Radio Chthulucene 87.9 FM

6/8/2024

“Corvid Calls” by Spade Thornton

This radio installment was encased by a sculpture made from clay and cardboard, made to look like a crow. It was installed Monday June 3rd on the second floor of the Visual Arts Facility on UCSD campus, and ran on a battery pack, meaning in the evenings it was unplugged.

The audio played by this radio is three different crow calls, slightly altered by me and even further distorted by the encoding required to upload it to the Arduino UNO. The intention was to take something from nature and warp it into something unfamiliar; to make the viewer question what they were hearing, even though it was something they were likely to have heard earlier that same day. This intention can also be seen in the sculpture, the beak and body of the “crow” made familiar enough to understand with given context. But without the context it almost seems like a strange entity, eyes spiraled and beak unnaturally set with a tongue of wire.

In the end, I found the result to be something eerie yet strangely comforting, both visually and aurally.