Signal & Message

Messages are an inescapable part of our environment: from billboards and a 24/7 news cycle in urban centers, to shortwave signals reaching the remotest parts of the globe. These messages shape public discourse and provide a context for how we see the world around us. By tightly controlling their use, governments and cooperations have been successful in limiting and/or trivializing public discourse on important issues. Signal & Message seeks to expose the physical workings of the medium and deconstructs its messages from within the technology itself. In linguistic terms, I create a type of technological poetry that plays with the grammar of the technology to create extra-linguistic meaning.

The ubiquity of current technology can hide the role it plays in shaping what gets said, who hears it and ultimately the power structures behind the messages. Since shortwave and passive radios are seen as relics of past technology, parsing message and medium – to see and question the interplay between signal and message – is an accessible analogy to our current digital mediums.

Unlike modern radio receivers a simple passive receivers allow the listener to get closer to the signal source itself. Several stations can be heard simultaneously drifting in and out of tune, overlapping, intermodulating and ultimately collapsing the carefully constructed narratives. In real-time, the radio waves weave their own stories – a collage of disparate, sometimes conflicting world views.