Son[i]a #320 Ji Youn Kang

Arthur Sauer, co-founder of The Game of Life, the world's only mobile Wave Field Synthesis system, talks about immersive sound, spatial electronic music, and other applications of Wave Field Synthesis.

In the 1990s, twenty minutes was all it took for local authorities in the Austrian city of Graz to detect and neutralise any illegal radio transmitter. Back then, Reni Hofmüller was part of a group of activists who took over the airwaves with pirate broadcasts every Sunday from the mountains surrounding the city. After short 18-minute sessions, the Radio Dauerwelle team would pack up its equipment and clear out, moments before the authorities arrived. In this podcast, Hofmüller shares her early commitment with radio, as well as her obsession with dismantling the invisible in order to understand and question it. A trip through time that takes us from the 1980s to the present, through her personal involvement in feminist discussions from the perspective of new media. Our conversation is riddled with references to her commitment to open source, to doing things together, to the uninhibited mixing of disciplines, and to her passion for the electromagnetic sphere and bicycles.

The improviser and maker John Richards describes the challenge of recording a performance-based practice and opens up his Dirty Electronics praxis through props and projects. He also tells us about the Luddites and Leicester, touches on his views on functionality, control, and safety nets, and talks about his approach to speculative circuitry, authorship and composition. 

Hugo Esquinca’s work is a multi-layered crust, intentionally obfuscated through excess, deliberately hard to peel. Scraping off layers of obfuscation in this dense network of transductive interactions gets you nowhere, cause those layers are precisely what Hugo uses in order to expose you (and himself) to a sort of sensory overload. We discuss with Hugo how growing up in the hyperchaos of Mexico City relates to his fascination with speed, overabundance and syncretism.