Slowing Down to Infrastructures

A live generative radio work by Radio Otherwise (Monai de Paula Antunes, Niko de Paula Lefort & Kate Donovan)
Palazzo Madama, Torino
14th Conference on Computation, Communication, Aesthetics & X — 8–10 July 2026

Between 8–10 July 2026, as part of the 14th Conference on Computation, Communication, Aesthetics & X (xcoax), Radio Otherwise will be transmitting its live generative webradio project Slowing Down to Infrastructures, paying attention to the inner life of the Palazzo Madama in Torino, Italy.

Slowing Down to Infrastructures is a durational, generative web radio project developed by Radio Otherwise that reconfigures buildings (the architectural materiality as well as the various energetic flows moving within and through them) as both studios and sonic instruments, attuning to the everyday infrastructures that sustain them. Using streamboxes (open microphones transmitting live audio), we install air and contact microphones, hydrophones, and electromagnetic antennas throughout a building to access its inner life and workings. Airflow through ventilation systems, electromagnetic signals from routers, water circulating through pipes, and vibrations from the street are streamed live alongside machine hums and distant traces of human and environmental presence, foregrounding the often-unnoticed infrastructures as protagonists. These live streams are processed in SuperCollider to form a continuously evolving, generative radio composition. Modulating frequency, rhythm, periodicity, and temporal cycles, the system unfolds over time with a subtle dramaturgy, alternating between moments of intensity and quiet reflection, allowing noise to gradually emerge as information. By listening to infrastructures as environmental sound, the project engages the material and invisible systems that shape collective human and more-than-human life. The soundscapes, rather than representing “nature,” reveal systems, foregrounding positionality and the conditions of listening itself. The project asks how listening to structural, coded, and invisible processes can make audible the politics of perception, access, and power embedded in infrastructural environments