Radio Otherwise

Radio Otherwise is an ongoing artistic research. As an experimental, artistic, and ecological radio collective, they focus beyond purely anthropogenic transmissions, recognizing relationality within the spectrum of more-than-human radio ecologies. They were a LINA Fellow in 2024 and are part of the Spree~Channelsea Radio Group, Colaboradio, Archipel and FR-BB free radios. They had artworks commissioned by the Copenhagen Architecture Forum, Basel Architecture Museum, Forest of Antennas Oceans of Waves Festival and Spore Institute in Berlin, and others. They have taught at UNIARTS Helsinki, ZHDK, Potsdam University, UESC, UFSB and offered different workshops at CTM, Sonic Acts and other festivals and independent contexts.

Since 2022, we have developed four transmission art projects consecutively that share the conceptual frame of INFRASTRUCTURES OF FLOW. These projects materialize Radio Otherwise’s approach to ecological radio, translating its theoretical commitments into situated, durational practices of listening, reception and transmission. Each intervention foregrounds the entanglement of human, technological, and more-than-human actors, using live, generative, and participatory formats to reveal the interconnectedness of energy, matter, and information that shape environments. Read more about it in High Pitch magazine issue 2.

Circling Thresholds (2022), durational floating transmission and performance on the river Spree by Forests of Antenna, Oceans of Waves.
Image credits: Anke Phoebe Peters

Spree~Channelsea Radio Group (2023) with Soundcamp, Archipel e.V, Surge Cooperative and Blanc Sceol. The project “involved two week-long exchanges, on the Channelsea river in East London and the Spree in Berlin. We set up a floating sound lab in each location, as a mobile platform to explore the social, organisational and environmental ecologies of the rivers, their shores and inter-tidal zones.” http://acousticommons.net/~/#Image credits: Kate Donovan

Infrastructural Eddies (2024), is an intervention by Radio Otherwise that took place at the Insola at Rummelsburg Bay in Berlin. At the invitation of Soundcamp, as part of their project S AM FM. Experiments in Ecological Radio with the Swiss Architecture Museum in Basel. https://www.sam-basel.org/en/events/s-am-fm-infrastructural-eddies
Image credits: Niko de Paula

Slowing Down to Infrastructures (2025) was a six-month-long, generative web radio project commissioned for the 2025 Copenhagen Architecture Biennial, which was themed on Slowness. https://www.cafx.dk/biennial/media/slowing-down-to-infrastructure
Image credits: Kate Donovan

(website under construction)

Listening, Ecologies, Cybernetics

Thinking and doing radio otherwise means focussing beyond purely anthropogenic transmissions, recognising relationality within the spectrum of more-than-human radio ecologies: the sun's rays, lightning strikes, meteors, the radio memories held in soil from radioactive pollutants. It also means to research and reflect upon alternative histories and forms of radio-making through its complex materialities and multifarious aural traditions; special attention is paid to the spatial qualities of radio and radio-making, from experimenting with
nomadic outdoor studios, building small-scale transmission ecologies (Friz), to observing how the frequency spectrum is occupied in place of rich biodiversity (Krause).

Radio Otherwise promotes radio's emancipatory potential, inspired by pirate, free and community radios, as well as the MiniFM movement (Kogawa), and supported by decolonial and feminist literature and practices. It recognises the recent turn towards bioacoustics and the connected practices of listening as ways to re-connect with 'nature'. But the power dynamics of listening can be just as violent as those of 'the gaze'. Radio Otherwise brings listening together in a constellation with ecologies and cybernetics, in an attempt to carefully and critically move beyond the human/nature dichotomy, to deal with messy boundary-crossings in order to recognise situated relationalities with/in place; we seek dialogical relations with environments, through the development of 'media' as well knowledge sharing/making processes, encouraged by the boundlessness of radio's artistic and cultural expressions. In this way, listening and radio-making can also be methods to sit with uncomfortable relationalities, the relentlessness of the Anthropocene.

Between April and July 2021, Radio Otherwise: listening, ecologies and cybernetics was taught as a seminar for master students of the Arts and Media program of the Universität Potsdam in Germany. We met regularly, reading, discussing and experimenting with bioacoustics and radio ecologies in many green spaces in Berlin such as the Prinzessinnengarten Moritzplatz and Hermannstrasse, the Gartenarbeitschule Wedding and the Floating University - where we also hosted a full day of live radio on 88,4 FM Berlin and 90,7 FM Potsdam. The students involved were Patrique Degen, Manuel Hoffmann, Dominika Majstrowicz, Giacomo Marinsalta, Jann Rasmus Petersen, Sophie Warmbrunn and Johanna Weber. We also had the pleasure of hosting the special guests Niko de Paula Lefort, Nica Bue, Felicity Mangan, Martin Howse, Constantin Engelmann and Till Boverman (PLONK), MK and HOOOOPS.

Resources:

PT
Um manifesto do micro rádio, Tetsuo Kogawa
Todo Mundo Ouvinte, Anne Friz

Part of the collective are:

Monaí de Paula Antunes is a doctoral candidate at the Bauhaus University with the research “Radio Gardening with quilombola horticultures: an investigacción-acción of natureculture relationships”. She was awarded the Villa Romana Fellowship of 2024 and the Elsa Neumann Fellowship in 2022. Some places where she has exhibited are: SAVVY Contemporary, Instituto INHOTIM, Floating University, Onassis Stegi, transmediale, CTM Festival, European Media Art Festival, Ars Electronica and others. https://monaidepaula.com/

Kate Donovan is a postdoctoral fellow at 4A_Lab, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz - Max-Planck-Institut | Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz. In 2025 she attained her PhD "Radio as Relation. Listening across worlds of artistic practice, technologies and the more-than-human" from Potsdam University. She has presented works in many settings including Radio Elsewheres (Canada), Radiotopia (Taiwan), Struer Tracks (Denmark), Sonic Acts (the Netherlands), Werkleitz (Germany), Wave Farm (USA) as well as many places in Berlin including the Museum for Communication. Her writing appears across multiple journals and publications. http://mattersoftransmission.net/

Niko de Paula Lefort is a vibrational practitioner working as a sound artist and musician. Also known as nikoLFO, he is a co-founder of Archipel Stations Community Radio, Portals Editions and Archipel Editions. Lefortʼs work has appeared in commissions for major museums, festivals and venues as well as more DIY settings, including Centre Pompidou, Guggenheim Bilbao, Kunsthaus Göttingen, CTM, Bozar, Berghain, HeK Basel, Instituto Inhotim, Audio Rebel, KM28 as a solo artist and in various collaborations. https://nikolfo.com/

LINA Fellowship
https://archipel.community/
https://soundtent.org/
streambox > https://soundtent.org/streaming_recipes.html
https://locusonus.org/soundmap/
https://aporee.org/