While all the other pages are about amateurradio - this page introduces a different view on our medium "shortwave". In 1998 I was asked by the ARS Electronica (Museum of the Future, here in Linz) if I could help them with a project. I immediately said "Yes, I will help you" and suddenly I was involved with ART (what an experience!).
The following reveals a bit of the mysterie about the RADIATION PROJECT.
| In the second year of the 20th century the signals from Guglielmo Marconi's first trans-Atlantic radio transmission began their journey across the Solar System. Since then radio waves have become as common as air and our planet has become a new source of radio waves in the galaxy. All the radio signals ever produced since Marconi's experiment are still radiating outwards through space. The history of our century exists at the speed of light in the dark spaces between the worlds. Marconi's radio used long wavelenths requiring very large antennas for transmission and reception. This remained the case for about 20 years - untill the technicians trained for the first world war returned home and began to experiment with short wave technology. It was discovered that short wave signals could be transmitted thousands of miles by bounceing them off the ionosphere. By the mid-thirties all the major countries were employing short wave radio for military and diplomatic communication. During the second world war radio technology became more sophisticated in reponse to the need for communication with armies and navies spread out across the world as well as the rapid deployment and control of air forces and for subversive information warfare involving encryption, deception and propaganda. The "RADIATION" project concentrates on short wave radio - the wave-lengths used mostly by security/espionage agencies, national propaganda/information stations and by amateur radio operators. Many short wave transmissions are received as bursts of coded or scrambled signal - morse, fax or image transmissions and secret commercial or political data. The short wave spectrum contains every human language and every kind of music. Short wave signals are often distorted by atmospheric conditions, bursts of electro-magnetic activity on the Sun, interference from other transmitters or local static - with short wave radio it is "radio" itself that is in the foreground. |
Project description: A computer program controls the output from four Short Wave Radio Receivers and fed over an amplifier into four public-address loudespeakers at the entrance to the Brucknerhaus (Ars Electronica Festival '98). The computer program, written in Linux, listens to the audio output and performs a spectral analysis of the sound quality. It then either keeps the existing array of stations or distributes new channels to the loudspeakers as necessary. Each radio has 40 channels stored in memory which are available for the computer selection process. The loudspeakers are mounted on 3 meter poles placed 4 meters apart beside the path to the Brucknerhaus.
 |
Equipment:
|
| RADIATION Demonstration Sound
Hear a simulation of the installation on Real Audio |
Email me by clicking on the rotating Email-Symbol on the left - or copy the following addresses into your personal Email-program: [email protected] In case your Email gets rejected try again and leave me a note on my guestbook! |