Shortwave Collective

Shortwave Collective is an international feminist artist group using the radio spectrum as artistic material. We spend time together remotely and in hybrid forms, making, testing, and sharing. Through this collective practice, we have created a new design for a homemade, ecological, and open radio receiver that connects the listener to a fusion of natural radio emissions and many human-generated transmissions. A year after our founding, we published this design in MAKE magazine (2021) and have since delivered workshops nationally and internationally, developing new models through a participatory practice. During our public art project Living Radio Lab as part of Struer Tracks Biennial for Sound and Listening (2023), we invited festival-goers and local residents to develop simple amplifiers in oyster shells with us. We recently published reflections on our methodology for radio-listening as a plural, situated, and embodied endeavour in Bodies of Sound: Becoming a Feminist Ear (eds. Revell & Shin, 2024). We also shared our collective listening practice in a 22-hour radio broadcast for Radio Art Zone (2022), a 24-hour transmission for PAM Common Art Collective (2025), and a piece for BBC Short Cuts (2025).