Shortwave Radio Workshop

Shortwave Collective is an international group of 10 people from various backgrounds and disciplines interested in feminist practices and the radio spectrum. As a collective, we have a desire to learn together and to open a space to learn together-with-others as equal non-experts. We spend time in each other’s company making, testing, listening and sharing; sometimes ‘failing’, but more often laughing our way into serendipitous results that lead us to new practices and new situated ways of listening. Part of our feminist ethos is ‘learning through doing’. This is a way to de-mystify aspects of technology, which enables us to share our experiences more easily with each other, and with others. The collective’s approach aims to create an inclusive, collaborative, tech-based learning environment, one which acknowledges and attends to gendered education gaps and one that purposefully removes potential hurdles, such as unexplained components lists that assume knowledge.

I think we are making an open wave receiver which is soooo cool, as I havent been made any past of the years… They share with us radio recipes, inviting us to search for transmissions and experience the radio spectrum in new and surprising ways. Unfortunately, when we hooking up our radios in special sites around Elephant, it does not pick up much signals:(

This is a work by Jeremy Kent doing MA. We are encouraged to interact with the equipment and tune into different radio frequencies which is interesting.

In my holiday, I also contacted with Ray on radio workshops, retro radio and the repair of radios:

My interest in radio began when I was five years old. I was walking with my grandmother in the woods behind my home when I came across an old radio dumped in the bushes. I lugged it home, with the help of my grandmother, and pulled it to bits in the garden.

My interest had been fired so, when I left school at fourteen, I went into radio and television servicing. Gaining my City and Guilds of London Institute certificate in radio and TV servicing, I loved all aspects of radio, television and electronics. I became a radio amateur, my call sign is G4NSJ, and built my own transmitters and various other equipment.

As time moved on and technology forged ahead, I began to think about the good old days when radios had valves and lovely wooden cabinets. Then, a friend gave me an old radio, and I spent many hours restoring it.