Portfolio > Human Chain Acting as a Radio Antenna

Human Chain Acting as a Radio AntennaInstallation
2017

Here you can hear some outtakes of the 10min looped broadcast. In the installation, there was more interference from the radios themselves. When viewers approached the radios, they would tune in and out between broadcast and static.

The broadcasts were read by 4 different voices in English, Russian, Norwegian and Arabic.
Texts written by Nora Adwan and Kjersti Sundland

Installation: Two radios, melted copper, external speakers, benches, galena crystals.
Photograph:

Magnor´s Place, 2017, Lofoten
80x80cm C-print
Exhibited with the rest of the installation as a device to position the work in the arctic region.

Exhibited at TagTeam Studios, Bergen, Norway 2017

Extracts from 10min broadcast:
“Transmitted elusive linguistic seeds produce
bitter fruits in the community of minds. The voice,
of a nation, but whose unity? I find myself seeing
my neighbours shrouded in suspicious shadows.
My new vocabulary finds a place for them. Ideas
catchy as a the tune you can’t quite remember,
but cant forget. Half a phrase, repeating. Repetition,
convincing, playing on your fears and unity
in the face of adversity”

“Searching for my favourite song, I would stumble
on strange sounds, well, different languages,
strange sounds to a child’s ear. I found people
on walkie talkies, people speaking in code, police
perhaps, and every kind of static and white noise
with the occasional voice, half a word breaking through.

I imagined shipwrecks, police chases, messages send
for me to decrypt. There was a world of possibilities
in the static crackle, the point between stations,
timeless, nationless, but not empty.”

“Stories circulated in the air, music is another kind
of story. The sound of an era, a moment, a
collective thought passing or a new idea
coming around again. Method and randomness,
technology and nature working to disrupt and
share simultaneously. The repeated familiar with
the possibility of the taste of another world breaking through.”