World radio tuning dial

A few years ago, in the context of the international research project Transnational Radio Encounters , the project “Radio Garden” emerged. Radio Garden lets listeners explore broadcasting and hear different stations across the entire globe. It’s one of the most popular and sucessfull web projects of 2017, being awarded the “Webby Awards 2017”, “FIAT/IFTA 2017”, “Archive Innovation Award”, “Dutch Design Awards 2017”, etc. Phenomenal!

I was contacted by an artist who’s collaborating with a Museum for an exhibition this September requesting my help, to provide something similar to Radio Garden, which they tried to contact without much sucess. One of its pieces is going to be an interactive display showing Africa and some radio stations pinned on the continent with some of the functionalities that Radio Garden provides, in a smaller scale.

Cartography and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) development is quite complex; Cartography is more of a mixture of sciene and art, while GIS is very precise. Developing a “Radio Garden” takes a lot of effort considering the budget museums or artists usually have, so you really need to be happy to help and do it for nothing much.

As usual, I’ve got other things to do that are important and been jumping on to this from time to time, when possible.

I started by pulling my React+Typescript boilerplate, that I usually work on with Functional Components, Context API and the Hooks API. Following up, worked separately in a Class object that emits noise, more specifically White/Brown noice (might tweak it a bit, as this can be quite disturbing if the frequency is not right). The goal is to manipulate the frequencies a bit, as you touch the screen and move X and Y, but to start it simply casts noise to the output.

Anyway, still in a very early stage but worked on the map and event handlers and came up with the video demo above!

Hope to update this article later on with new updates!