Interview with Honor Harger from r a d i o q u a l i a
The LIFT conference was an incredible opportunity to meet new people and hear about where the technology stands nowadays and where it is going. We have heard many interesting talks and demos, such as Hojun Song’s Open Source Satellite Initiative and Fabian Hemmert’s presentation on how they, in Design Research Lab (Berlin), do studies and experimentations on human-computer interaction. The latter was quite interesting, since it was an insight on how the new applications and ideas develop from research. They presented an example on how they approached designing a cellphone for women, which is not simply turned into pink, but is adapted functionality-wise to the requirements of women. Another interesting talk was from Nick Heller from Google-Europe, who, after presenting how the world is affected by technology today, suggested his view on the new applications to come, such as the ones that detect the pollen count or allow you to vote via mobile phones.
However, the most interesting conversation we had during the LIFT conference was with Honor Harger, who kindly agreed to give us an interview in between the presentations. Honor is a New Zealand-born artist and curator, who is particularly interested in artistic uses of technology. She is the director of Lighthouse, an arts agency in Brighton, UK. Together with a collaborator, she created an artist collective – r a d i o q u a l i a, which explores how broadcasting technologies can be used in artistic forms. One of their very interesting projects is Radio Astronomy. It is an arts and science project, which allows broadcasting from space, where you can hear the actual sounds that come from the planets, pulsars, or the sun.
Here are some extracts from our interview with Honor.
To learn more about Honor, click here to go to her page on about.me.
To hear her very interesting talk on TED about the sounds of space, click here or view it on youtube.
- Nadya Suvorova
- Mariam Asatryan