it is humid. Music for browsing intercepts all active connections to remote Internet servers as they happen, and then echolocates these servers, continuously measuring your distance from them. The music you create depends on your connection, your browsing patterns, and on how far away the content you are seeking is stored. You can download the software on the artist's page.

‘Act so that there is no use in a centre’ (2014) is an abstracted and deconstructed spatial radio play. It sets Rooms, from Gertrude Stein’s seminal language-art book Tender Buttons, as a distributed radio-transmitted sound installation which visitors explore by navigating space. The work takes its name from the first sentence of the text, which also sets the tone for the visitor experience. Like the text, it deals with fragmentation, interference, and distortion of memory, place, and meaning. Emanating out of 6 storage boxes, the combined memories of the writer (text) and the artist (sound) haunt the exhibition’s hertzian space with imaginary landscapes, wordscapes, and fleeting soundscapes, waiting to be discovered using 7 small portable radios. Each box contains fragments from a particular type of space implied in Stein’s text which it transmits to the nearby airwaves via low-powered FM.

Hertzian Field #1 (2014) is an immersive augmented reality environment that exposes the raw materiality of the WiFi communication medium, exploring its physical interaction with our spaces and our bodies through sound. At its core is an invisible dynamic field of WiFi microwaves occupying the exhibition space. The human body interferes with it, shaping and distorting it. A reactive system performs a ‘composed transduction’ of electromagnetic waves into sound from the point of view of four receivers in a square formation, which sonify the dispersal of microwaves caused by bodies and movement. The body-as-electromagnetic-shadow conducts the system through movement, while being influenced by the system’s sound to move in particular ways and areas. Body, movement, sound, and hertzian field become entangled in a feedback loop, creating spontaneous choreographies within a moldable and seemingly viscous hertzian architecture.

The Water Within (Hertzian Field #3.1) (2018) is an intimate 20-minute experience of complete multi-sensory immersion. The space - a steam sauna hosting up to 6 visitors at a time - has its own very hot and humid microclimate. An electromagnetic bubble engulfs it, acting as the sensing apparatus of a monitoring software agent. This autonomous agent harnesses the interference of water molecules (found inside visitor’s bodies and the hot steam) on this bubble to conduct something akin to a continuous X-ray or MRI – but with ordinary WiFi signals. It then performs an algorithmically-driven soundscape generated in response to the interference patterns produced by these water flows and changing densities. The piece uses the raw materiality of wireless communication to expose the sympathetic resonance of the human body to its signals and to celebrate interference, signal-loss and disconnecting, both metaphorically and through its (ab)use of WiFi technology. The sensing system was inspired by obscure surveillance research and was conceived and developed in its entirety by Stelios Manousakis. The sauna structure was developed in collaboration with architect Ping-Hsiang Chen.

Stelios Manousakis (NL/GR) is an artist exploring relationships between time, space, body, system and sound. His work is particularly concerned with the invisible and the ephemeral, and with dynamically shaping sensation, perception and experience. His practice lies in the convergence of music, art, philosophy, science and engineering; it extends from performances, to environments and interactive installations, compositions, fixed media, and music for dance and film. His work most often involves software that he develops, merging algorithmic finesse with the immediacy of audience participation, or the expressiveness of improvisation. Since 2010 he has been developing a body of work exploring the spatiality of radio and microwave technologies and infrastructures. Stelios' work has been shown in five continents, in varied venues & festivals such as ZKM, Museum Reina Sofia, Seattle Art Museum, dOCUMENTA, IDFA, Rewire, Audio Art, The Place, Athens Digital Arts Festival, November Music, ICMC, and NIME. Besides his solo work, he has co-founded several music and multimedia groups and, together with duo partner Stephanie Pan, is the founding co-director, co-curator and technical director of Modern Body Festival and Modulus Foundation.

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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).