Repatterning

Repatterning 6/1 · Kate Donovan May 14, 2023


Kate Donovan talks about meteors and interruptions, apples and time, sensing and bubbles, and temporary listening communities.


“I was thinking of the apples as a sound of interruption — something that just happens. So it makes you pay attention to something else in the garden — the more-than-human world. And in terms of radio, I think of the meteor as a figure of interruption. […] When a celestial body meets an atmosphere from a planet it generates ionized trails. That’s what we see as a meteor. […] And it’s possible to send a radio frequency and it would bounce off of these trails. So I think of it as a figure of radio interruption.”


Kate Donovan · Photo by Victoria Tomaschko

Kate Donovan · Photo by Victoria Tomaschko


Kate Donovan is a Berlin-based artist and researcher working with radio, listening and the more-than-human. She is interested in transmission and interconnectedness, but also disruption and interference. Her research focusses on non-anthropogenic radio, and re-thinking/working dominant radio histories.

Much of her practice is together with others and circles around knowledge exchange and experimentation. She is part of CoLaboRadio (Free Radios Berlin Brandenburg), the Datscha Radio Berlin team, the international feminist group Shortwave Collective and is a co-founder of Radio Otherwise, an artistic research project motivated by the plurality of experiences involved in radio-making in connection to ecological thinking. She is also part of the research group SENSING: the Knowledge of Sensitive Media (Potsdam), with a project on Radio as Relation.


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Repatterning is a series of talks about being turned inside out. It is about the experience of being radically upended, the work of dreaming, and the ghosts that travel along the way. Concentric circles rippling outwards from art, crisis, music, sickness, reinvention, mourning, renewal, collapse, and enchantment. Picking through the remnants and imagining what might emerge, as the grains of sand pile upwards, the hope drone swells, the gamelan chimes, and the distant bells peal.

Repatterning is available via RSS, and via Apple or Google, with occasional glimpses on social media.