Output details

Celestial Radio: a multi-media interactive public sculpture, in the form of a ‘glittering’ mirror-tiled yacht-cum-radio station, broadcasting site-specific sound-works in Thessaloniki, Isle of Skye, Folkestone, Margate, Whitstable, London, Jerusalem and Sydney (2008-12). Enabled through funding from: Arts Council England, Greek State Museum of Contemporary Art, The Hellenic Ministry of Culture, Folkestone Triennial, British Council, European Cultural Foundation, and Creative Scotland.

The aim of Celestial Radio was to extend the parameters and orthodoxies of public art, through finding new ways to involve audiences in an artwork, and in such ways to enable them to imaginatively re-examine the physical and non-physical environment that surrounds them. The research builds on the legacy of public art works to act as a catalyst to shift and enhance perceptions of place, and the legacy of site-specific work as a device through which environment and context can be interrogated.

Celestial Radio makes a unique creative and meaningful contribution to this field by developing a ‘peripatetic work’ that immerses audiences in new readings of the diverse landscapes that the work encounters. The research therefore employed original methods that significantly contribute to the ways in which a public artwork can involve audiences. Celestial Radio was particular in its aim to evoke a duality of existence between the audience’s physical surroundings and the non-physical world of imagination and visionary thinking, explored through light, sound, stories, and the human geography of place.

Celestial Radio projects were commissioned by the following institutions: Turner Contemporary Margate; Atlas Arts Skye and Musrara Festival Jerusalem; Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, MCA Sydney, Australia. The roots of this project lie in Celestial Radio (CR1 2004) that evoked memories of the Pirate Radio era on the Essex Coast. CR2 aimed to re-examine the effectiveness of this immersive art work within more diverse contexts, shifting the work away from its narrow origins in pirate radio history and extending the work into a unique peripatetic art project.

The project has been contextualised and discussed by Gabriela Salgado, in the catalogue for the Thessaloniki Biennale:2, 2009; Public discussion was also initiated through media coverage including Times, Guardian and BBC.