Over the past five years, our work has focused on broad frequency radio reception: designing radio receivers, antennas and other devices that allow us to transduce the electromagnetic waves around us into sound. We’ve considered ‘plural’ ways of listening and developed a collective practice around radio-making. We’d now like to tune our research to consider what we hear—and what we don’t.
The radio spectrum is partitioned into ‘bands’ of frequencies by international coordination and national regulation. Bands are allocated for different purposes, such as broadcasting, aviation, mobile networks, satellites and amateur communications. Though radio waves are infinite, the range of their frequencies is finite, making the spectrum a valuable resource. Corporations that rely on radio waves for their technological products (mobile networks, satellite firms, etc) lobby governments to prioritise their use. As such, control over frequency allocation is both a technical and a political issue.
We stand with those communities who argue that radio waves, as a natural resource, are a global commons. Access to and use of the spectrum should be fair, transparent and equitable. Learning from the proposals for ‘electromagnetic commons’ by Soph Dyer (2017) as well as the advocacy of Celeste Oram (2024), our project aims to spark collective conversations on this topic and (re)imagine how spectrum could be shared. In so doing, we will think through methodologies for collective resource sharing, drawing from feminist theory and beyond.