ARCHIVE

This is a collection of four works made between 2018-2022, which record the artist’s radio experiments.

In the first piece, Hannah constructs an antenna to listen for natural radio emissions. The second work documents an encounter with amateur radio enthusiasts in a regional club in the UK. The third is an audio ‘how to’ guide, supporting listeners to scroll through the radio spectrum via software-defined radio web platforms. The final work was produced in Barrow-in-Furness, collecting conversations with local radio amateurs whilst attempting to listen to submarine communications. Hannah’s interest in radio is social rather than technical, and access is a key theme in these works. In a field largely dominated by men, Hannah promotes feminist approaches, and frames radio technologies as a portal for rich collective listening experiences.

Hannah Kemp-Welch is a sound artist with a socially-engaged practice. She often works with community groups to produce audio for installation and broadcast, using voices, field recordings and found sounds. She also delivers workshops, makes zines and builds basic radios, aiming to open out sonic practices and technologies for all. Hannah is a member of feminist radio art group Shortwave Collective and arts cooperative Soundcamp.

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).