media: electromagnetic fluctuations, Max/MSP/Jitter, car radio recordings, GoPro recordings, two raspberry-pis, three video monitors, three amplifiers + power supplies, two haptic motors, three custom directional speaker domes, found van seat, wood, steel, acrylic
Statement
The portal has become the emblem of telematic connectivity enabled by digital networks. Facebook’s consumer device Portal touts the slogan: “if you can’t be there, feel there.” Despite attempts to sidestep ocularcentric telematics (Montpellier et al. 2015), media design fails to produce other kinds of portals than those cybernetic and McLuhan-esque rubrics of connectivity. Though media theorists have been quick to criticize connectivity culture (Shaviro 2004, Galloway and Thacker 2009, Culp 2016), there are few proposals for alternative modes of mediated together-ing.
In our last presentation, we spoke about Idiotic Resonances, a set of rhythmanalytic (Lefebrvre 1992) practices attuning to the excesses and entropies of complex systems using traditional medium-frequency radio receivers and the spatial variability of the electromagnetic spectrum (Mechtley & Johnson 2019). Radio, as a field of transmission, offers an entirely different inflection of social media; pace Shannon, information here works as an operator of collective individuation (Simondon 2009). In this paper, we engage radio to produce alternative portacular resonances through the interplay of Euclidean and Riemannian concepts of space, presence, and closeness (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004).
We return to radio, highlighting some delightful peculiarities and cultural practices, including phenomena such as skip zones (dead zones where radio signals are reportedly non-existent) and unintended ionospheric reflections (which bounce local radio broadcasts across the world) fold space-time in a manner suggesting a portacularity inheriting from Riemannian rather than graph-theoretical topology. On the other hand, direction finding, or “fox hunts”, a tactical procedure whereby the origins of radio transmissions are located via triangulation, reimposes a Euclidian reckoning onto the RF field. Through a politics of the weird and eerie (Fisher 2015) radio allows us to create new relational portals vis-a-vis governance, social identity, and communication as an alternative to network culture.
shows
- Experimental Engagements: Happenings, University of California Irvine, 2019
- Uncanny Valley, Wave Pool Gallery, Cincinnati Ohio, 2019
- Stadt Land FLuss. Ateliers-Tag. Berlin, DE, 2021.
