This week's episode of Human-Machine features research on prosthetic technology, and includes music by Gary Numan and Tubeway Army.

In this special broadcast selection, 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.

PiratesWeek, a 30-minute audio tour of pirate shortwave radio signals, has been off the air since the summer. Tonight on WGXC host Ragner Daneskjold's new show debuts on WGXC. It aired for the first time Friday night, January 6, on shortwave station 5110 kHz WBCQ Area 51 following "Allan Weiner Worldwide" and is called the "Hall of Fame Spotlight."

Tonight's episode: "The Voice of Laryngitis is legendary in the field of pirate radio… and deservedly so. No pirate station in North America (and possibly the world) has ever developed such complex and humorous original skits. In fact, most of the skits are more complex than anything heard on shortwave or commercial radio. Because of the style of programming and the work involved, only about 20 different 45 minute programs from The Voice of Laryngitis have been created since their inception in November 1983. As a result, the station has rarely operated since programs stopped being produced on a regular basis in 1985. In light of everything, it is easier to compare The Voice of Laryngitis to The Fireside Theater than to other long time active pirates."

In this rebroadcast of Jason Kahn's sound work Unheard Zürich, produced in 2007, Kahn captures a city through its soundscape, and its residents through their perception of the sounds that surround them.

Writes Kahn, "In the radio piece "Unheard Zürich" I interviewed people from Zürich about what their favorite sound or sounding place in the city was and made recordings of these places and sounds.I decided to have the people interviewed speak in their native language (Swiss German, Italian, English), as this also reflects the sound of Zürich. Unheard Zürichis another in my series of Unheard Citiesworks, where I investigate how people living in cities perceive the sounds around them.

Unheard Zürich includes interviews with Magali Bucher, Mattea Gianotti, Jason Kahn, Mira Kahn, Hansjörg Köfler, Tomas Korber, Marcus Maeder, Dave Phillips, Ralph Steinbrüchel, Christof Steinmann, Christian Weber, and Manfred Werder.

The Human Machine is a program that presents projects, sounds, performance and research on the subject of the increasing convergence of humans and technology. This program, produced by Jeremy Kelly, includes: Coil - Are You Shivering?, Richard Maxfield - Pastoral Symphony, Rune Lindblad - Till Zakynthos (op.205), Gog - 3, Daphne Oram - Dr. Faustus Suite, Annea Lockwood - Tiger Balm , and Kim Cascone - Zephirum Scan.

The second edition of The Hall of Fame Spotlight with a look back at KNBS, a shortwave pirate radio station. KNBS took to the air in January of 1985 to advocate decriminalization of marijuana. Front man Phil Muzik used a low-key approach, playing pot-themed music and reminding listeners that in a “free country” the individual, not the government, had the constitutional right to make the decisions in his or her life. Studio engineer Pot Seedy was never heard on the air, and usually couldn’t be seen in the booth because of all the pot smoke in there. The station used the slogan “The Station With Your Mind In Mind.”The station was owned and operated by the California Marijuana Cooperative and claimed a transmitter site on Alcatraz Island, in San Francisco Bay. In later years KNBS was joined by a Canadian relay station, CNBS, but it was difficult to tell which transmitter was in use for any broadcast since it was never announced.

During this winter, Cinema Terrorisme will broadcast on alternating Saturdays on "The Human Machine" on WGXC. Cinema Terrorisme is an audio signal using cut-up methods and collage in order to distill the horror of modern existential malaise into substantiate energy mass. There is no moral value expressed in Cinema Terrorisme. Everything you hear has been alchemically remapped into a new order of relational aesthetics. FMI: http://cinematerrorisme.blogspot.com/

Radius Sketchpad is an ongoing monthly program on WGXC 90.7-FM presented by the Chicago-based platform, Radius. This month features Harold Schellinx's Seventy Seconds, and is followed by a playlist of works selected by the artist.

Things just keep happening over, and over again. With appearances from Wily E. Coyote, Fibber McGee and Molly, and others.