Radio Earth Broadcasts Begin

One of the coolest applications of technology is written about in this Atlantic Monthly article-the unveiling of Radio Garden. By looking at a map and clicking on a dot you can “know humanity through its sounds, through its music. It’s an interactive map that lets you tune into any one of thousands of radio stations all over the world in real time. Exploring the site is both immersive and a bit disorienting—it offers the sense of lurking near Earth as an outsider. In an instant, you can click to any dot on the map and hear what’s playing on the radio there, from Miami to Lahore to Berlin to Sulaymaniyah and beyond”.
I have been listening to Radio Izmir Turkey’s local station Radyo Kordelya and Dakar Senegal’s “Allo Dakar Radio Tam Tam”.

“The project, created for the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision by the interactive design firms Studio Puckey and Moniker, was built using an open-source WebGL globe that draws from thousands of radio stations—terrestrial and online-only streams—overlaid with Bing satellite imagery. The result is the best kind of internet rabbit hole: Engrossing, perspective shifting, provocative, and delightful”.

Tuning into these stations broadcasting local music and items of local significance gives a new way of viewing “humanity in the abstract, and also at the individual level”.

In the words of Canadian visionary  Marshall McLuhan:

“As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes”.