MARY-JO GILLIGAN

Diapole 1

Diapole 1 is an installation created for a theatre building in Athlone, Ireland. Geographically Athlone is a hub of radiowave propegation: Athlone was once the active site of the national broadcaster RTE’s  main mast for AM waves propagation; the telephone exchange still operates from the base of an iconic red and white mast in the town centre; mobile phone companies continue to sprout aerials throughout the locality; satellite dishes and yagis bespeckle house facades and rooftops; and radiowaves themselves are ever present fluid structures.

This work invites the audience to participate in an expanded notion of urban architecture by exploring the presence and behaviour of radio waves, while moving between interior and exterior space, soaked in sonicscapes and tuning frequencies.

text excerpts from Ahmm Ffhmm, 8" 20'

…The stretch and the scope of them…shortwaves circle the globe in a tassle of curves, bouncing off sun churned atoms in the ionosphere, FM streaking as the crows fly from tall stilts and towers, spilling outside of the inevitable curve, out into space. And AM held all the closer at dusk, as the sun relinquishes it’s alchemic reign over electrons, leaving the atmosphere remain like a cool cotton sheet pulled around the sloping back of the night. And me stretched out in full goal-keeper flight, lying in their plane for a moment, unaware of the rippling slice that would pass through my watery toes, to my hips, to my shoulders, through to my head and its inner thinkings, undisturbed by some frequency modulated by violins in Vienna…

 

...It stands rigid as if shooting underground as long and straight a rod as up and up, striking a shaft of metal lattice in the centre of the island - in the centre of the land. Baubled and bristled with buckets and cones and rods, blues and greys and white polyps on its body, like cockles sucking to its height and turning their faces to taste the tall air and feed upon waves: waves that crash against the steel tower soundlessly, the tumult mute and seemless. Absorbtion upon contact. The ahmm and fhmm swallowed by the bucket creatures, circulated through their system and breathed up and out again, back into the teeming air, but upside down...

...“Tune in Athlone”, my Grandad would say, the town spelled out on the band behind glass, warm with the orange uplight inside the set.  Connected to the dial and the cogs and the copper wire, tuning the radio frequency, mirrored, like the string of a mandolin plucked beside the body of another so it fills with a borrowed note. “Tune in Athlone”, the two tall masts, each tapered down into a point the ground, balancing between thick cables like a magnificent tent-pole, anchoring it upright, proud and swaying delicately still. Built so the west could hear the Pope long ago: now idle and listening alone.