Selena Savić (ed.) Radio Explorations Media Studies Volume 112 SelenaSavić is a trained architect and an assistant professor for the protohistory of Artificial Intelligence andmachines in the arts at the University of Amsterdam. Af- ter completing her PhD at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and an SNSF- funded postdoc at Technische Universität Wien, she worked at the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW as the Head of the Make/Sense PhD programme. Her re- search interests animate a practice at the intersection of computational processes and posthumanist and postcolonial critique of technology. Selena Savić (ed.) Radio Explorations Architectonic Studies of Electromagnetic Milieux Research for this book has been carried out with support of the Spark grant num- ber 190310 by the Swiss National Science Foundation, for the project Negentropic Explorations of Radio.The publication was produced with generous financial sup- port from the Swiss National Science Foundation through the Open Access grant number 22289. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek TheDeutscheNationalbibliothek lists this publication in theDeutscheNationalbib- liografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at https://dnb.dn b.de/ This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (BY) license, which means that the text may be remixed, transformed and built upon and be copied and redistributed in any medium or format even commercially, provided credit is given to the author. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Creative Commons license terms for re-use do not apply to any content (such as graphs, figures, photos, excerpts, etc.) not original to the Open Access publication and further permission may be required from the rights holder. The obligation to research and clear permission lies solely with the party re-using the material. First published in 2024 by transcript Verlag, Bielefeld © Selena Savić (ed.) Cover layout: Maria Arndt, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Selena Savić Proofread: Matthias Müller Printed by: Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH,Wetzlar https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 Print-ISBN: 978-3-8376-7337-1 PDF-ISBN: 978-3-8394-7337-5 ISSN of series: 2569-2240 eISSN of series: 2702-8984 Printed on permanent acid-free text paper. https://dnb.dnb.de/ https://dnb.dnb.de/ https://dnb.dnb.de/ https://dnb.dnb.de/ https://dnb.dnb.de/ https://dnb.dnb.de/ https://dnb.dnb.de/ https://dnb.dnb.de/ https://dnb.dnb.de/ https://dnb.dnb.de/ https://dnb.dnb.de/ https://dnb.dnb.de/ https://dnb.dnb.de/ https://dnb.dnb.de/ https://dnb.dnb.de/ https://dnb.dnb.de/ https://dnb.dnb.de/ https://dnb.dnb.de/ https://dnb.dnb.de/ https://dnb.dnb.de/ https://dnb.dnb.de/ https://dnb.dnb.de/ https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473375 Tomy electromagnetic companions with attitude   Contents Acknowledgements ......................................................... 11 Introducing Radio Architectonic Explorations of Radio Selena Savić ................................................................. 15 Interviews Nature of Radio Signals Interview with Douglas Kahn .................................................27 SIGID Wiki Archival and Knowledge Practices Interview with Carl Colena ....................................................47 On Technicity of Listening Technicity of Radio Signal Transmissions Carl Colena .................................................................. 61 Digital Literacy and one of its Characters Miro Roman ................................................................. 69 Characterizing Aural Experiences Simone Conforti ............................................................. 83 Data Observatories Data Observatory: Descriptions Selena Savić and Yann Patrick Martins........................................ 91 Data Observatory: Projections Selena Savić and Yann Patrick Martins....................................... 95 On Rewriting Networks The Art of Networking Sarah Grant ................................................................. 101 Cryptographic Rewriting across Domains Roberto Bottazzi ............................................................ 109 Navigating across Galaxies of Concepts Miro Roman ................................................................. 131 Post-Scriptum: Radio Otherwise Sonic Symbiosis Beyond the Symbolic Lisa Müller-Trede............................................................ 137 The Urban, The Classified, the Coupled Selena Savić ................................................................143 Pixels and Bandwidth: On Imaginaries of Travel in Data Selena Savić ................................................................153 References Contributors ............................................................... 171 Bibliography ............................................................... 177 Acknowledgements This book is the result of many conversations, some of which are docu- mented as its contributions, andmany others that happened before and during the work on Negentropic Explorations of Radio project. I would like to thank the contributors for their generosity andpatience inworkingon text that comes out of the meetings and interviews. Among them,Miro Roman and Carl Colena provided much needed support in theoretical knowledge and practical computational techniques for understanding self-organizing maps and electromagnetic signals. Vahid Moosavi pro- vided invaluable expertise when it came to programming self-organiz- ingmaps. I am grateful to Vera Bühlmann for inspiringme to think and read about categories and classes, feminist new materialism and abun- dance in digital data. I am indebted to the team of Critical Media Lab IXDM at the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW for hosting this project. Finally, without the numerous contributors to the SIGID wiki who shared their recordings,observations, andknowledge of radio com- munications this research would not have been possible. To Gordan Savičić, my principal co-thinker in everything that has to do with computers and life, I cannot express my gratitude. He was the one to pointme towards the SIGIDwiki.He alsomade it possible forme to attend the long project meetings during the global pandemic. I am incredibly grateful tomy children for being an endless source of fun and play, which made every day joyful, after all. Introducing Radio Architectonic Explorations of Radio Selena Savić Introduction The book Radio Explorations engages with digital data on radio signals to trace the entanglements of nature and culture in this electromagnetic medium.The wider scope of this effort is to challenge the foundational essentialization of opposites in modern conceptions of the world – body-mind, nature–culture, matter-information, one and the other – and to do that by exposing the necessity of an intersectional perspective on technology. Radio signals do not easily fit the categories: they can be ’natural’ (i.e., solar storms) and ’cultural’ (i.e., telecommunications); they are ’immaterial’ and yet able to transport information across space. This book is the result of a practice-based exploration of digital and computational processes, materiality of radio signals and the promise of data self-organization. Rooted partly in practice of experimental de- sign, and partly in feminist new materialism and intersectionality, this research reimagines what it means to know radio signals, that is, to ar- ticulate anarchitectonicposition engagingwith theirmaterial, informa- tional, mediating, political and social aspects. While this research can claimnone of the academic fields it visits as its own, it seeks to frame the problem of the conceptualization of radio signals as an interdisciplinary problem that relates and connects different disciplines, without reduc- ing them to one dominant view. The diversity of contributions in the present volume demonstrates the importance of intersectional perspec- tives on radio signals, digital archives, and technical artefactsmore gen- erally. Radio cannot be known through engineering knowledge alone, 16 Introducing Radio nor can it be reduced to a singular disciplinary perspective. InData Fem- inism, Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein1 engage with intersec- tional analysis of the ways in which systems for data collection and clas- sificationperpetuateoppression.They recognize an initial impasse: tobe put to use, data must be classified in some way, as Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star pointed out2.Once the systemworks, it becomes ‘natu- ralized’. To question classification is a feminist concern: how are people divided in categories by age, gender, race, place of birth or postal code? The collection of texts presented here documents the encounter of invited artists, architects and scholars at two research meetings held as part of the research project Negentropic Explorations of Radio3 (2020–21). This collection is complemented by two interviewswhich extend the per- spective on radio between technical expertise of telecommunication and artistic concerns for the materiality of energy.The starting point for the discussions and reflections in this volume is the experimental design engagement with digital information, which itself starts from a digital archive, the Signal Identification Guide (SIGID).4The SIGID wiki docu- ments listening practices of a community of radio amateurs and enthu- siasts.Recordings of radio signals ’in thewild’ can capture the interest of a telecommunications engineer, a media archaeologist, a data scientist, an ecologist, a historian of science and technology. The outcome of the experimental work with the data are two ’data observatories’ which pro- 1 Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein, Data Feminism (Cambridge, Mas- sachusetts: MIT Press, 2020). 2 Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things out: Classification and Its Consequences, 1st paperback edition, Inside Technology (Cambridge, Mas- sachusetts London, England: The MIT Press, 2000). 3 Documentation of the SNSF-funded project Negentropic Explorations of Radio (SNSF 190310) is available at: http://radioexplorations.ch (accessed 11.12.2021). 4 The SIGID guide wiki is a collection of digital recordings of radio signals cap- tured ‘in the wild’ by the wiki contributors. Information on the signals is gath- ered mainly for the purpose of identifying signals by this community of radio amateurs. All recordings and descriptions are available here: https://www.sigi dwiki.com/ (accessed 11.12.2021). http://radioexplorations.ch http://radioexplorations.ch http://radioexplorations.ch http://radioexplorations.ch http://radioexplorations.ch http://radioexplorations.ch http://radioexplorations.ch http://radioexplorations.ch http://radioexplorations.ch http://radioexplorations.ch http://radioexplorations.ch http://radioexplorations.ch http://radioexplorations.ch http://radioexplorations.ch http://radioexplorations.ch http://radioexplorations.ch http://radioexplorations.ch http://radioexplorations.ch http://radioexplorations.ch http://radioexplorations.ch http://radioexplorations.ch http://radioexplorations.ch http://radioexplorations.ch http://radioexplorations.ch http://radioexplorations.ch http://radioexplorations.ch http://radioexplorations.ch http://radioexplorations.ch http://radioexplorations.ch https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/Signal_Identification_Guide https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/Signal_Identification_Guide https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/Signal_Identification_Guide https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/Signal_Identification_Guide https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/Signal_Identification_Guide https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/Signal_Identification_Guide https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/Signal_Identification_Guide https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/Signal_Identification_Guide https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/Signal_Identification_Guide https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/Signal_Identification_Guide https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/Signal_Identification_Guide https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/Signal_Identification_Guide https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/Signal_Identification_Guide https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/Signal_Identification_Guide https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/Signal_Identification_Guide https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/Signal_Identification_Guide https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/Signal_Identification_Guide https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/Signal_Identification_Guide https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/Signal_Identification_Guide https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/Signal_Identification_Guide https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/Signal_Identification_Guide https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/Signal_Identification_Guide https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/Signal_Identification_Guide https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/Signal_Identification_Guide https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/Signal_Identification_Guide https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/Signal_Identification_Guide https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/Signal_Identification_Guide https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/Signal_Identification_Guide https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/Signal_Identification_Guide https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/Signal_Identification_Guide Selena Savić: Architectonic Explorations of Radio 17 pose intuitive ways to orient oneself across different aspects of digital data: categories, features, similarity. Encountering radio signals In the summer of 2009, at a workshop onData Forensics andUrbanEM in- terventions at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin, participants learned to use open-source Wi-Fi network analysis tools and build can- tennas from scrap material. Artists Martin Howse and Julian Oliver who led the workshop, problematized the ‘leaking’ of private, secured net- works into public space, and access to networks more generally. Howse and Oliver were active within an artistic scene that explored networked media and communication through hacking, visualization and playful interference. As one of the participants at theHKWworkshop, I became interested in materiality of wireless networks and other radio signals, which gradually developed into the research that addresses materiality of signals as data and energies, discussed in this book. A couple of years after the HKW encounter, an important discovery hit network-aficionado communities. Engineers gathered around the open-source mobile communications project (osmocom)5 found a way to turn small USB dongles, made for digital television (DTV) reception, into computer-based radio scanners. The discovery of this affordable software-defined radio (SDR) opened the specialized domain of elec- tromagnetic engineering and research to tech-savvy radio amateurs. The use of RTL-SDR proliferated and a community formed around it, curious to explore the radio space. The struggle to access and understand the propagation ofWi-Fi net- works lead Carl Colena, a computer engineer and a student at the City College of New York at that time, to purchase a small electronic device 5 The project documents the way DVB-T dongles based on the Realtek RTL2832U can be used as a cheap SDR, as described here: https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/ wiki/rtl-sdr. https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr https://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr 18 Introducing Radio made for digital television reception (DTV) to understand theWi-Fi en- vironment at the college campus and orient himself towards stronger signals.6 Gradually, his interest in radio signals lead him to become one of the main contributors and eventually the administrator of the Signal Identification Guide (SIGID) wiki website, which documents radio sig- nals recorded ‘in the wild’. The SIGID wiki project dates back to 2014, whenCarl Laufer, the owner of the RTL-SDR radio amateur blog, started a centralized database of radio signals that could be recorded using this accessible equipment. The SIGID wiki website is a collection of all the information about radio signals that is held among a community of am- ateurs and enthusiasts, in form of a digital archive. It includes digital recordings of signals, aswell as textual descriptions andmeta-data in an online database.This digital archive is the starting point and the source of data for radio explorations discussed in this book. Encountering data: the architectonic disposition of a dataset Different domains of theory and practice related to radio and telecom- munications would approach the systematization of radio signals knowledge eachwith their own specific set of questions. An information studies scholar might focus on protocols andmodulations, ways to keep track of different properties of signals and organize this knowledge in the archive.A data feministmight problematize these archival practices, looking into the way differences among signals have been naturalized (or not), as well as the presence of certain types of transmissions and certain archivists in the archive. A data visualization scholar could bring forward the importance of paying attention to methods that transform unobservable phenomena, such as radio, into visual systems that give us access to relationships between data on signals.What can recordings of radio signals tell us that we do not already know in theory? And how could we move across these different domains, without trading 6 See interview with Carl Colena in this volume. Selena Savić: Architectonic Explorations of Radio 19 the depth and span of expert knowledge for general understanding of communication technologies? Large datasets form the basis of patterns and predictions identified in algorithmic operations of contemporary computational practices. In an article about historical technologies of information management, Shannon Mattern questioned if patterned data can ever be considered meaningful information. She noted that data, “in both its digital and analogue forms, has long been transformed into spectacle and pack- aged as a critical tool for cultural transformation.”7 What else, besides patterns or spectacle, might we see in data on radio signals? Machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence are oftendis- cussed in termof blackboxes in engineering circles today.The blackbox ar- ticulation currently in circulation is rooted in post-World War II cyber- netics and psychology research,where it was used to generalize a notion of systems so that the effects couldbeobserved independently fromtheir operation on an established consistency of inputs and outputs. Science and technology studies cultivatedan interest in theblackboxof scientific facts, notably in thewritings of Bruno Latour such as his collection of es- says entitledPandora’sHope.8With theboxopenedandabsolute truthout of sight, Latour suggested, the only thing to do is to go deeper to reach the hope at the bottom. Importantly, Latour did not propose to simply smashblackboxesopenwithhammers.FelixStalderpoignantly reminds us: “Treating complex systems as black boxes is a way of reducing com- plexity and this is often a very sensible thing to do.”9 Still, he contin- ued,we candistinguish between an old and a newkind of black: between systems whose logic is accessible to specialized knowledge and systems whose elements are non-transparent even to the people who built them. 7 Shannon Mattern, “The Spectacle of Data: A Century of Fairs, Fiches, and Fan- tasies,” Theory, Culture & Society 37, no. 7–8 (December 2020): p 136, https://doi. org/10.1177/0263276420958052. 8 Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999). 9 Felix Stalder, “The Deepest of Black. AI as Social Power,” Entangled Realities – Liv- ing with Artificial Intelligence Exhibition Catalogue, May 9, 2019, http://felix.open flows.com/node/539 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420958052 http://felix.openflows.com/node/539 http://felix.openflows.com/node/539 http://felix.openflows.com/node/539 http://felix.openflows.com/node/539 http://felix.openflows.com/node/539 http://felix.openflows.com/node/539 http://felix.openflows.com/node/539 http://felix.openflows.com/node/539 http://felix.openflows.com/node/539 http://felix.openflows.com/node/539 http://felix.openflows.com/node/539 http://felix.openflows.com/node/539 http://felix.openflows.com/node/539 http://felix.openflows.com/node/539 http://felix.openflows.com/node/539 http://felix.openflows.com/node/539 http://felix.openflows.com/node/539 http://felix.openflows.com/node/539 http://felix.openflows.com/node/539 http://felix.openflows.com/node/539 http://felix.openflows.com/node/539 http://felix.openflows.com/node/539 http://felix.openflows.com/node/539 http://felix.openflows.com/node/539 http://felix.openflows.com/node/539 http://felix.openflows.com/node/539 http://felix.openflows.com/node/539 http://felix.openflows.com/node/539 http://felix.openflows.com/node/539 http://felix.openflows.com/node/539 http://felix.openflows.com/node/539 http://felix.openflows.com/node/539 http://felix.openflows.com/node/539 http://felix.openflows.com/node/539 http://felix.openflows.com/node/539 http://felix.openflows.com/node/539 http://felix.openflows.com/node/539 http://felix.openflows.com/node/539 http://felix.openflows.com/node/539 http://felix.openflows.com/node/539 http://felix.openflows.com/node/539 20 Introducing Radio Theview of the process gets lost among layers of computational routines initiated with a couple of parameters and goals towards which to opti- mize the ‘learning’ or ‘training’ process.The question is, what should we do with these systems, given that they cannot be simply opened, while slowly creeping into every aspect of anticipation,withoutmuchaccount- ability. The method of working with digital data discussed in this book is inspired by the notion of architectonic disposition, articulated by Vera Bühlmann in Posthuman Glossary.10 This method implies a volumetric thinking model that puts nature (the given or potential), the observable (a layout, a ground) and the viewing operation (perspective) into a vol- umetric relationship of proportionality. This method is inspired by a historical experimental approach of the ancient Greek mathematician Thales of Miletus to geometric measurement. Michel Serres described in the Origin of Geometry11 how Thales measured the height of the Great Pyramid of Cheops.He established a proportionality between the height of a wooden stake and the height of the pyramid through the lengths of their shadows cast in the sand, establishing a space of similarity. The pyramid could not be measured directly, not only due to physical difficulty, but also because it would be considered a gesture of sacrilege to the pharaoh. Having no access to the pyramid itself, Thales turned to the sun to speak about it: “he asks the object in motion to provide a constant flow of information about the object at rest.”12 Consider again the black box. As Latour pointed out, wemight open it but find almost nothing there.13 Serres’ figure of the Harlequin, the Emperor of the Moon, is even more explicit: Harlequin’s composite body dressed in a thick layer of coats, eachmade of thousand pieces and 10 Vera Bühlmann, “Architectonic Disposition: Ichnography, Scaenography, Or- thography,” in PosthumanGlossary, ed. Rossi Braidotti andMariaHlavajova (Lon- don: Bloomsbury, 2018). 11 Michel Serres, Hermes. Literature, Science, Philosophy, ed. Josué V. Harari and David F. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982) see Part II, chap- ter 10. The Origin of Geometry, pp 125–133. 12 Serres, p 87. 13 Latour, Pandora’s Hope. Selena Savić: Architectonic Explorations of Radio 21 colours of clothes stitched together,withstands anymethodical analysis: no amount of undressing will reveal its true nature.14 Radio explorations and materiality of information The book and the project Architectonic Explorations of Radio demonstrate ways to work with abstract datasets, computational training processes, and to understand situated yet invisible radio transmissions.The trans- missions are situated by virtue of being recorded by specific people, on specific locations on Earth, and included in the database on radio sig- nals, SIGID wiki. A wiki user can compare a signal they recorded in the wild to signals organized in the database, using some form of classifica- tion – according to the frequency band, or broadcast category – looking for amatch.This identification process relies on profound and often im- plicit knowledge of signal engineering and experience of having ‘heard’ or ‘seen’ a signal before. One of the premises of this book is to question the way we order things.This builds on the well-knownwork by Susan Leigh Star and Ge- offrey Bowker15 who saw classification as essential to any working in- frastructure. With an interest in difference, or similarity, between the way people and machines perform intuitive pattern recognition, they propose a method for re-ordering digital information. This method is based on the development and use of data observatories to organize and explore concretemanifestations of radio signals, using the self-organiz- ingmap (SOM) – an unsupervisedmachine learning algorithm.The dig- ital observatories enable the complex, mediated observation of radio sig- 14 Michel Serres, The Troubadour of Knowledge, Studies in Literature and Science (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). 15 Susan Leigh Star, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure,” American Behavioral Sci- entist 43, no. 3 (November 1, 1999): 377–91, https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764992 1955326; Bowker and Star, Sorting Things Out. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326; 22 Introducing Radio nals through publicly available web-based interfaces.16We can approach a data observatorymore like an instrument rather than a tool – an instru- ment tomeasure and performmultidimensional information. Architect and researcher Miro Roman, one of the contributors of this book, ar- ticulated such an instrument as a ‘double articulation’ of algorithm and data17, loosely based on Deleuze’s and Guattari’s notion.18 The instru- ment brings into relationship the person playing it, the radio signals in the environment, and the digital data from the SIGID database. It is a partial and engaged method that brings out different voices from the dataset. This book does not seek to lay open the black box of machinic reason performed by the SOM algorithm.Rather, it inquires into the possibility of “digital literacy”: a sensorial and cognitive coupling with digital in- formation which enables one to play with it like an instrument. Digital literacy is aboutpracticing intentionality: articulatingways to indexdata by a situationally meaningful criterion. This book and research project aim to facilitate speculation on the connectionbetweensignal representationand technical communication protocols, by shifting criteria of similarity from taxonomical and instru- mental (e.g. used in military) or physical (e.g. high or low frequency), to properties shared across all signals – such as the probability of silence or noise in the signal. If the challenge today is not to separate artificial from natural or information from noise in banal or fixed ways, it is in the interaction with this information that we should look for the ways to articulate productive differences. 16 The two data observatories developed in this project are available online, as De- scriptions https://radioexplorations.ch/descriptions/ and Projections https://radi oexplorations.ch/projections/ (accessed 21.06.2022). 17 Miro Roman, Play Among Books: A Symposium on Architecture and Information Spelled in Atom-Letters, Applied Virtuality Book Series 17 (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2022). 18 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari,AThousand Plateaus: Capitalismand Schizophre- nia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) see chapter 3. 10,000 B.C.: The Geology of Morals (Who Does the Earth Think It Is?) pp. 39–75. https://radioexplorations.ch/descriptions/ https://radioexplorations.ch/descriptions/ https://radioexplorations.ch/descriptions/ 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https://radioexplorations.ch/projections/ https://radioexplorations.ch/projections/ https://radioexplorations.ch/projections/ https://radioexplorations.ch/projections/ https://radioexplorations.ch/projections/ https://radioexplorations.ch/projections/ https://radioexplorations.ch/projections/ https://radioexplorations.ch/projections/ https://radioexplorations.ch/projections/ https://radioexplorations.ch/projections/ https://radioexplorations.ch/projections/ https://radioexplorations.ch/projections/ https://radioexplorations.ch/projections/ https://radioexplorations.ch/projections/ https://radioexplorations.ch/projections/ https://radioexplorations.ch/projections/ https://radioexplorations.ch/projections/ Selena Savić: Architectonic Explorations of Radio 23 Structure of the book The special approach to radio signals, digital information and their ma- teriality is introduced in a discussion with two interviewees: Douglas Kahn, the author of two books on the use of radio and energymore gen- erally in the arts19 and Carl Colena, the administrator of the SIGID wiki website. Douglas Kahn talked about the phenomenon of natural radio, its use in the arts as well as in climate science. Carl Colena introduced the background of the SIGID wiki project, related listening and knowl- edge practices and the community’s archival strategies. The second chapter presents essays that emanated from the research meeting on Technicity of Listening – knowledge, tools and approaches to digital data.Three invited guests,Carl Colena (SIGIDwiki),MiroRoman (CAAD,ETHZ) andSimoneConforti (IRCAM)presented their current re- search into archives of radio signals, images, books andmusic, aswell as strategies for articulating profiles and identities with data. The third, intermezzo chapter documents the ‘data observatories.’ They were presented as a starting point for exchanges by the research team, Selena Savić and Yann Patricks Martins. The first data observatory called Descriptions was discussed at the first workshop meeting, while the prototype of the second data observatory, Projections, was discussed in terms of rewriting radio signals through different domains, such as music or sounds of nature. The fourth chapter presents essays originating from the second research meeting, Rewriting the Networks. Together with three invited guests, Sarah Grant (Weise 7 and Kunsthochschule Kassel), Roberto Bottazzi (The Bartlett) andMiro Roman (CAAD, ETHZ), we explored the notion of rewriting in context of telecommunications and beyond: how to translate between domains, such as the natural environment and network infrastructures, digital and spatial, books and architecture. 19 Douglas Kahn, Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Douglas Kahn, ed., Energies in the Arts (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2019). 24 Introducing Radio The final, post-scriptum chapter presents the findings and out- looks from the project, joined by an invited contribution by artist and researcher Lisa Müller-Trede. Her work is concerned with algorithmic order of differencewithinmerged breath signals.Next toMüller-Trede’s essay, this chapter presents the author’s approach to understanding radio signal materialities and offers stories and resistance instead of hard discrete data, clusters and predictions. Interviews Nature of Radio Signals Interview with Douglas Kahn Douglas Kahn is a historian and theorist, author of Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (1999), and Earth Sound Earth Signal: En- ergies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (2013). He is Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney and Professor Emeritus at both the University of California, Davis, and theUniversity of NewSouthWales, Sydney.The interview was conducted by Selena Savić in January 2021 and revised inMarch 2023 Selena Savić: Your bookEarth SoundEarth Signal1 was one of the primary sources of inspiration for the project on Radio Explorations. Your writ- ing on the way radio was heard before it was invented can be taken as the guideline for problematizing our knowledge of radio signals and the technicity of listening practices. Because radio can be ‘natural’ as in elec- tromagnetic energy emitted by lightning, it extends beyond applied en- gineering knowledge. Youmentioned, however, that it would be difficult to consider any radio signal ‘natural’ because the realignment ofweather systems and increase in extreme weather events means a reconfigura- tion of the incidence of naturally occurring emissions, as discussed in the 1999 article by Reeve and Toumi.2 Investigating correlation between global lightningactivity andglobal temperature, the authors founda sig- nificant correlation between the global increase in temperature and in 1 Douglas Kahn, Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). 2 N. Reeve and R. Toumi, “Lightning Activity as an Indicator of Climate Change,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 125, no. 555 (1999): 893–903, https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507. https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507 https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.49712555507 28 Interviews lightning activity, in the Earth’s northern hemisphere. Would you say that everything changes with global warming because all electromag- netic energy that affects the Earth is in away ‘filtered’ by our ionosphere, whose properties are changing with increasing heat? Douglas Kahn: Thenatural in natural radio denoted terrestrial radio that was not generated by humans, and it can refer to extraterrestrial radio in that respect. It was radio that could be heard and otherwise detected but not sent by anyone, radio using communications technologies but not communicating. Sensing is a better term and, indeed, so-called telecom- munications technologies in the nineteenth centurywere used bothwit- tingly andunwittingly, scientifically and aesthetically, as sensing devices within the frame of technological variability discussed in the book, that is, a technology designed for one function used for another. Early en- counters with natural radio were on the telephone where, in effect, tele- phone lines andgroundsbecameantennas before antennas.The ‘natural’ in this case was bolstered by how very low frequency (VLF) radio gen- erated by lightning and other phenomena fell into the audio-frequency range of human hearing with only simple transduction available in pre- radiophonic technologies. It was heard while listening for other things. Naturalness was retained even after radiophonic technologies, no mat- ter from where the original signal emanated with respect to normative hearing. The full spectrum electromagnetic bursts of lightning strikes gen- erate dominant forms of natural radio, travelling (transmitting) great distances, bouncing between the ionosphere high in the Earth’s at- mosphere and the surface of the Earth and, at times, catching a ride on magnetoionic flux lines out into the magnetosphere that reach out about six Earth radii into outer space, and then looping over to the op- posite hemisphere, sometimes looping back. When transduced, these huge arcs can be heard as delicate glissandi, a crisp little whistle to the thunder’s basso profundo. They are unlikely upper register products of the massive amounts of energy released with lightning. They can travel in the magnetosphere from one ‘conjugate point’ to another in the opposite hemisphere, a kind of conjugal planetary eroticism. At Interview with Douglas Kahn: Nature of Radio Signals 29 this very moment we stand one big spark away from gently whistling to our planetary partner, and vice versa. It is not a great relationship because they don’t talk often. The flux lines are diaphanously transient and temperamentally dependent upon geomagnetic activity and solar winds, with weather and space weather twisted into an orbital torque. Whistling at Earth magnitude has manymoving parts. The redistribution and severity ofweather events involving lightning within an anthropogenically changed climate is themain reason natural radio is less, or no longer, natural. Severity has not merely increased, as predicteddecades ago,but accelerated onoldermodels, and incidence of lightning, its spatial and temporal concentration, has changed accord- ingly. The static, sliding tones, and glissandi now have human content. Lightning’s audible anthropogenesis in radio and thunder is an astound- ing transformation. Lightning was once associated mythologically with the destructive power andmoralism of the gods; now it ismore of a self- suicidal pact or, rather, asymmetrical omnicide carried on by a tiny class that ignores the logical conclusionof its own fate.Thegods arenowbour- geois, corrupt and criminal, with a political power that has mated with and mutated lightning to create monsters. They promise everything is under control, but they are not able to control something as down to earth as lightning. They have instead gone troppo, Australian slang for goingmaddue tohot tropical conditions,DoctorMoreaus in their tropo- sphere.Their lightning makes it difficult to call this radio natural.What does the dry lightning igniting a forest rendered kindling by prolonged drought sound like, or the lightning generated by a pyrocumulus cloud fed by the forest creating its ownweather? I saw one such cloud ten kilo- metres from my home in the Blue Mountains during the recent fires in Australia. Like many I find natural radio beautiful, and I love lightning and thunder. One night where I live there was somuch lightning, for several minutes it seemed like day interrupted by flashes of darkness. I was on top a hill running home, so danger pushed it into the sublime. During thunderstorms I sometimes tune an old transistor radio between sta- tions to listen to the static bursts of lightning, which gives a feeling of being enfolded by weather beyond the horizon; as spatial experience it’s 30 Interviews muchcheaper thanwavefield synthesis,and inamuch larger space.Nev- ertheless, the beauty is like seeing a sunset and realizing its colours are due to air pollution from a factory in the region.The polluters of natural radio are global, with regional offices. Several years ago, climate mod- elling became sophisticated enough to validate climate attribution stud- ies, that is, the ability to identify sources and degrees of responsibility for extremeweather events, narrowing it to certain industrial sectors, all of which have ensembles of power populated with individuals and fam- ily estates. Oceans tighten around their island tax havens.They have not merely stigmatized the sky and its radio, they are responsible for mas- sive destruction, none of it with the old-fashioned moral authority of myth.They have removed weather events from the list of natural disas- ters, where earthquakes not caused by fracking remain. I discuss them inmy essay, “What is an Ecopath?”3 Perception can shift technically, conceptually, and experientially to statistical and turbulent means adequate to hearing the toxicity of this (certain) human content. Playing with perceptual registers is what many artists do; others shift apperception to migrate content toward the tacit. Musicians not only sink sound into muscle memory, they sink hearing. Those who do not play also perform hearing. We are already thinking about and experiencing environments dynamically, in fields and systems, to be ecological in the first place. The frenzy of statistics in AI is already salting the daily lives of many, and quantum computing will begin to range influence once it quits perpetually promising. People hear and otherwise perceive adaptively in many models. In whatever trajectory, we should be able to sense intergenerationally and render dynamic homeostasis with the planet routine. A major experiential conundrum of climate catastrophe is its latency, the delayed effects of emissions released currently, or how ecopaths murder now but hide the bodies in the future. As kids we know the latency of lightning, the distance involved until the thunder arrives. Although we don’t always 3 Douglas Kahn, “What Is an Ecopath?,” Sydney Review of Books Climate Crisis (March 3, 2020), https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/what-is-an-ecopath Interview with Douglas Kahn: Nature of Radio Signals 31 see the flash, the simultaneous static heard is beyond our sight. What is the human content, its care and corruption, across the land in the distance travelled? If music is the art of time, what of latency now that the storms have hit? SS: Thestarting point forHenri Lefebvre’s theory of rhythmanalysis had a medical connotation: it was about observing vibrations in bodily or- gans to detect anomalies. Do you think that has also changed? DK: Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis had musical inspiration tied to his abili- ties as an amateur pianist of Western art music with Mozart at the top. His short book, co-written in part by Catherine Régulier,4 was one of his last writings, so his lifelong musical loyalties would have ruled the day. Since he didn’t have time to develop or demonstrate his analysis from closer examination of the sciences and (other) cultural traditions, he defaulted to an abstract and universalist approach.He talks about the rhythms or, rather, polyrhythms of the body as a garland of rhythms, which is merely a simple gesture to what occurs. I would recommend Rhythms of Life by Russell Foster and Leon Kreitzman for starters.5 His own culturally-bound music was a triad of melody-harmony-rhythm, and he thought the third item was most neglected, so neglected that it deserved a new, dedicated branch of knowledge: rhythmanalysis. An- other triad, time-space-energy, described the cosmos, and rhythm fit in thusly: “Everywhere where there is interaction between a place, a time and an expenditure of energy there is rhythm.”6 I don’t live in that uni- verse. Among the physical and conceptual fields of energies, repetition 4 Henri Lefebvre and Catherine Régulier, “Le projet rythmanalytique,” Communi- cations 41, no. 1 (1985): 191–99, https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616. 5 Russell G. Foster and Leon Kreitzman, Rhythms of Life: The Biological Clocks That Control the Daily Lives of Every Living Thing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). 6 Russell G. Foster and Leon Kreitzman, Rhythms of Life: The Biological Clocks That Control the Daily Lives of Every Living Thing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1985.1616 32 Interviews is common but not intrinsic and plenty of places amongmymusical loy- alties where one or all ofmelody, harmony, and rhythmmay gomissing. Lefebvre’s concept appealed to Gaston Bachelard’s earlier writing on rhythmanalysis. Bachelard in turn cited as his touchstone a Lúcio Alberto Pinheiro dos Santos text known only through his quotation of it, since nobody had seen it or could find it since (that may have changed). The ‘vibrations in bodily organs’ you mention are pharmacologically manifested in his discussion of Pinheiro dos Santos’ ‘wave biology,’ a ref- erence to homeopathy. Bachelard is rightfully suspicious but suspends his doubts to explore the abstract reasoning behind it. His thoughts on rhythmanalysis in general occupy a conflicting, if not convincing, meeting ground of his philosophy of science and elemental poetics, presuming rigor of the former and license of the latter, a schism that Michel Serres pointed out in his published conversations with Bruno Latour.7 Lefebvre’s elaboration of Bachelard created its own fields of study. What his text lacked ecologically has been introduced by GordonWalker inEnergy andRhythm:Rhythmanalysis for a LowCarbonFuture,with the no- table goal for remediation through a “general principle of reconnection andreturn tonatural rhythm-energies.”8 It certainlyhas implications for design. Rhythmanalysis has also played a less practical role in cultural theory over the last decade too, where it has been coupled with ‘vibra- tional ontology,’ sound, and music. I distinguish this theory from cul- tural history in my essay “On Vibrations: Cosmographs.”9 Steve Good- man drew attention to Bachelard and Lefebvre by giving rhythmanal- ysis its own chapter in Sonic Warfare.10 It is a long way from Mozart to Goodman’s electronic dance music. Both moved into a discursive space 7 Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). 8 GordonWalker, Energy and Rhythm: Rhythmanalysis for a Low Carbon Future (Lon- don: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), p 169. 9 Douglas Kahn, “On Vibrations: Cosmographs,” Sound Studies 6, no. 1 (January 2, 2020): 14–28, https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509. 10 Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2012). https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1713509 Interview with Douglas Kahn: Nature of Radio Signals 33 that had been vacated by tropes of social harmony, frequency standing in for proportionality, and neither differ significantly from claimsmade by the Western symphonic repertoire of having privileged access to the universe. Goodman’s ‘ecology’ is free of pollution, climate disruption, species extinction, etc., which would seem required for staging grand panoramas. Moreover, having music as fundamental for rhythmanalysis seems reductive; energy positions itmore appropriately. In Bachelard’sThePsy- choanalysis of Fire, in what may be a first appeal to Pinheiro dos Santos, the concept occurs within a discussion of how the unconscious may be sought in situ in two formsof ‘primitivism,’ the familiar colonial one,and another populated by those who try to make sense of new scientific and engineering developments without the proper education, laboratories, or professional networks to do so. 11 The latter primitivism mapped an elementaryfireonto electricity that produces in themid-eighteenth cen- tury an electrical fire and forms the basis for an electrical theory of the sexes, having the general outlines of those ofWilhelmReich in the twen- tieth century derived from Freud’s libidinal energetics.12 Bachelard kin- dles his own flame explaining the thermal, kinetic, and sexual energies involved in how friction generates fire, whether flint producing a spark, rubbing sticks together long enough, in stormy winds rubbing trees to- gether to set forests ablaze, in the warmth of a caress, or the to-and- fro friction involved in sexual copulation. The repetitive routine of the tasks of rubbing finally sets the stage for passing approval of Pinheiro dos Santos’ rhythmanalysis. It seems like a stretch, but it is certainly less bizarre than Freud in Civilization and its Discontents talking about the ho- mosexuality of ‘primal man’ pissing on the phallic flames of a fire while ‘woman’ is held captive physiologically bearing ‘the hearth.’13 Apart from Bachelard’s brief speculation that it was during the prolonged ‘gentle 11 Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire, trans. Alan C. M. Ross (Boston: Bea- con Press, 1964). 12 Bachelard, pp 21–28. 13 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York, NY: Norton, 2010), Section III, footnote 3. 34 Interviews task’ of rubbing sticks together that “man learned to sing,” there was no mention of music in this field of energies.14 There is also an idealization at the crux of Lefebvre’s notion of rhythms that is no longer tenable. Ecological catastrophe hobbles it. In his attempt to get away from ‘thingness,’ he sought anchorage for rhythms in two grand cycles: the seasons and the diurnal (circadian). Without seasons only one remains. Since the circadian depends upon the rotation of the planet, and position (orbit, tilt) in relation to the sun, it has proven difficult to ruin, although it hasn’t escaped entirely: shifts of weight due tomelting glaciers and polar caps, and expansion of oceans, has resulted inminute changes to the wobble in the Earth’s axis. On the circadian embodiment by humans, Lefebvre was too early and too abstract to integrate discoveries in sensory and corporeal rhythms. During the 1990s and early 2000s the existence of a third retinal cell was established, and a greater sophistication regarding circadian cells and processes throughout the body was developed. Rods and cones had been familiar to every school kid, but intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells were unknown to everyone. These solar retinals, as I have called them, are non-imaging receptors (actually, they have a miniscule role) that are the main mechanism to entrain, that is, sluggishly synch, our bodies to the sun.They were described with increasing detail just as synching with screens became obsessional. The source of all but 1/4000 of the energy for life on Earth radiates fromthe sun. In the evolutionary biology of the eye, the sunwas enfolded from the skin in response to its radiant and ambient light. In an odd Pla- tonic way, the sun causes vision, causes time, but to see rhythm as pri- marily temporal is to forget that lived time is a spatial function of our po- sition in the solar system.Noneed for clockwork time tobe the strawdog for arguments about temporality when spatiality is absent. Solarception is the name I have given the sensory process of the internalization of the sun to locate this basic energy relation. Just as there is a way to hear sta- tistically and turbulently, I also think there is a way of transfiguring the 14 Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire, p 28. Interview with Douglas Kahn: Nature of Radio Signals 35 circadian from an autonomic to a somatic sense within an ecological ef- fort. Long distance air travel already does this. It operates multimodally in the field notion of transperception introduced in Earth Sound Earth Sig- nal. I first observed it in Henry David Thoreau hearing the sound of a train or bells over a distance, or seeing a mountain through intervening mist, and in Alvin Lucier hearing the enormous power and earth mag- nitude in the delicate glissando of a whistler, a type of natural radio. It supplements and supplants cause and effect, linearity, and indexicality found inmodels of perception and sensationwith fields, and forces with energies. Again, transperception has and can become tacit. Lucier heard differently and transperceived sensibly in themid-1960s due to geophys- ical radio science research from the previous decade. Solar retinals have had a quarter century head start. SS: It is interesting toobserve the engineering task in themediumof ra- dio telecommunication, because radio signals are not flows or highways or any sort of linear information transmission channels, but a broadcast of energy going in all directions. This requires a different paradigm of control. Radio, at the same time, was always a very controlled medium, it was about broadcasting and receiving by engineering choice. DK: I wouldn’t say paradigms of control are due to an intrinsic counter nature of radio signals. Radiation patterns are the basis of antenna de- sign and there are ways to map and estimate the ‘footprint’ of broad- casts and narrowcasts. It used to be a dark art where steel suspension bridges and regional forests were influencing factors. I remember being in New York in the early 1980s and seeing the World Trade Center tow- ers ghosted in a television image. Subtlety and precision are impressive now, and there has been a fascinating relationship between signal trans- mission with energy scavenging. It is a micro version of Tesla’s free en- ergy, yet still big enough for regulations against sapping signal strength. The patterns pertain to property rights, after all, let alone military do- minion, national sovereignty, geopolitics, and other activities. As I dis- cuss in Earth Sound Earth Signal, the surge in environmental sensing was a byproduct ofmilitary and intelligence activities during theColdWar. It 36 Interviews wasalsopart of an effort to control natural processes inweapons systems at local and planetary scales, as detailed in Jacob Darwin Hamblin’s sur- prising and sobering book, ArmingMother Nature:The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism.15 Engineering has control issues, in that its native control paradigm has issued into places where it does not belong. For example, Friedrich Kittler’s media theory was engineered, as it applied to knowledge, phi- losophy, history, literature, and media. Its importance, which is unde- niable, was both validated by and contributed to a period of digital and media technological development, and no doubt will be revivified in- creasingly with the spread of AI. However, contemporary relevance is severely limited because of the negligible roles that ecology and the sci- ences played at the core of his work. In “TheCity is aMedium,” published around the same year as US vice president Al Gore was talking about the information superhighway but before any Inconvenient Truth, Kit- tler wrote about all things related to the city as informational.16 Every- thing is informational because there is control: “whethernetworks trans- mit information (telephone, radio, television) or energy (water supply, electricity, highway), they all represent forms of information. (If only be- cause every modern energy flow requires a parallel control network.)”17 His contest with humanism had no ecological impetus, which is a prob- lem because there is no outside. Engineering put the post in his post- humanism, reinventing invention narratives in the progress of media studies and media theory founded on a fundamental sociality that had no nature. What other area of knowledge has shown such sturdy im- munity to recent critiques of anthropocentrism? Its strength was legi- ble in a media ecology with no ecological content. What is remediation now? Its strength is alsomeasured in the lateness of any challenge inme- 15 Jacob Darwin Hamblin, Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environ- mentalism (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 16 Friedrich A. Kittler, “The City is a Medium,” New Literary History 27, no. 4 (1996): 717–29. 17 Kittler, p 718. Interview with Douglas Kahn: Nature of Radio Signals 37 dia theory, only a decade ago, with Jussi Parikka’s A Geology of Media,18 John Durham Peters’The Marvellous Clouds,19 and my Earth Sound Earth Signal.20There is now no shortage. SS: Michel Serres writes on noticing the balancing polarities: there is always softness and hardness to bothmatter and information, and these are the kinds of transformations that matter is going through. This is quite interesting and also very hard tomake actionable in terms of engi- neering. DK: When I presented a talk several years ago in Copenhagen about the Earth Sound Earth Signal, I was asked how it might relate to the digital in telecommunication and computation. I didn’t have a good answer. Perhaps the expectation for expertise came from the earlier book I edited with Hannah Higgins, Mainframe Experimentalism, but that was on early computing and the arts, far from the digital we inhabit now.21 I was planning to explore the notion of survivable communications, but that project went on the back burner as I took a step back as it became evident tome the engineering default of information as data and signals needed to go upstream scientifically to its physical status to dispose it differently to ecological understandings. The decentralization of the Internet was developed under this aegis of survivable communications in a military context. It was a means to foil the efficacy of a nuclear attack by structuring backup measures into the system.There is plenty of precedent in the history of military communications. George O. Squier was an officer rising in the ranks, although he is most known, oddly, for Muzak. He looked to trees as grounds and antennas when 18 Jussi Parikka, AGeology of Media (Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). 19 John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Me- dia (Chicago; London: the University of Chicago Press, 2015). 20 Kahn, Earth Sound Earth Signal. 21 Hannah Higgins and Douglas Kahn, eds., Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts (Berkeley: University of Cali- fornia Press, 2012). 38 Interviews the soil was too dry to form a good ground for his telegraphy gear, and then researched the possibilities for trans-Atlantic wireless tree communication.22Thepresence of trees does notmake it ecological, but it is likewise not merely allegorical. Beyond carbon accounting, mineral extraction, and equations of infrastructurewithmateriality,whatwould survivability mean in an ecological rather thanmilitary sense? After completingEarthSoundEarthSignal, I began readingSerres and he became important for my work, but I am a reader rather than a se- rious student of his work per se. I look to Christopher Watkin, Steven Connor, and others for a broader view. I haven’t formed an opinion on his hard and soft tropes, just that they are at times at odds with one an- other, and because I am suspicious of polarities. Instead, I have spun his work to emphasize a conditionality associated with what he calls world- objects, and to amplify the energy in the triad matter-energy-informa- tion, which is something I do as a matter of course with other thinkers. ‘Matter’ is both a constituent of and collective term for matter-energy- information, so it can be confusing where and how its transformations might occur. I am interested in their configured activities rather than an umbrella of matter since it allows an analytical isolation of energy. Amplification is not dissimilar to Lefebvre singling out rhythm in the melody-harmony-rhythm triad on the basis of its neglect. If matter-en- ergy-information were the Holy Trinity,matter and information are the two guys with beards who seem to be everywhere, but no one has a clue about the Holy Ghost. Lefebvre has a passage on the analytical advan- tages of such triads but, unlike Lefebvre’s enterprising rhythm, no new branchofknowledge isnecessary.Old-school energetics assertedadom- inance or centrality of energy in something of a power play and gener- ated plenty of intellectual paranoia in its wake. Historical and cultural analysis obviously has no such designs; scientismmay be a topic, but not hardware to wave around. Philosophically, Michael Marder emphasizes that fundamentally challenging how energy is understood is of utmost 22 George O. Squier, “Tree Telephony and Telegraphy,” Journal of the Franklin Insti- tute 187, no. 6 (1919): 657–87 Interview with Douglas Kahn: Nature of Radio Signals 39 importance; perhaps his work could be called a ‘survivable philosophy’? I agree but do not work in philosophy. Tripartite configurations are convenient, crude emblems. Their legitimacy might be judged through their elemental status but, in any case, are preferable to poles and other binaries because they are more amenable to a type of field-thinking required to approach complex sit- uations. It was routine in nineteenth century physics but doesn’t often make its way into academic vernacular. The way Serres’ writing resists pull quotes and epigrams is the result of field thinking, of saying several things at once. I first developed a preference for fields as a math major in university. It was a matter of words, concepts, events, sensations, etc. eventually adhering to the points and planes and vectors darting around in n-dimensions that I used to daydream about. Serres revels in a correlation of mathematics and the physical cosmos, and even starts his book on religion with the virtuality of mathematics, and incredi- bly finished the manuscript a day before he dies. The script would be too corny for Hollywood. Math lapsed for me when it proved to be an insufficient explanatory system for the systemic cruelty and violence I encountered while hitchhiking through the backroads of the United States. But I then found fields in Walter Benjamin’s constellations, and both Benjamin and Serres keep power and trauma in focus. Benjamin finds barbarism in the documents of civilization, and much of Serres derives fromHiroshima, his metonym for nuclear annihilation. Hiroshima was his first world-object. Although he didn’t give cre- dence to Bachelard’s epistemological break, Hiroshima had a similar philosophical function for him in the break of humans facing for the first time a global self-realization for potential self-annihilation. This object belongs to his lexicon of objects, with Latour animating his quasi-objects in actor-network theory, along with the small class of cosmic objects. I have no idea why his world-objects never caught on, since they resemble Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects, which made their way in the world. In Hermes Serres wrote about the world-object being the product of a thanatocratic expansion of capability arising from an unprecedented coordination of three socio-political players: the state/military, industry, and science – what Latour called the iron 40 Interviews triangle. Sometime in the late 1980s, as far as I can tell, global warming becomes his othermajor world-object. SinceHiroshima is the planetary dimension of energy, the same would apply to global warming, one as instant incineration and the other a not-so-slow burn.Not all his world- objects would conform to annihilation at this scale, but his two main ones do. President Truman warned Japan hours after Hiroshima that the United States now has the power to bring the sun down to earth and unleash it once again, while now a revanchist sun comes down to earth to bake us. Under guises of mastery, these two dominant world-objects demonstrate a spasmodic lack of control.Their death reflex needs to be undercut with revised notions of energy, and triangulated with however matter and informationmay convert or relate to one another. SS: When you speak of information pertaining to its physicality and the laws of physics, it seems to be about understanding data as found versus actively made. In pragmatic knowledge theories, such as the controver- sially hierarchical DIKW knowledge pyramid, information is simply the meaningful part of data.23 But how could we really talk about the data? To go back to Serres, while I might not be able to get specific enough in terms of the way he talks about data,my impression is that data for him is this thing which is really dug up from the ground, and it is alwaysma- terial because it is always acquired through some kind of agency. It is the act of acquiring data that is giving it an ‘orientation’; if data is always ori- ented, it is never ‘neutral’ nor inactive.Materiality of information there- fore can be establishedwith a quantum-physical understanding of com- munication theory. So rather than thinking of information with Shan- non’s information theory, Iwould be curious about otherways to address materiality of information. For example, we could say that the German 23 The Data Information Knowledge Wisdom pyramid is a model for structural and/or functional relationships between data, information, knowledge, and wisdom stacked in a hierarchical order that suggests increase in value through scarcity, from bottom (data) to top (wisdom): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D IKW_pyramid [accessed 10.03.2021]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid Interview with Douglas Kahn: Nature of Radio Signals 41 media theory addresses thismateriality through the networks and tech- nicality of mediating information.What is your take on this? DK: There are many interesting artists addressing these issues, and no doubt enterprises that could mobilize them into media systems and en- gineering at scale. There is no shortage of talent and tools. I don’t have anything to say beyondwhat others have said about the capitalist ecstasy of datamining having the same extractivist frame of transformations of matter at the root of environmental catastrophe. It would be interesting to apply Serres’ notion of pollution as an expansion of territory rather than waste.The capitalist maw that chews up the Earth and spits it back out is a technique of possession in the manner that one owns someone else’s bowl of soupby spitting in it.Whatdoes it possess after chewingup and spitting out data banks? He states advertising is pollution, which is hard to argue against, but it is just one formofmonetization that wastes and possesses enormously for little social and ecological good. It is a question now whether non-extractivism occurs before catastrophe im- poses it. Materiality old and new is sold in somany flavours now, that the pre- sumed virtues can be difficult to identify, and are often too simple when they can. For me, any smattering of matter needs to be accompanied by historical materialism, but also one not dependent on the archives that produce history.How ‘data’ exists and is produced by and against indige- nous cultures, and what does and does not need to be known to sur- vive and maintain integrity, are key, among all the records suppressed, destroyed, or never produced in the first place. I am living on Aborigi- nal land belonging to the longest continuing culture on Earth, over sixty thousand years, which makes this evident in a way that I don’t know if Europeans who think of Greece as antiquity can appreciate. I do find remarkable one understanding of an operative materiality of data. Key features of solar retinals I mentioned were hypothesized and validated among the circuits of data banks, long before weather research. The functional protein melanopsin active in solarception was shown that it had to exist, and it did, and its evolutionary biology was described in a similar manner. This is old news, of course, but as 42 Interviews Przemysław Prusinkiewicz and Aristid Lindenmayer signalled inThe Al- gorithmic Beauty of Plants, it was inevitable that models in computational biology went past the point of scientists contributing their research to them, to conducting their research within them.24 So, in a way, certain things exist more completely in data. The Delphic oracle of climate modelling is located there, Pythia proclaiming the future sitting on her tripod inhaling greenhouse gas fumes. I am not familiar with the DIKW or its controversies but, if I had to choose among simple geometric explanations, I would go for the self- amplifying iron triangle. I find thewisdomplaced at the pinnacle funny. Perhaps an eye could fit on top, like the pyramid on the US dollar bill? I wonder what self-abnegation andmeditative practice of enlightenment is required to attain thewisdomofmanagerialist Bodhisattvahood? And whatwill shareholders think if it evaporates into full Buddhahood? Bud- dha will be fine because he comes from wealth, but what about the em- ployees? Obviously, if this wisdomwere truly wise, then it would already have the situation sorted out ahead of time. Somehow, I think it will end up instead in AI systems hacking each other’s infrastructures. I have failed to keep upwithmedia theory fromGermany since com- pleting the book over a decade ago, so I am very much out of that loop. Even then itwas primarily Kittler,whose historical basis for theorization Iheld inhigh regard, if not always the specific content.However,his pen- chant for engineering placed limits on the science, ecology, power, and trauma necessary to be broadly relevant. In a seminar I taught at Uni- versity of California, we tested the limits of Kittler’s ideas by examining war crime snapshots by American soldiers in Vietnam.Despite data, in- formation, and knowledge, evidence has a hard climb to justice, let alone wisdom. I wonder too what proximity experience would have in or with the DIKW pyramid. In my essay in Energies in the Arts I analyse the energy field performances of the Australian artist Peter Blamey through the no- tionof experiential physics.Otherbranchesof scienceor formsofknowl- edge may become experiential through knowing or believing to know. 24 Prusinkiewicz and Lindenmayer, The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants. Interview with Douglas Kahn: Nature of Radio Signals 43 You know that photosynthesis is occurring in plants, not just that they flower or are green. Photosynthesis may have initially leapt off a school desk, but it has since become tacit in what you can see (perceive, un- derstand, experience) and what some sense without saying. Living in the sun moves without the baggage of a vital force. You can feel a for- est asmassive absorption, as an aspect of transperception. Fusing exist- ing and new knowledges with tacit experience de facto exists in adapta- tive behaviours, but also in different cultures.TheWadjiginy, Emmiyan- gal, and Mendheyangal people on the coast of the Northern Territory of Australia, for example, see microseasonally where other cultures merely seeweather.Knowledges built up in labs or data sets have certain advan- tages,butwhat informsknowledge built up over thousands of years? Just knowing that, it becomes clear that macroseasonal disruption is part of an ongoing dispossession and genocide. SS: To wrap up, would you say that speaking of energy implies also al- ways speaking of its manifestation as matter and information? Are they always present in your thought of howenergy becomesmanifested in the arts? In the case of Serres’ world-object being in some extent created by humans, which is exceptional in the way it uses up life and resources: it is using all of it up, an ultimate reproduction. DK: The matter-energy-information schema is productive in a theme- and-variation way that philosophers will stress test concepts with dif- ferent classical elements.Marder did that recently with fire and political power in his Pyropolitics, instead of the presumed Earth with its terri- tories, properties, sovereignty, and the geo- in geopolitics. Even Serres, who makes fun of Bachelard’s schism between matter/energy (without the benefit of Shannon’s information) and classical elements, makes re- course to them to replace the United Nations with “an objective insti- tution, the WAFEL, whose initials would mean in English not men, nor nations, nor the species, but the world: Water, Air, Fire, the Earth, and 44 Interviews the Living. One more step, and we have a cosmocracy.”25 For a physi- cal model, I like to remind myself of their intricate relationships in Ra- man scattering, in the interactions of photons, electrons, molecular vi- brations, and heat in the chemistries of why, in infinitesimal part, the sky is blue. Luckily, the sky is big enough to lend the infinitesimal some presence. I also like to think of the relatively free and easy energy ride of a photon from the sun, unencumbered by toomuch information, un- til it reaches the retina, whereupon it crosses into intricate information universe of ion exchanges, like a complicated knot at the end of a very long string, both for imaging in vision and for spatial-temporal position in the solar system. Perhaps because I concentrate on the arts and priv- ilege (trans)perceptual matters, I limit energy and information interac- tion to the sensorymembranes of the cochlea, retina, and skin, their cel- lular surface transduction and ion exchanges. The other huge matter- energy-information site is metabolism, but that would get too compli- cated too quickly for me at the moment, so I stay with the superficiality of sensory membranes. Pia van Gelder from the Australian National University and I are presently completing a book collection,The Energies Artists Say, which is an exercise in engaging a physical, cultural, and linguistic breadth of energies in historical and cultural analyses. Artists said ‘energy’ inmany ways during the twentieth century, but they did not mean fossil fuels and their alternatives until the 1970s, in the United States at least, in the wake of the Santa Barbara oil spill and the OPEC embargo, the so-called energy crisis. That is, artists did not say energy in the way energy hu- manities means it until recently, in an historical sense, and during and since this meaning has interacted with other energies and, in turn, matter and information, in specific ways. The book will introduce the energies artists say as one method within the development of an energy reading, which is beginning to take shape. I wonder why Serres’ world-objects began with Hiroshima. Its existential motivations make sense, but global telecommunications 25 Michel Serres, Malfeasance: Appropriation through Pollution?, trans. Anne-Marie Feenberg-Dibon (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), p 84. Interview with Douglas Kahn: Nature of Radio Signals 45 unfolding in the mid-nineteenth century, its lines arcing over horizons, would be an obvious place to start. Natural radio has arced over the equator for about 3.5 billion years, but Serres’ world-objects are human- made or -generated one way or another.The glissandi of whistlers gen- erated along these flux lines were heard on early telecommunication lines, long perceived as nature, but now they broadcast their human content. If telecommunications require existential coordinates to be a world-object, then their deadly role in colonial expansion, military subjugation, and domestic repression, aided by messages at the speed of light, should suffice. If this is insufficient and global annihilation remains the metric, then we must wait for the DEW Line in the 1950s, which I believe was the largest media infrastructure up to that point. In the 1950s, militarized sensing at earth magnitude developed in par- allel with an environmental sensing that itself hearkens back to the nineteenth century, when telegraph systems were used not only in communication but as large sensory arrays for the study of magnetic storms. Sensing and telemetry were on the same device, and there is no shortage of either at present. How to make them survivable is another question. SIGID Wiki Archival and Knowledge Practices Interview with Carl Colena Carl Colena is a software engineer, digital signal processing hobbyist and the cur- rent administrator of theSIGIDwikiwebsite and radio signal digital archive.The interviewwas conductedbySelenaSavićandYannPatrickMartins inMay2020. Selena Savić and Yann Patrick Martins: The Signal Identification Guide (SIDIG) wiki is an organized database of information on radio signals. It contains data on signals’ characteristics such as frequency and band- width,modulation type, aswell as short descriptions, audio samples and waterfall plots. How was this project started and who supported it? Carl Colena: A community of hardware hackers were able to turn the in- expensive digital television dongle (DVB-T) into a software defined ra- dio (SDR) hardware. The discovery of these affordable TV dongles that can be used like a spectrum analyser, has significantly dropped the bar- rier of entry for amateur radio enthusiasts and other technically literate individuals, to explore radio signal reception and hacking. Carl Laufer, the owner of theRTL-SDRblog,1 started theSignal Iden- tification Guide (SIGID) wiki2 project in 2014. The goal was to create a blog for all interested people who were using RTL-SDR to look around the radio signal spectrum and understand what they are receiving. 1 RTL-SDR (RTL2832U) and software defined radio news and projects https://w ww.rtl-sdr.com/ (accessed 22.06.2022). 2 Signal Identification Guide wiki https://www.sigidwiki.com (accessed 22.06.2022). https://www.rtl-sdr.com/ https://www.rtl-sdr.com/ https://www.rtl-sdr.com/ https://www.rtl-sdr.com/ https://www.rtl-sdr.com/ https://www.rtl-sdr.com/ https://www.rtl-sdr.com/ https://www.rtl-sdr.com/ https://www.rtl-sdr.com/ https://www.rtl-sdr.com/ https://www.rtl-sdr.com/ https://www.rtl-sdr.com/ https://www.rtl-sdr.com/ https://www.rtl-sdr.com/ https://www.rtl-sdr.com/ https://www.rtl-sdr.com/ https://www.rtl-sdr.com/ https://www.rtl-sdr.com/ https://www.rtl-sdr.com/ https://www.rtl-sdr.com/ https://www.rtl-sdr.com/ https://www.rtl-sdr.com/ https://www.rtl-sdr.com/ https://www.rtl-sdr.com/ https://www.rtl-sdr.com/ https://www.rtl-sdr.com/ https://www.rtl-sdr.com/ https://www.rtl-sdr.com/ https://www.rtl-sdr.com/ https://www.sigidwiki.com https://www.sigidwiki.com https://www.sigidwiki.com https://www.sigidwiki.com https://www.sigidwiki.com https://www.sigidwiki.com https://www.sigidwiki.com https://www.sigidwiki.com https://www.sigidwiki.com https://www.sigidwiki.com https://www.sigidwiki.com https://www.sigidwiki.com https://www.sigidwiki.com https://www.sigidwiki.com https://www.sigidwiki.com https://www.sigidwiki.com https://www.sigidwiki.com https://www.sigidwiki.com https://www.sigidwiki.com https://www.sigidwiki.com https://www.sigidwiki.com https://www.sigidwiki.com https://www.sigidwiki.com https://www.sigidwiki.com https://www.sigidwiki.com https://www.sigidwiki.com https://www.sigidwiki.com https://www.sigidwiki.com https://www.sigidwiki.com 48 Interviews There was previously no centralized database describing these signals. The SIGID wiki website start