Sonic Talk: Kate Donovan - Conglomerate Bodies of Radio
For the second Sonic Talk of summer semester 2026 artist and researcher Kate Donovan is invited to share her research and practice. She brings together different interwoven strands of her work under the title Conglomerate Bodies of Radio. Moving beyond conventional understandings of broadcasting and reception, the presentation unfolds radio as a more-than-human, collective as well as relational and ecological practice.
The first strand engages with the notion of more-than-human radio, extending the framework of radio beyond anthropocentric and technocentric frameworks. Here, radio emerges as trans-scalar phenomena that is evident across species and materialities..
The second strand attends to small-scale, feminist, and collective radio-making, told in particular through the work of activist and artist Margaretta D’Arcy, who foregrounds radio as a site of political and communal possibility
The third strand turns to ecological thinking and site-specific practices of listening~transmitting, developed through the artistic research group Radio Otherwise. This work involves giving attention to the environmental and infrastructural conditions of radio as both situated and planetary processes.
Together, these strands propose a reorientation of radio as plural and situated, as a mode of relation across bodies, environments, and worlds.
Kate Donovan is a Berlin-based artist and researcher working with radio, ecological thinking, listening, planetarity, and the more-than-human. She currently holds a fellowship with 4A_Lab Berlin (Institute for Art History, Florence - Max-Planck-Institut) with the project “Ecologies of Dispersal. Sound, seeds, holding”. Her PhD project “Radio as Relation. Listening across Worlds of Artistic Research, Technologies and the More-than-human” (2025) was completed as part of the research group SENSING: the Knowledge of Sensitive Media (Potsdam University); it is a reframing of radio outside of anthropocentric, patriarchal, techno-modernity. She has been actively involved in many collaborative radio art and community radio initiatives, including CoLaboRadio, Datscha Radio Berlin, Archipel e.V., Radiotopia and she is the co-founder of Radio Otherwise, an artistic research project whose work involves environment-specific transmissions of listening and dialogic exchange.
More information: www.mattersoftransmission.net
Sonic Talk: Kate Donovan - Conglomerate Bodies of Radio
19th of May, 7pm
Glas Cube of Limona (Steubenstraße 8, 99423 Weimar)