Since the late 1970s, artists and theorists have explored sound and radio as a site of resistance, embodied transmission, and spatial disruption.¹ Tetsuo Kogawa’s micro-FM stations in Tokyo proposed a model of trans-local radio — community-based signal zones operating outside mass media.² Max Neuhaus’s sound installations in public spaces, with hidden speakers and audience-triggered mechanisms, proposed a model of interactive acoustics, soundscapes shaped by listener presence beyond conventional art spaces.³

Chiara Hardy’s installation at Ubud Open Studios in Bali builds on these roots, using pirate radio’s DIY ethos and audience-triggered broadcasts with locally scavenged materials to reflect the island’s informal broadcasting practices, evoking, intentionally or not, Bali’s ephemeral spirit.

Built from scavenged components and activated by presence and actions of the audience, her transmitter actualises pirate aesthetics on a hyperlocal scale. The antenna structures, adapted from bamboo, wire, and discarded furniture, function as both signal carriers and sculptural forms: tree branches inverted into the ground with pigment grounding the circuitry, strings tensioned across salvaged wood. The installation operates as a functioning emitter. There is no fixed schedule. Visitors trigger the transmission through movement, proximity, or incidental contact. The signal loops outward, broadcasting to any receiver within its range. Bali is the stage.

In Indonesia, pirate radio circulates across a spectrum of use — from fishermen wiring makeshift antennae to stream music at sea, to neighbourhood systems embedded in everyday life.⁴ These activities often go undocumented yet remain part of a living subculture. In Bali, rooftop antennae on residential buildings are widely visible, and their function is often only understood locally. Hardy admits that her work responds directly to this phenomenon and its embedded forms of unregulated transmission.

Reception is not guaranteed. The act of transmission takes precedence – a gesture of sending rather than a demand for feedback. Several of the large structures are shaped as bows, encapsulating this principle: meant to launch outward, with no certainty of where or whether it will land. Gregory Whitehead once described the audience for such broadcasts as “phantom,” assumed but invisible.⁵ Hardy’s system similarly functions regardless of who’s listening, prioritising the gesture of sending.

Chiara’s installation is both acoustic and spatial, fully contingent on interaction. Without sustained presence, the system ceases to operate. Anne Hilde Neset framed this type of transmission art as an “expanded acoustic architecture” — a method of organising space through ephemeral means.⁶

Above all, Hardy’s work sits deeply rooted in Bali’s traditions of impermanence — from palm-leaf offerings that decay by design to the incense smoke that fills the air, and chants that dissolve at the end of ceremony. Its aesthetic is raw, functional, and grounded in local materials, resisting the over-produced, spectacle-driven aesthetic of the contemporary art world, and yet each part possesses its own subtle poetics. As Chiara’s transmissions pulse across Ubud’s air, the work leaves one hoping: that small, temporary systems like this can cut through the white noise of our culture.

Notes:
Brandon LaBelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art, 2nd ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 158–172.
Tetsuo Kogawa, “Toward Polymorphous Radio,” Radio Rethink, ed. Daina Augaitis and Dan Lander (Banff: Walter Phillips Gallery, 1994), 141–150.
Christoph Cox, “Max Neuhaus and the Politics of Public Sound,” in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, ed. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (London: Continuum, 2004), 336–339.
Resty Woro Yuniar, “Pilots Complain of Music Interference from Pirate Radio Used by Indonesian Fishermen,” Vice, January 24, 2020, https://www.vice.com/en/article/pilots-complain-music-pirate-radio-indonesian-fishermen.
Gregory Whitehead, “Out of the Dark: Notes on the Nobodies of Radio Art,” in Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde, ed. Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 253–272.
Anne Hilde Neset, “Expanded Acoustic Architecture,” Contemporary Music Review 25, no. 1–2 (2006): 49–58.

— Natasha Doroshenko Murray