Radio Amnion: Sonic Transmissions of Care with/in Oceanic Space
Radio Amnion is a multi-year audio project streaming new compositions of affirmation, joy, elegy and lament into, for, through, and with/in the Pacific Ocean. Radio Amnion is commissioning artists and researchers interested in sending soundings and voicings of care for the primordial / amniotic waters of Earth with transmissions beginning in 2021 during equinoxes and solstices.
The Radio Amnion Platform is attached to a submerged cubic kilometre ‘neutrino telescope’ experiment with the SFB1258: Neutrino and Dark Matter Group of the Technical University of Munich in collaboration with Ocean Networks Canada: a vast underwater oceanographic observatory monitoring marine ecosystem function, deep-sea biodiversity, and multiple geological dynamics across hundreds of kilometres.
These artists commissions now act as lures and invitations until 2022 when the project will again meet the sea in a second iteration with monthly compositions broadcast during each full moon.
The artists for the 2021 equinoxes and solstices are:
Libita Sibungu and Perivi Katjavivi
Samuel Hertz
Margarida Mendes
Abbas Zahedi
Andrea Zarza
Radio Amnion asks us to stretch our human imaginations beyond terrestrial, ‘grounded’, and anthropocentric contexts: as Rachel Carson once noted, “To sense this world of waters known to the creatures of the sea we must shed our human perceptions of length and breadth and time and place” (Quoted in Melody Jue, Wild Blue Media, 2020).
Invocations, laments, blessings & affirmations from Radio Amnion are first and foremost for and to the Ocean, streamed in those remote abyssal depths that irrigate our connected lives and worlds. The very existence of the ‘P-ONE’ telescope of SFB1258 that invites and anchors Radio Amnion reveals how the waters of Earth are in constant communication with the skies over our heads and under our feet, how the deepest regions of space are constantly here with us, helping us to further recognize a radical relationality that permeates and patterns life and experience with/in spacetimematter.
Radio Amnion: Bronze, Steel, Glass, Aluminum, Rubber, Electronics.
“What if, instead of The Ordered World, we could image The World as a Plenum, an infinite
composition in which each existant’s singularity is contingent upon its becoming one possible
expression of all the other existants, with which it is entangled beyond space and time.”
- Denise Ferreira da Silva, Difference Without Separability
While Radio Amnion quietly whispers into some of the darkest reaches of Earth, it nonetheless, like Melody Jue’s (2020) book, has “[a] wildness that points to the limits of the human sensorium, or the thresholds of perceptibility” and celebrates the 1983 artist statement of Ana Mendieta:
“My art is grounded in
the belief
of one universal energy which runs through everything: from insect
to human, from human to spectre, from spectre to plant, from plant to galaxy”
“My art is grounded in the belief of one universal energy which runs through everything: from insect to human, from human to spectre, from spectre to plant, from plant to galaxy”
︎ @Radio_Amnion_
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. canadacouncil.ca