Radio Techno Fossil
Essay commissioned for the radio broadcast produced in collaboration with Eline Benjaminsen, Sasha Engelmann and oneacre.online.
(July 2018)
oneacre.online
Witte de With
Den Haag and Rotterdam
What began as a photograph of the Earth’s techno-geographies, is now textured by the electromagnetic conditions of the planet. An image borne of radio waves. An anti-pattern, a trace fossil.
At 0.2 Hz, scientists in the Finnish arctic listen for Very Low Frequencies that index industrial, military and cosmic activity. At 3 – 30 GHz the radio relays of financial traders converge and compete for lines-of-sight at the French port of Calais. At 2.4 GHz an NGO prototypes Wi-Fi kits for use in European refugee camps and by sea rescue vessels. This is a politics of radio. A parallel wireless world, modulated by intergovernmental treaties, corporate monopolies, ionospheric conditions, and the radio-active cycles of our Sun.
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Artificial sferics. Whistlers are Very Low Frequency radio waves generated by lightning. In the early 1950s scientists started to listen for one-hop and two-hop whistlers, induced not by lightning but by nuclear explosions. The most spectacular of which was in July 1962 when Starfish Prime, a 1,400 kiloton device, was detonated 400 kilometres from Hawaii