²           2022
           radio installation

steel, transmitter, media player, microphone, battery, cables, hairs (500 x 150 x 100 cm)

The Radio Rattler is speculative technology and biology, spectral sculpture and interference platform.

This being tells of a time, when biology and technology follow their own ways

of change, radically far away from humans. Perhaps the Radio Rattler once was a radio that moved on from its human-given purpose to become self-paced. Feeling the electro-magnetic radiation in various bandwidths, it somewhen decided to transmit and interfere with its surroundings, possibly out of a whimsey. It doesn’t see or hear in a human way and so the Radio Rattler also strangely abandoned its individual way of being. It can only be by transmitting and receiving, thus forming a node in a vast spectral sculpture of radio waves. As radio once was an idealist socialist dream of connecting people through space and time, the Radio Rattler is retro-fitting the past into a future that already happened. By neglecting all hierarchies and licensings in the radio space it reduces radio to its roots of an egalitarian connecting space - and reviving hopes for a radio-based utopia.

The work effectively functions as a pirate radio station, capable of hijacking the UHF frequency band in a 10 square kilometre area, depending on topology of the landscape and position of the antenna. In Vienna it was used to interfere with the Ö3 station, by transmitting the manifesto of several civil movements to probably hundreds or even thousands of radio listeners in the inner city of Vienna.