MARCONI MACHINES
collaboration with WOMR 92.1 (Provincetown's OuterMost Community Radio), November 002005
Marconi beach is the site of the first transatlantic transmission of radio signals from the United States to Great Britain. It’s always in the process of becoming, unfolding, forming, re-forming. Our project uses radio and web transmission to make something material and palpable out of the invisible forces and processes of the beach’s emergence.
We designed several Marconi Machines to be activated by the forces that shape and shift Marconi beach: light, air, water, temperature, and sound.
We placed the machines at various edges of the beach’s “becomings:” places where the ocean, dunes, waves, winds, light, shadows, temperature, sounds, silences, were becoming and becoming else.
We fitted some of the Marconi Machines with sound recording devices. As the forces that create the beach (winds/waves/sand/grass) set our devices in motion, we recorded the radio and audio signals that they produced.
Radio and web audiences for our project receive audible traces of Marconi beach’s continuous materialization and dematerialization. We invite audiences to project their imaginations along these audible traces—not back to Marconi Beach as it was, but out to the beach’s, and their own, continuous emergence.
