As part of the AV Festival Broadcast in Tyneside this week, Isis Arts are hosting Radio Craft Lab, which comprises of five days of intensive workshops for engaging, using and making radio tools. Invited artists and practitioners run the workshops where each day sees a different topic. The facilitator for the event is Sneha Solanki.
The Radio Craft Lab was only open to Regional Artists, but because of my interest and research into VLF and ELF, I managed to secure a place on Tuesday’s workshop that was run by the Australian artist Joyce Hinterding, who explores the electromagnetic substance by way of acoustics, performance and installations that incorporate large sculptural and passive antennae. Joyce ran through the basics of the EM spectrum, interspersing this with examples of her own work and interests. Predominant in her artistic enquiries is the relationship between the acoustic wave and the electromagnetic wave, her own background in music positing her as a ‘sympathetic resonance’ between the two; a revealer of the electromagnetically silent world where everything has its own vibratory frequency. Her workshop therefore focused on VLF antennae building.
We did not get too involved in the exact scientific calculations of antennae length relating to frequency, as there were far too many variables that had to be taken into consideration. Instead, we worked on existing calculations, and based our antennae on makeshift contraptions. The ‘Bike Loop’ antennae provided an easy introduction, each bike loop being wound with increasing lengths of copper wire. At 40 winds the frequency reception was cited at being 200Hz – 20kHz; I wound mine at 75, which in theory should have provided a lower frequency range. When I came to soldering the connectors however, the thin copper on the underside snapped off, leaving me no option other than to unwind the wire.
Paul, a fellow participant helped me, and instead of rewinding the wire around the rim of the hoop, we decided to wind it over the diameter with a view to making a spherical shape. Earlier on in the workshop we had already discussed our interests of making objects with a Victorian pseudo-scientific and/or musical origin, so this combined effort had a like-minded air to producing something useable, interactive and wearable. The outcome therefore was something that was initially called the Head Concertina or the Radiohead Antennae, as the shape of the wound copper had a resemblance to a Victorian Faraday cage for the brain. It was of course adjustable, and the receiving frequency could be altered or tuned by pulling or contracting the contraption. The exact frequency reception of this was unknown, as the copper wire was wound in such a way that it was possibly creating a resistance to itself, preventing the full range of frequencies that the amount of copper had the potential to gather.
Radiohead Antennae from artist1066 on Vimeo.
