Eleven Minutes to . . . connect to the world

This week on from the archives Friday, we harken back to the early days of Eleven Minutes to Mars, and a time when many of us were still in various states of quarantine and lockdown.

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As we are drawn together in this shared experience whilst being kept apart, I have become increasingly enamored of technology that replicates, in some fashion, those feelings of connection and discovery. In the rapidly iterative digital world, some of these things cometted into my life, then faded away. Then, there were those others that rather than fading away, just keep getting better.

Such is the case with one of my more recent rediscoveries, Radio Garden, an app that lets you tune into radio stations across the globe. The project started in 2016 as an exhibition project commissioned by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision in the context of the research project Transnational Radio Encounters. As noted on their Web site:

“by bringing distant voices close, radio connects people and places. From its very beginning, radio signals have crossed borders. Radio makers and listeners have imagined both connecting with distant cultures, as well as re-connecting with people from ‘home’ from thousands of miles away.”

It can be easy to overlook the fact that we are all here together on this rock (all 7.9 billion of us), hurtling through time and space, and that the borders created by us, can also be transcended by us, voice by voice, moment by moment.