2024-10-30 (Radio Row)

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

“Memory”

In 2008, the streets of New York quietly absorbed the final generation of analog televisions. With the federal transition to digital broadcasting completed in 2009, these once-central domestic machines lost their function and entered a prolonged state of obsolescence, accumulating across the city as an unintentional technological stratum.

Amid these discarded systems—many of which resisted conventional recycling protocols—I encountered a moment in which technology ceased to operate as instrument and instead appeared as presence. Detached from utility, these obsolete devices revealed themselves not as dead media, but as dormant fields of signal, memory, and latency. This encounter marked the beginning of Digital Being.

Since then, I have worked with abandoned electronic systems, particularly CRT televisions—what Marshall McLuhan described as “cool media”—not as objects to be restored, but as substrates for reconfiguration. Through embedded sensing systems, code, and networked feedback, these machines are no longer treated as passive artifacts, but as responsive entities capable of generating emergent behavior. I refer to these entities as Digital Beings, and the broader practice as Digitology.

This trajectory led me to Radio Row, a once-vibrant district of technological exchange in Lower Manhattan active from the early 20th century until its disappearance in the 1960s. Though physically erased, Radio Row persists as an infrastructural memory of media circulation, shaping the technological imagination of its time—what Michel Foucault might describe as an episteme—and forming a latent foundation for contemporary media culture.

Today, I reframe Radio Row not as a historical site, but as an auratic field: a spatial condition in which technological memory, material residue, and signal-based systems can be reactivated. Within this framework, Digital Being: Radio Row operates as a living system of activation, where discarded technologies are not restored as tools, but reconstituted as relational entities within a dynamic network of signal, environment, and presence.

The installation functions simultaneously as an archive and an activation site. Here, behavior does not follow fixed programming, but emerges through real-time interaction between system, space, and viewer. Visitors do not simply observe the work; they enter into its operational field, becoming part of a feedback loop that continuously reshapes its state of being.

Rather than framing obsolescence as an endpoint, Radio Row positions it as a condition of transformation. It proposes that technological decay is not a form of disappearance, but a phase of reconfiguration in which new forms of agency may emerge from residual systems.

At the same time, the project reactivates the historical commercial and social intensity of the original Radio Row—reframed today as a site of circulation, activation, and custodial collection.

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.