Shortwave Collective workshop at Radio WORM & A Tale of a Tub

For 2 days in October 2024, Radio WORM and A Tale of A Tub welcomed Shortwave Collective to Rotterdam for an a workshop on building and testing Open Wave-Receivers: self-powered radio receivers built from commonly available, low-cost components that allow us to hear what’s happening in the wave-world around us.

We split speaker cable, coiled up copper wire, clipped together tent-peg diodes, and took our fresh circuits out into the wild. From the top of the Justus van Effencomplex, and the base of a light-tower at Sparta stadium, we caught some astonishing, fleeting audio: the “Rotterdam Hum.” You can listen back to some samples, and a conversation with Shortwave members Georgia and Brigitte, and workshop participants Clara and Maoyi, on Radio WORM’s Mixcloud.

Missed out on tickets this time and want us to invite Shortwave Collective back next year? Let us know!

Shortwave Collective is an international group of creative practitioners from various backgrounds and disciplines (sound and radio art, activism, social science, media and artistic research) brought together by an interest in feminist practices and the radio spectrum. 

The design for the Open Wave-Receiver, initially based on foxhole radios and crystal sets proliferating in the 1940s, has been adapted and refined by members and workshop participants over years of experimentation and knowledge-sharing. <3 The workshop in Rotterdam was initiated by A Tale of A Tub in the spirit of the exhibition The Lips of History.

Photos by Lika Kotetishvili