🗓️ Wednesday 27 March, 2.00PM – 5.30PM

📍 Open School East, 39 Hawley Square, Margate CT9 1NY

Join OSE Associate Nikki Sheth and members of Shortwave Collective to learn about and build a simple homemade radio receiver, an ‘Open Wave-Receiver’.

Participants will be engaged as co-researchers and experimenters, working with a basic set of materials: copper wire, metal clips, speaker wire, tent pegs, and found objects.

We encourage participants to bring or scavenge some scraps to customise their radios, such as:

• Something flat and non-conductive, like a piece of cardboard, wood, or a book
• A toilet paper roll tube, or any non-conductive tube 
• Small pieces of metal or mineral
• Decorations like stickers or decorative tape, or bring a sharpie!

Parts can be switched out for alternatives, pieces can be sculptural, and it can be literally built into a location. The design doesn’t have a tuner so multiple frequencies can be received at once! Previous radios have included toys, bins, cutlery and dildos!

Following the construction of our Open Wave-Receivers, we’ll explore the local area together, searching for signals and attaching our radios to metal structures as makeshift antennas, incorporating urban fixtures into the radio circuit.

In order to complete your radio, you will need access to a battery-powered speaker, and additionally, a field recorder or other device with a strong pre-amp will help make your radio louder. We will have some available for testing during the workshop.

This workshop is open to all ages and levels of experience for people with an interest in sound and electronics. 

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Shortwave Collective is an international feminist artist group established in May 2020, interested in creative uses of radio. We meet regularly to discuss feminist approaches to amateur radio and the radio spectrum as artistic material, sharing resources, considering DIY approaches and inclusive structures.

OSE Public Programme 2023-24

This year’s Associate-led Public Programme, Where Echo Lies, takes us to the edges of our experience, where it is dark, and all is not necessarily clear. Plunging into new depths, the programme thinks through deep time and the unconscious mind. What forms of solace might be found in the night that cannot emerge in the light of day? What might we hear when surrounded by this darkness? Through myth making, spectatorship, performance, and painting, you are invited to look inward and ask how can our experience help us understand what lies beneath the knowable?

We’re excited to announce our continued partnership with Turner Contemporary, who are generously hosting part of the public programme. Turner Contemporary is one of the UK’s leading art galleries. Founded to celebrate JMW Turner’s connection to Margate in 2001, the David Chipperfield designed gallery opened in 2011.

You can find more Public Programme events at: openschooleast.org/ose-public-programme-2024