Unearthing the New AfterLife Array

KDZU is an autofictional interventionist transmission platform that operates at the intersection of speculative media, networked infrastructures, and tactical mythmaking. It produces site-responsive works that use radio, networking technologies, and narrative fabrication to create participatory environments where fiction and infrastructure blur. Through installations, performances, and embedded artifacts, KDZU explores decentralized communication, collective authorship, and the politics of signal, memory, and presence.

KDZU’s Goldfield, Nevada, outpost recently received an unsigned letter* in the mail, postmarked but otherwise unadorned, containing a hand-drawn map, technical sketches, and a claim that the Memphis, Tennessee-based OMSA** (Orange Mound Space Agency) robotics and interventionist transmission collective may have persisted beyond the 1994 “Great Raid” on their Memphis Pyramid squat.

According to this letter, while many OMSA members scattered westward, the OMSA (Our Methods Seem Abstract) RF research group traveled north and east, establishing a provisional site in the northern Catskills near present-day Acra, New York. The letter describes this region as strategically chosen for its seclusion, low population density, and hilly terrain. These conditions, the residents of Wave Farm already understand, are favorable for experimental long-range transmissions, signal occlusion, and off-grid communications.

KDZU approaches the claims in this letter as an activation point for its tactical mythmaking activities: a prompt to investigate, reconstruct, and extend a speculative lineage of OMSA’s (One More Sexy Anarchist) transmission experiments, which took place over thirty years ago at the Wave Farm site.

What Will KDZU Discover? KDZU proposes developing the New AfterLife Array, a Meshtastic-based (LoRa and LoRaWAN), long-range, off-grid communication network that was fictitiously developed and buried by OMSA (Origin Myth Site Acra). This mesh-enabled multi-node instrument will be fictitiously unearthed, activated, and presented across the Wave Farm site.

The installation will present four nodes from OMSA’s (Our Memphian Signaling Architecture) network, G, F, N, and H, each corresponding to a letter in the word GOLDFINCH, a bird native to the Acra, NY region known for its waveform-like flight pattern. This partial recovery suggests that five additional nodes may exist elsewhere in Upstate New York, possibly awaiting discovery or may be permanently lost.

Each of these four nodes consists of five components

At Wave Farm, the New AfterLife Array functions as both a fictional field test of a long-dormant system and a contemporary experiment in decentralized transmission. It privileges slowness, intentionality, and communication as an ongoing, collectively activated process.

Using LoRa mesh devices distributed across the landscape, the project treats transmission as durational and accumulative: signals move slowly, degrade, repeat, and require multiple encounters to be perceived. As messages propagate through the network, they form an evolving archive of interruptions, delays, and relays. Visitors will also encounter fragments of OMSA’s (Ongoing Mutual Signal Attunements) surreptitious caregiving of the system, such as maintenance logs, instructions for future care, and transmission records. Some bits will be translated into sound and spoken text to be activated by the Array. The four nodes operate as a distributed, mesh-enabled sonic instrument that performs both its signals and its artifacts.

It is OMSA’s (Our Mesh Subverts ARPANET) contemporary anarchist response to J.C.R. Licklider’s once imagined “Intergalactic Computer Network,” a 1960’s vision of globally interconnected computers enabling shared access to information, an early articulation of the internet as an “electronic commons.” Reinterpreted at Wave Farm, this project takes up that vision through a recently unearthed low-power, collectively maintained system contingent on human presence, proximity to others, and human+transmitter+receiver collaboration.

This work also draws from the legacy of upstate New York’s many historical intentional community experiments I encountered while living in Troy, New York: utopias that collapsed, dispersed, or dissolved, yet left behind important traces, structures, and ideologies that continue to resonate in ways that can be more potent than the utopianists' original intentions and methods. The New AfterLife Array treats failures as symbolically generative transmissions that sometimes persist and develop potency beyond their original intentions.

FRMPayload (Frame Payload) Communications Messaging Signals

Then each node has its own local mapping table, for example:

NODE “G”

Additional distributed instrument components

• sender-based behaviors: Node “G” responds to node “F” differently than node “N” or “H”
• signal-strength mappings:
• packet delay memory:
• node-specific identities: