Parasite Radio: Environmental Art Repurpose of the Radio Medium

The analog radio offers an approach to low powered and self-made technology, which does not require the larger material an energetic infrastructure of an Internet service. FM radio transmission is undervalued and
offers a potential to resist the centralization of digital archiving, and the collateral resource impact produced from server storage and operation. This article presents the Parasite Radio project as an artistic appropriation of the supposedly obsolete radio medium. The aim was to operationalize the radio to be used beyond its former purpose of a communication channel. The project experimented with telematic interactions between the environment, radio signals and soundscape recordings. The message transmitted through multiple inputs converting bio-chemical reactions, Aeolian energy, or kinetic transformations of the environment into radio signals. This enabled to expand human listening and, perhaps also, informed other non-human agents about
ecosystem transformations. Parasite Radio also brought together Nordic and southern soundscapes and sites into feedback loop transmissions to generate new sonic materials. Thus, it also facilitated novel inter-relations between diverse artistic communities and assisted in technological appropriations by decentralized art organizations. The article shows how ‘old’ media such as the radio could be operationalized to act in a contemporary ‘new’ media context forming hybrid media ecologies stretching across geophysical boundaries.
Here, media archaeology becomes a method to conduct critical and artistic examinations of media technologies as concerned with energy and ecology. It serves as an energy art practice to address technological obsolescence as well as study its effects on the environment.