Shaping the æther

In 2021, I was invited by Valérie Perrin to create the exhibition Shaping the Æther at Espace Multimédia Gantner in the Territoire de Belfort. The project allowed me to invite around twenty artists, activists, and collectives whose work seemed important and essential to me in the field of radioart.

Five historical or previously unseen works by Dinah Bird & Jean-Philippe Renoult, Julien Clauss, Joyce Hinterding, Nicolas Montgermont, and the ΠNode collective were shown in the exhibition spaces; While the collective video installation On: Transmission, created for the occasion, provided a space for speech, sound, and image by Anna Friz, Tetsuo Kogawa, Christina Kubisch, Victor Mazón Gardoqui, Mobile Radio (Sarah Washington & Knut Aufermann), Sisters Akousmatica (Julia Drouhin & Philippa Stafford), Juliette Volcler, Franz Xaver, Carl.Y, and Elisabeth Zimmermann.

In its century-long existence, radio has gone from being a technological and cultural revolution to a household commodity and even an almost obsolete means of communication. Yet, beyond the familiarity of the radio set, the mysteries of radiation unfold endlessly: an electromagnetic æther once attributed with nothing less than the power to hold the world together, and whose extent of interaction with the universe, from the atomic scale to that of the cosmos, is now a little better understood.

Our bodies, it is true, are very poorly equipped to perceive electromagnetic waves. Our eyes translate only a tiny fraction of the spectrum into color, while their speed and vibratory nature remain elusive to us. Yet technological exploitation has made waves ubiquitous. Transmitted by our phones, computers, microwave ovens, satellites, or controlling the drones that monitor us, they permeate our physical existence, organize our social lives, and produce the media and communication reality of our world.

Shaping the Æther brings together artists for whom radio is not just a vehicle for sound production. They question transmission, approach radiation as a material in its own right, and undertake to explore waves, reveal them, or sculpt them. Taking advantage of the vibratory kinship of electromagnetic manifestations with electrical circulation or acoustic excitations, it is through sounds or images that we are offered sensory access to the æther, and that we find ourselves confronted with the paradox of a phenomenon that is both natural and mediatic.

The forms these artists propose thus contribute to materializing an ecology of signals, and reveal to what extent the electromagnetic spectrum is also a political territory: a media ecosystem whose resources are prey to capitalist extraction and privatization, but which also conceals zones of freedom, wastelands, and spaces of resistance.

[The two videos featured on this page are respectively: On:Transmission, the collaborative video created for the exhibition; and a virtual tour of the exhibition, presented by me.]