No, not pirate! Jennifer Waits reviews Peter Simensky's 'Pyrite Radio: Dispatch' exhibit which will be occurring in Santa Monica this week (April 9, 2022) at the 18th Street Arts Center’s Olympic Campus.
Artist Peter Simensky dashes about The Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco (ICA SF), inspecting five colorful hand-built crystal radios that are tuned to a micro-power radio station running a few feet away. He replaces batteries and listens carefully as voices and music in many languages drift in and out of his radios, along with the crackle of interference. Perched on tinker toy-esque wooden tripods, the cylindrical radios stand majestically like friendly creatures from a fantastical children’s story.
(all images by author)
Calling to mind party favors or Christmas crackers, each radio has a unique hand-painted design with playful stripes or abstract neon detailing beneath precisely wound golden or red copper wire. A sparkling hunk of rock containing the mineral pyrite (also known as fool’s gold) functions as a detector for each radio, allowing for this cute little apparatus to pick up the AM radio signals being transmitted to the room. While these seriously old school crystal radios are typically listened to with earphones, Simensky fashioned battery-powered amplifiers and affixed a small black paper speaker cone to his devices so that audience members can hear the show while moving about the space. Walking through the exhibit, sounds vary in clarity and loudness depending on, not only one’s distance from a radio but, the quirks of each hand-made set.
Pyrite Radio Dispatch is both a performance and a work of visual art. An interdisciplinary artist, Simensky found his way to radio making after working with pyrite and learning that it could function in a crystal radio. His cheerful radios are attached to equally whimsical antennas. Networks of wires are strung overhead, echoing the look of clothes lines. Other wires reside inside pink, gold and red mylar security blankets. Two of these metallic sheets are sculptured onto stands, while another is rolled on the floor like a sleeping bag. As with the radios, the sheets resemble living beings, but on a larger scale. With so much to look at, the exhibit compels the viewer to journey inside and around to see the array of beautiful looping, twisted and coiled wire, brass structures, oval rainbow-hued gels, and other geometrically patterned antennas.
For the ICA SF show, Simensky arranged hour-long segments from eight different artists or radio stations. The show began with Aki Onda’s Midnight Radio, A Method to its Messiness, an album full of radio recordings that the artist made during his travels using a Walkman.
It was the perfect start, as the original piece includes overlapping radio stations, sounds of the radio dial spinning, and interference. When I returned a day later to hear bits from David Goren’s Brooklyn Pirate Radio Sound Map, it had similar resonances. I enjoyed the distorted noises emanating from the imprecisely tuned radios. It made for a supremely meta experience as I pondered all the different layers of interference resulting from multiple pyrite radios beaming Simensky’s short-range, broadcast of recordings from pirate radio stations in Brooklyn, New York. Goren has archived a wide range of radio stations in many different languages and the clips that Simensky randomly played showcased that linguistic diversity. Snippets of English language lessons included strangely apt soundbites like “I am an electrician.” Standing amid the radios and under the wires while listening to radio also created a feeling of being in a hall of mirrors, with reflections of reflections bouncing back, both visually and sonically. A pirate voice announced that it was transmitting from “the station that listens to you.” The unseen Brooklyn radio host could never have guessed that their voice would echo in such a way through tiny radios far from home.
Images from Pyrite Radio Dispatch can be viewed on Peter Simensky’s website, along with photos and videos from his past performances, featuring the many different radios that he’s built over the years. He performs Pyrite Radio: Dispatch in Santa Monica on April 9, 2022 at the 18th Street Arts Center’s Olympic Campus. Also this spring, he’s showing another version of his radios as part of “The Potential of Objects” group exhibit at Marin Museum of Contemporary Art (April 2-June 5, 2022).
