36X24 Inches
Photographic print
On February 5 1948 WDTR began official broadcasting. With 2,000 watts of effective power the station was mostly limited to Detroit and its nearest suburbs. WDTR was listener-supported and non-commercial, broadcasting mostly classical music, jazz and educational content. By 2003 the facility was abandon, and from what I can gather they sold their license to another station that still holds the 90.9 MHz frequency.
I went to the site looking for a relic or image to respond to and found some red plastic flowers in the corner of the archive and took a photo.
In studio I encoded the image of the flowers through Slow Scan TV (SSTV) into an audio output. SSTV is a common method of image transmission for Amateur radio hobbyists and has been in use since the late 80s. I then built a transmitter with an audio looper embedded, playing the encoded image as audio over FM Radio.
On February 25 2023 WDTR made its final transmission at a mere 7 watts. I installed the battery-operated transmitter on the roof of the building. I walked away from the abandon facility with an FM receiver and recorded the transmissions as they decayed with distance and interference. The recorded audio was then decoded back into these corrupted images.
FOR ADDITIONAL INFO PLEASE SEE: https://michaelcandy.com/WDTR-FLOWERS
FOR PROCESS IMAGES PLEASE SEE: https://tinyurl.com/6fv35pn8
This work is available for pre-order, with anticipated availability September 2023. Buyers will be contacted to complete payment when the work is available for purchase and pick up/shipping.
Item is located in Detroit, MI. Local pickup available. Domestic shipping is available for an additional $50 fee.
Michael Candy is an artist whose work reflects the socio-political currents of contemporary technologies. Acting as a witness to the oppressive nature of cybernetics and digital culture, Candy positions the viewer in a physical and moral confrontation with issues challenging society.
His installations, sculpture, and video works often emerge as social experiments or ecological interventions in public space. This didactic practice seeks to mediate the liminal realm that the digital age oppresses on the physical world.
By directly interfacing the systems in question, Candy’s works enact the artist’s desire to reach a deeper register of audience feeling, endowing experiences–not spectacle. These robotic anomalies draw aesthetically from a lineage of post-industrial design, robotic engineering, and emergent technology.
Candy has been involved in many international exhibitions and residencies, notably: Water, (GOMA, Brisbane), Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, (AGSA, Adelaide), Ars Electronica Festival, (Linz, Austria), The Kathmandu Triennale (Kathmandu, Nepal), The Forum of Sensory Motion (Athens, Greece), The Instrument Builders Project + Hackteria Lab (Yogyakarta, Indonesia), and Hawapi (Huepetuhe, Peru).
Michael is also the winner of the WRO Award as part of the 16th Media Art biennale in Poland and Prix Cube in Paris. He has also been a finalist in the Jeremy Hynes Award (Brisbane, Australia) and the Bio Art and Design Award (The Hague, Netherlands).
Thesis statement
