Radio On Exhibition - Kate McQuillen's Portfolio

Radio On

In 1937, Isamu Noguchi created the Radio Nurse and Guardian Ear, an early room monitoring device. Sparse and Minimalist in design, and shaped like a woman’s head, the Radio Nurse was built to receive the calls of both the young and the very old, and relay them to the Guardian Ear, a receiver situated near their caretaker.

What is special about communicating with the human voice? What is gained by the intonations, the spacing of words, and the shifts in volume? How are speaking and listening intrinsically tied? How can symbols and text make a visual image speak? The artists in this show answer these questions in various formats, all of which incorporate tools of repeatable markmaking: etchings, 3-D prints, monoprints, and zines.

Some of the artists incorporate specific strategies, such appropriation, heavily mediated markmaking, and self-publishing. Others lean into the representational, depicting the act of listening through line art drawing, or incorporating symbolic imagery, using images of everything from flowers to snakes. Some focus on the sensory experience that occurs when patterns and opposing colors cause optic vibrations, imparting a sense of visual frequencies and airwaves.

Looking at these works together through the lens of the Radio Nurse – and when ideas of care are embodied so gracefully in an everyday household appliance – we can consider ways in which methods of communication, both old and new, can be used to broadcast distress signals and send aid.

Guardian Ear 2.0: As the Radio Nurse captured distress and transmitted it back to its Guardian Ear, a larger web portal can capture signals of distress for an updated Guardian Ear. Text submissions from anywhere in the world will be validated by a relatively simple AI test, converted to speech, and spoken by the Guardian Ear 2.0.

Video documentation of Guardian Ear 2.0, by Zach Taylor