Radio Umwelt: How to become an intraspecies radio, master graduation design project, (2021-2022, Piet-Zwart Institute)
What: Electrical engineering, physics, quantum-mechanics, math, prototyping, video making and editing, modeling, animation making.
Role: designer, collaborator, engineer, manufacturer, director, model, editor, animator.
A design project that is built upon a multidisciplinary research and juxtaposition of various sources and fields (architecture, philosophy, quantum-mechanics, physics and biology), which theorizes a model for intra-species communication using radio waves as a technological tool and space that mediates species’ perceptual boundary limitation. In both my research and the design, I’m proposing a radio space to critically be re-thought within the field of spatial design and architecture, by engaging with radio technology to argue for an alternative model of conceptualizing a non-anthropocentric world. A world that is focused on the sound that is made through radio and the spaces that radio waves occupy, opening up new notions of space and potential for its speculative theorization and its human and non-human occupants.
In denying the radio as mere static object and a fixed space, but rather as a dynamic intra-active reconfiguring of entangled agents determining boundaries, meanings, and marks on bodies, we humans cannot refuse to reconsider the socio-cultural and political factors that are heavily enacting on it. That is, comprehending the full extent of the radio object and the electromagnetic landscape without overlooking the urgency and relevancy the radio space is subjected to in reality. Especially when one looks at the significant and unbeatable commercial uprise of immaterial wireless (tele)communication structures, which shape our complex current (and future) socio-cultural and political systems and our relationship with the material landscape. As well as the uprise of new political laws to use this landscape for eavesdropping on citizens and selling/using it only for human ownership/communication.
Therefore, this project’s position is to reclaim this, to humans, unperceivable landscape back from anthropocentric colonized structures and use it not only for human communication only but to think about using it as a tool for new subjective dimensions, materialized relationships and acknowledge/share the out of controlness of radio space like it has been before humans. A space of subversion, challenging and reclaiming the current colonized allocations of the invisible electromagnetic world.
The final outcome of the project was an installation that discussed issues related to intra-active multispecies communication through my designs. The concept behind the installation was complex and required a considerable degree of attention from the viewer in order to be communicated. For this to work, I created a closed spatial installation that consisted of four main elements; a film, an animated projection, a vitrine and a physical manifestation of the thesis. These four elements were choreographed in an understandable manner, in which they constantly enhanced each other. Overall, one can say that the installation was trying to collapse technical and scientific rationality with a quixotic quest to communicate between species via radio space.
The video was essential in order to allow the viewer to absorb the content with no distraction by showing the functionality and narration of the technology as well as the sound designs that were received by it. The vitrine with that same technology was meant to give the objects an aura of uniqueness and importance. This also helped to communicate the tension in this project between hi-tec and care. The animation brings together the main subversive argument of the thesis with the sonic material of the video by creating an intra-active map out of it.
In the sections below you can find more material about every element.
The film's scenario consists of a human material body going into nature on a normal day, anno 2022, to listen to the radio landscape, to his influence in this landscape and its connection/communication with other material bodies in the radio forest. The human wears an antenna on his body and carries audio technology that he can connect to other antennas he encounters on his journey through the forest. These antennas are also connected to non-human material bodies that transmit signals and thus also affect the radio landscape. This signal gets captured with audio cables, amplified by a mini amplifier and transmitted to a mini transmitter which in turn transmits the signal from the body in question at a certain frequency back into the radio landscape.
This creates a radio feedback loop consisting of signals from material bodies that are not only human. Instead of hearing conventional radio stations, you could now hear the radio waves of trees and its occupied influence. A process that happens constantly without these custom-made antennas but of which we humans have no idea or perception.
Film shot by Mark Loopstra, edited by Sander Blomsma Kralingse bos, Rotterdam (2022)
The custom designed and manufactured antennas go against conventional antenna design in terms of usage and shape. The shape of the antennas are called fractals, which are defined as geometric patterns found in nature. Fractal antennas are potential transcalar antennas that use an iterative function system to create a fractal element whose shape always remains the same. By using fractal geometry, one can increase the electrical length of the antenna while keeping the volume of the antenna the same.
This makes the antenna's transmitting wire longer, allowing multiple bandwidths to be achieved (multiple frequencies). This is desirable because if the antennas connected on the human and non-human bodies can receive as much of the radio landscape as possible, the matter of the body can broadcast as much presence and influence in the radio landscape as possible.
For the animation I started off with translating the sonic recordings of all the transmitting material bodies from the video into a received and encoded signal/visualization. I ended up using old weather satellite software that is based on ‘slow scanning’. With this software I was able to encode an 8 minute signal that wasn’t ‘‘known’’ by the program as a weather image. However, for me it gave the closest translation I could get of the radio landscape with human and non-human bodies intra-acting with each other via reception and transmission in that radio space and its waves.
With a yet to human unidentifiable 2D visualization of an 8 minute segment of a piece of radio landscape where radio waves are influencing bodies and vice versa, I made a step towards a 3D space. Here, I wanted to design a map that ignores any human allocated frequencies of radio segments defined by Hertz (see colored map below) but rather a free form that has no fixed axis, values or limits. This resulted in a dome that uses the encoded image as a height map wrapped around it. This was projected on a still image of the animation to create extra depth and resolution.
