Toward a Minor Tech:Mateus 500

Lightning strikes the earth up to 100 times a second!

The transmission of networked data takes place at many points through different zones of the electromagnetic spectrum. It moves stretched and condensed, at wavelengths ranging from approximately 0.00075mm to 125mm.

These moments of transmission are shared excursions – light pulsing through the bandwidth commons of undersea cables, and point to point hopping through CDNs, from street-side cabinets, to domestic routers.

Do you hobby?

Build a playful listening device today!

Recipe

Take a scrap board at least 30x30cm.

Hammer nails to create a square.

Wrap Wire in a coil around the nails. The wire should go around about 133 times.

Connect the two ends of the wire to an audio cable.

Plug in to amplifier.

A very low frequency antenna allows the reader to listen to the electromagnetic phenomenon existing alongside and overlapping our human made transmissions. Statics is the name given to the sound lightning strikes. When listening with an antenna, the presence of statics can be used to determine that the antenna is functioning correctly as, "after the first few kilometres, the lightning radio signal propagates by ground wave, following the Earth's curvature for thousands of kilometres."[1] Given the distances the signal can travel, these Statics should always be present. It sounds like the inviting crackling of a warm fire on a dark night.

Other phenomenon might also be recorded, such as the effects of solar flares. This suggests an unexpected and immediate transgression of scale. It suggests a practice of time, a durational listening - that changes, with the time of day, the weather and the season, each producing different trends or conditions. Listen at dusk! Listen to an email arrive!

The playful reader might also find such an antenna reconfiguring their local space. Wifi packets become audible pops, vehicle engines whine, and with luck and haphazard assembly - occasionally broadcast radio of voices and music might be picked up too.

For the rushed reader, the conditions of this listening are still contingent on the availability of power and manufactured components – tied to hobbyist supply chains. The reader might ask, How do anti-capitalist practices transmit across these different frequencies? How does a creative practice that seeks to explore low-power computation resolve the contradictions inherent in its entanglement with global supply chains and systems of infrastructure?

Through their specificity and component breakdown the hobbyist may often reach further into the webs of supply than most consumer practices are required to i.e. through purchasing from platforms such as Alibaba or directly with component manufacturers. Do you hobby, reader?

Now imagine what kind of listening might be possible in the future, under different circumstances. Off-grid. Only statics.