Tone Transmissions

11 Sep 2020 - 11 Sep 2021

Shown as part of the Science Museum and Crossed Wires online exhibition:

The Exchange

From fears of eavesdropping on the party line to alarm at rising rates of 'nomophobia', the telephone taps into some of the key social, cultural and political concerns of the modern and contemporary age. But in what ways can bringing together art and technology help us to understand the role of the telephone in how we talk and listen across cultures?

Created for the Science Museum Group as part of the Crossed Lines project, a diverse group of artists were commissioned to explore the role of the telephone in cultural production and reception. Inspired by objects in the Science Museum Group Collection, The Exchange features art, poetry and spoken word by novelist and journalist Will Self, artist Maya Chowdhry, beatboxer Danny Ladwa, poets Lisa Kelly, Serge Neptune, Nadia Nadarajah and DL Williams, and sound artist Aura Satz.

Commissioned during the COVID-19 pandemic, and reflecting a turn towards calling in lockdown, the project takes inspiration from a long history of creative engagement with the telephone: musicians, writers and artists from Mark Twain to Lady Gaga have turned to the apparatus as way of investigating notions of intimacy, voice, mobility, power and desire.

But by responding directly to objects in the collection - including an undersea cable, a manual switchboard, and a rotary dial - these artists not only open up ways of interacting with our cultural heritage, but also think through how, where and why communication takes place. In so doing, the project demonstrates the value of fostering exchange between technology and the arts in order to remember our pasts and imagine our possible futures.

28 March 2026

Tone Transmissions: Aura Satz & Sarah Shin on Éliane Radigue', as part of Assembly, Somerset House, London

Tone Transmissions is a listening session led by Aura Satz, reflecting on the life and work of influential electronic composer Éliane Radigue (1932–2026). In this session for Assembly 2026, artist Aura Satz shares projects made in collaboration with the late minimalist pioneer, best known for her meditative electronic drone compositions produced on the ARP 2500 modular synthesizer. Satz is joined by publisher, writer, and curator Sarah Shin to reflect on Radigue’s philosophies and approaches to score, listening, and musical communication. Satz draws on two works created with Radigue and collaborating musicians Rhodri Davies and Julia Eckhardt: Tone Transmissions, a sound work addressing Radigue’s shift from electronic music to later acoustic works and the transmission of music through conversation, mental images, and non-notational scores; and Occam Delta XX, a trio for film, harp, and viola developed through Radigue’s oral “living score” process, in which Satz’s film participates directly in the logic of the composition.