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Radio Art, Radio Silence
New York's P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center has launched what it calls "the world's first internet art radio station," bringing a 24-hour stream of "music, talk and historic spoken-word programs focusing on contemporary art, music and literature from around the world." But careful how you try to access the station in Pocahontas County, West Virginia - that's the National Radio Quiet Zone!
WPS1, as the new Internet-only art station is called, uses contemporary writers, artists and musicians to host its shows. Its material includes the latest cutting edge news and music, but also provides access to the entire historical audio archive of the Museum of Modern Art. "As such," reports the site's mission statement, " WPS1will become a live audio museum in cyberspace, extending the visual art, book, music, film, video and performance programs that P.S.1 and MoMA are known for in ways previously unforeseen."
Listen to Art Radio WPS1, examine their program schedule, and browse their archives
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WIRED magazine recently reported on the "unique combination of geography and legislation" that has designated 13,000 square miles to be a national "Radio Quiet" zone, nearly free of electromagnetic pollution. This massive rectangle, the size of Connecticut and Massachusetts combined, nestles in the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia and Virginia.
In the central area of the zone, cell phone service is not permitted. Pagers, garage door openers, wireless computer networks, other transmitters? Just forget about it. (Even the US Fish & Wildlife Service got into trouble lately because some of flying squirrels fitted with their transmitter-tags entered the area. |
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That's a pretty big "Shush!!" Who's behind it? National security folks? National librarians?
Actually, it's astronomers. The region is home to the 485-foot, 17-million pound Green Bank Telescope, a monstrous radio telescope that peers into deep space and reads its structure from electromagnetic radiation so faint that typical signals are measured in Janskys (equivalent to 10 octillionths of a watt in power). After all, the signals are just the sparks thrown off my colliding atoms billions of light years away from Earth. Local radio noise swamps those weak signals. |
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In 1958 the Federal Communications Commission set aside the region as a quiet zone, and the rules have stuck. Power lines are buried 4 feet underground. No radio stations allowed, and cell phone stations are okay only around the edges of the zone. The observatory even has an official "keeper of the quiet," who constantly searches out and quiets leaky signals (inside and outside the observatory, and throughout the region) that muck up the observations.
Read much more in the WIRED article
Visit the National Radio Quiet Zone and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) |
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