Artists Anton Kats and Maia Urstad invite you to hear and share different ways of working with radio - as tools for communication, platforms for programming and opportunities for listening and connecting to each other. They will be joined by Nats Spada, Solmaz Aslan and Olivia Melkonian from youth-led radio station Platform B, and Sue Davis and Kim Newland from the Mid Sussex Amateur Radio Society.

Doors and bar open: 6pm

Discussion: 6.30-8.30pm

Tickets: Free/ pay what you can

The ways in which radio is created, used and distributed have developed dramatically over recent decades. The whole model of what a radio station - and all its forms of listening, recording, operating, transmitting and networking - has been taken apart and re-built. New technologies offer different ways to play, create, operate, activate and use radio for our own means.

MAKU is Anton and Maia’s collaborative project, combining their shared practices and interests in communication technology, radio transmission and ways of listening. Anton and Maia will use the session to introduce their approaches, and are interested to hear what radio practices are taking place in Brighton, especially in relation to current needs for space, networking and self-organisation in the city.

Find out more about MAKU’s residency at Lighthouse.

Anton Kats is an artist, musician and dancer born in the Ukraine and now based in Berlin, Germany. His practice derives from informal everyday relationships from growing up in a vibrant neighbourhood in Kherson, Ukraine, complemented through the necessity and pragmatics of seeking self-legalisation in Europe via entering formal institutions of education. In his work, Kats explores radio through concepts of ‘narrowcast’ and ‘concrete listening’, engaging with structures of self-organisation and self-education. His projects often unfold in the form of collaborative interventions, installations and sonic sculptures, performances, learning sites and public programs, and have been present in venues including the Serpentine Galleries, Tate, Victoria and Albert Museum, The Showroom gallery, London (UK) and documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel.

Maia Urstad is an artist based in Bergen, Norway working at the intersection of audio and visual art. She was a member of ska/new-wave group 'Program 81', releasing 4 records and touring between 1979-84. Technological progress and communications technology are pervasive themes in her projects, using radio as a key audio, visual and conceptual element, commenting on the temporary nature of present technology, and what traces and stories we leave behind when new inventions enter our daily lives. In 2017, she was appointed as City Sound Artist of Bonn 2017, and throughout 2018 exhibiting ‘Time-Tone-Passages’, a 40-channel site specific sound installation based on material from the radio archive of Deutsche Welle, Germany. She is part of the international sound art collective Freq_out curated by CM von Hausswolff, and a co-founder of Lydgalleriet, Bergen.

Platform B is Brighton’s first youth-led radio station broadcasting online since 2016 and on 105.5 FM and DAB across the City since October 2018. It is programmed and directed by a new wave of DJs, producers and presenters who are re-imagining and diversifying the medium with an eclectic mix of music and youth programming. Their studio is in the Green Door Store, a music venue underneath Brighton Station.

Nats Spada is Co-Founder, Creative Director and Station Manager for Platform B. Prior to setting up Platform B, Nats worked at totallyradio.com, where she headed up the internet radio station's editorial team and music curators as well as presenting the New Noise Rock Show. She also managed three partnership projects supported by the Technology Strategy Board.

Solmaz Aslan is a Senior Producer at Platform B and a recent Philosophy Graduate from the University of Sussex. Prior to getting involved with Platform B, Solmaz was Station Manager at the University of Sussex’s student radio station, URF.

Olivia Melkonian is a DJ and producer at Platform B. A recent Media Production Graduate from the University of Sussex, Olivia's dissertation and personal interests focus on accurately recounting Armenian history through the medium of podcasts.

Sue Davis and Kim Newland are part of the Mid Sussex Amateur Radio Society. They will introduce the practices and uses of amateur radio today, and how the society communicates with other users across the world.

Mid Sussex Amateur Radio Society is a group of local radio amateurs who meet weekly in Burgess Hill, West Sussex. As well as hosting weekly communication sessions from their radio shack and regular events on different radio practices, the Society runs short courses to teach techniques required to obtain an Amateur Radio licence.

The event is part of Lighthouse Curator in Residence Eva Rowson’s six month programme ‘Who’s doing the washing up – where’s the sink?’ exploring the role of hospitality in organisations. The project is a response to Lighthouse’s aim to create spaces to host new ideas, practices and communities and a shared understanding amongst local groups and independent organisations that these spaces are disappearing elsewhere in the city. Drawing on ideas of world-building and feminist science-fiction, modes of communication and organisational practices, the programme takes different forms including workshops and interventions as well as re-imaginings of the uses and workings of the Lighthouse building itself.

The programme title ‘Who’s doing the washing up – where’s the sink?’ is used to address questions that so often go unasked by institutions and grant-makers when imagining ’radical’ new models of organising and hosting: How are different types of work – from the artists to the cleaning – valued in these futures? Who gets to have a voice in these imaginings? And how do we actually change the infrastructures we’re working in so we don’t just reproduce the same models, narratives and values?

Part of Re-imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.