What sounds make sparks? What pulses ignite stoves and fires? How to practice sonic repairing?
Day by day transistors, semi-conductors, devices and chips translocate between worlds and climates. Globalism’s promise of a flat world in which virtually everything is replaceable and within reach is covering more and more regions of the planet, while the act of repairing, patching and tinkering passes into the realm of memories and fiction.
Boneless TV screens and radios frame walls and windows.
In a new research iteration developed at Estación Terrena to diversify notions around technologies, as a medium and discursive field, we inquired about the possibilities and potential of the Radiochispa (Radio Sparking): electronic technician who tinkers the thing.
Radiochispa is one of the many ways that the tropical hacker is called ~> the one of the cacharreo, the spell and the repair. A radiochispa is also a radio operator of community networks. An alias. A way of naming those who manage the telecommunications of allegal organizations in Colombia. It is also a word used in the cultural guild of electronic repair to refer to those who acquire their knowledge in an empirical way. Radiochispa or Chispológo, are both titles -used among peers- for those who acquire their technical knowledge in learning by doing, cacharreo and outside the educational programs of modern institutions.
Resistors, conductors, transformers.
But being a Radiochispa is much more than being someone who tinkers and repairs electronics. Understanding ecologies as systems of relationships and societies as interdependent circuits of pulses and impulses, we could think that the practice of the Radiochispa goes beyond the electronic device or apparatus and extends to the cultural and ecological apparatus. Now, what is the role of the Radiochispa and how does she/he use her/his tools in these terrains?
Interested in hacking practices that infiltrate collective imaginaries, and that use artifacts to contemplate enchanted worlds, we examine technologies and knowledge situated in dialogue with a Tropical InterPlanetary consciousness* to approach answers to these questions.
In this exhibition, we bring together offerings that activate electromagnetic fields and conduct lightning through sonic experiences in the Estación Terrena Navigation Room, located on the second floor of the site. Here we present a selection of sound and media installations that interweave rumors of social activation in Chile, calls from the forest or non-lexical words (non-words) of displaced endemic communities in the Philippines, as well as communication protocols based on knots, combining endemic technologies such as khipus with emerging technologies. While in the Experimentation Room, located on the second floor, we will host a Radio Libre broadcasting station hosted by Alejo Duque and agitated by Laura Wiesner during the Artbo FDS program.
We have hosted and offered interventions on Radio Libre during the exhibition, accompanied by a conversation, as well as guided tours.
More soon ++
