Shortwave Collective

May 31, 2025 @ 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM GMT+1 , Room 2 Add to Calendar

Registration

Build an Open Wave-Receiver with Shortwave Collective

Come and make a radio receiver with us! Open Wave-Receivers are self-powered radio receivers built from commonly available components that allow us to hear what’s happening in the invisible electromagnetic world around us.

The design for the Open Wave-Receiver, initially based on foxhole radios and crystal sets proliferating in the 1940s, has been adapted and refined by members and workshop participants over years of experimentation and knowledge-sharing.

No experience necessary. Our workshops have a feminist ethos and are designed as inclusive spaces to question and create together.

We encourage you to bring / scavenge some scraps to customise your radio:

  • Something flat and non-conductive, around A5 size.

  • A tube (also non-conductive), the size and shape of a toilet paper tube.

  • Small pieces of metal or mineral.

  • We'll have audio devices on hand to test with, but feel free to bring one of your own.

Shortwave Collective is an international, feminist artist group, interested in creative uses of radio. We meet regularly to discuss feminist approaches to amateur radio and the radio spectrum as artistic material, sharing resources, considering DIY approaches and inclusive structures.

Shortwave Collective

Shortwave Collective is an international group of creative practitioners from various backgrounds and disciplines (sound and radio art, activism, social science, media and artistic research) brought together by an interest 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.