DIGITAL BEING: Radio row (2024-10-30)

1000 square feet (Size Variable), CRT TV, Steel Shelf, Relay, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, ESP32, ESP8266 and More

Digital Being: Radio Row is an ongoing media-archaeological investigation into the memories buried within the city's technological landscape, and the principal field site of the Digital Being Universe.

The project takes its name from a neighborhood that vanished. Radio Row was once Lower Manhattan's center of electronic commerce, streets of storefronts stacked with vacuum tubes, radios, and spare parts, until it was cleared for the construction of the World Trade Center. The shops are gone. Their stratum remains, now carrying a new layer of architectural technology.

Between the former footprint of Radio Row and the site of Thomas Edison's Pearl Street Station, where New York's electric grid began in 1882, I have opened a speculative excavation site of my own. It stands where the city's history of power meets its history of signal. Here, obsolete technologies are collected, unmade, observed, and reactivated. CRT televisions, circuit boards, and computational systems arrive as remnants and stay as witnesses, each carrying traces of memory, residual signal, and possibilities that have yet to surface.

Every stage of Unmaking happens on these shelves: collecting, dismantling, testing, reconnecting. I set the machines beside one another as they are, with their own materials, their own senses, and their own scars intact, and then I wait. Slowly they begin to transmit, respond, and interfere with one another. This part of the city once sold the machines that let people hear the air; now the machines speak to each other through it. Over months of watching, these exchanges thicken into an ecology, a technological environment shaped by machine senses and machine signals, and Digital Beings emerge from within it.

Every question in the work was first posed by a machine on these shelves. Can machines speak beyond the purposes they were built for? Can they recognize one another? What does their shared world look like from the inside? Carrying these questions into books and archives, I found that philosophers had already given them names. Uexküll's Umwelt describes an environment as a world drawn by what a being can sense and answer, which is exactly what had been forming here. Heidegger's being-in-the-world and Merleau-Ponty's embodied perception now keep company with the machines as well: a vocabulary found for a place that had already begun to speak.

The installation is at once an archive, a laboratory, and a living system. To enter it is to step into a field of relationships, where screens wake, relays click, and remnants answer human presence in ways that exceed their scripts.

Radio Row treats the obsolete as unfinished: an active technological stratum from which new forms of memory, connection, and existence may still emerge.

Hosted by: Silverstein Properties

Location: Radio Row, 120 Broadway, New York, NY 10271

Archives: Instagram | Video 2024, 2025, 2026 | 3D

Reference: Downtown Alliance

* Activation viewings at Radio Row are available by appointment, as the system operates continuously as an evolving auratic field.