At 3 Hz to 3,000 GHz, radio blurs physis and techne, celestial and terrestrial, ancient and contemporary, human and nonhuman. It reverberates through different historic struggles. More than a medium, radio is an agitator.

The three-year research project takes the form of a series of collaborations, field trips, films and short stories of radio “as sensation, affect, as technological compulsion”. [1] The  installation for Artefact brings together the very beginning and very end of the research period.

We begin at 30 GHz, with a photograph of the landscape transversed by the radio relays that link Frankfurt and London’s financial centres and converge over the Calais refugee camps. During the research we were witnesses to “a strange sympathy between the atmospheric particles that float through the sky and the human beings who migrate across the ground and then across the sea. [2]

We end at 92 MHz, with a recording of the radio show, ‘Radio Techno Fossil’, broadcast on Den Haag FM, on 5 July 2018. The show is a conversation between artists and researchers on radio as a force that moves capital, bodies and time. It is also a radio fossil: the transmission itself will escape our Earth’s atmosphere and be preserved for perpetuity in the near vacuum of space.

[1] Irit Rogoff. A Short Tale of Infrastructure. Unpublished
[2] Adrian Lahoud. Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary, “Scale as Problem, Architecture as Trap”. Lars Müller: 2016
[3] Fredric Jameson. The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. New York, Verso: 1991