Community Radio

Kelley O’Leary

#slow wave radio

[she/they] I am an artist and educator based in the Bay Area. My work explores the physicality of the internet through the perspective of an archeologist of the future, offering speculative artifacts and documentation to reveal hidden geographies embedded within cyberspace and pointing towards the immensity of Earth’s extraction across multiple temporalities.

kelleyeoleary.com ✻

@kelley__oleary

#reflections

Learning through making alongside other artists and thinkers who are interested and deeply invested in these topics has been a really enriching and heart-quenching experience. I love to learn through doing and making mistakes, and thrived in these weekly gatherings in community. I feel inspired and empowered by both the technical skills I developed in this class as well as the depth of dialogue we engaged in as a class. This class in particular lent itself to community and knowledge-sharing and I am excited to continue being in conversation with this collective classroom in the future[s].

#class project

My project is to host my own website for an online radio station . Two collaborators Tino Gonzales, Brian Bartz and I recently created a hyperlocal radio station in SF 87.8fm Slow Wave Radio. It reaches a radius of about a half mile. We had it installed at Pallas Gallery on Geary and Van Ness during a month-long installation/residency/show called Slow Connection. We engaged with the physical infrastructure of the gallery space as well- opening up a crawlspace door on the floor, lighting it from below and covering it with a plexiglass museum case, and livestreaming the sky above the gallery. The radio station broadcast live sounds of the space that we collected from EMF readers-we picked up static and feedback from the electric wiring, our cell phones, the CRT TVs… and also other radio frequencies (ghostly talk radio voices coming out of the walls) to re-broadcast out. We are interested in tapping into inaudible-to-humans frequencies and turning the invisible audio landscape of the space inside out. We also invited folks to call our hotline (my cell voicemail) and leave dedications, song requests, poetry, ramblings, etc. to be broadcast on the airwaves. Now the show is done but we wanted a way to continue the radio station because it was so fun and had potential to grow in weird ways. We talked about doing it online but I was conflicted, I really treasured the physicality, geography and transparency of the radio transmitter and its short reach. I think hosting the website with my own server and building the website from scratch is an interesting way to have a larger reach for experimentation but maintain physicality. I'm currently working on the website and am learning to do it with HTML, which, is delightfully and surprisingly similar to my art practice that involves collection, collaboration and reassembling. This first part of the project for me has been largely technical with quite a sizable learning curve, which is EXCITING. Facing the intimidation of computing is peeling back the curtain and discovering new tools and materials. At this time in my practice I am looking to expand my digital literacy in order to more immediately imagine post-capitalist futures of the network.

A white cardboard box with yellow and blue wires protruding from it sits on a shelf near an electrical outlet with two cords plugged in.

#ideal futures of class project

#memories/quotes/stuff that stuck