There is something wonderfully strange about entering a room filled with old radios and being invited to listen for messages from the animal world.
In The Enormous Radio, an A Chamber Made work by Roslyn Oades and Bob Scott with collaborators, wildlife recordings, obsolete technology and a touch of techno-spiritualism combine to create an immersive experience that is both intriguing and quietly haunting.
Having only recently experienced Oades and Scott’s immersive audio work The Nightline, I was keen to see what this collaboration might offer. At The Substation in Newport, the Main Space has been transformed into a curious hive of old radios, their glowing dials, crackling speakers and twitching antennas creating something between a communications centre and a séance.
Production designer Jenny Hector’s striking installation, complemented by lighting programmer Matt Milne, gives the space an eerie, otherworldly quality. Technology designer Kevan Atkins, with technician and antenna designer Sam King, brings the network of obsolete equipment to life.
The work unfolds through six transmissions, each featuring a distinctive Australian species: Tasmanian Devils, the Pobblebonk Frog, Red-tailed Black Cockatoos, Blue Whales, Dingoes and Boobook Owls.
But these are not simply wildlife recordings. Working with text dramaturg Sarah Walker, Oades feeds the animal field recordings into voice enhancement and translation software, asking the machine to identify English-language words. The resulting texts are the uncanny ‘found texts’ produced by the software itself: what the machine believes it can hear.
It is an ingenious conceit. Animal calls become fragments of language; noise becomes communication; the inexplicable begins to sound almost meaningful. There is a fascinating tension between knowing what we are hearing and our human desire to believe that something else might be trying to speak to us.
The old radios are central to the experience. Once vital instruments of communication, they now seem almost archaic, yet retain a particular resonance in Australia, where radio remains important during bushfires, floods and other emergencies. Here, they have been hacked, revived and repurposed as an interconnected machine-medium seeking, receiving and transmitting messages from the animal world.
The work also draws on the history of electronic voice phenomena, or EVP, where researchers once believed unexplained voices could be detected within recordings. The Enormous Radio brings that idea into the age of machine learning, creating a new kind of ‘techno-spiritualism’ in which technology becomes an intermediary between the human and non-human worlds.
In an era of human-made climate emergency, there is something particularly poignant about this desire to listen differently. The work taps into our longing to reconnect with the wild and to find forms of communication beyond our own.
Oades, Scott and their collaborators have created something that sits intriguingly between performance, installation, documentary and experiment. The Enormous Radio asks little of its audience beyond a willingness to listen, but rewards that attention with an absorbing journey into sound, technology and the unknown.
The Enormous Radio is an imaginative work, attuned to the possibilities of listening. Sometimes the most intriguing messages are the ones we are not quite sure we have heard.
The Enormous Radio
The Substation, 1 Market Street, Newport
Performance: Wednesday 30 September 2026
Season continues to 10 October 2026
Information and Bookings: www.thesubstation.org.au
Images: The Enormous Radio – photos by Sarah Walker
Review: Rohan Shearn