Unearthing the New AfterLife Array

Introduction

KDZU is an autofictional interventionist transmission platform that blends speculative storytelling with RF systems and robotics. It creates site-specific projects in which these technologies conjure narrative frameworks—for example, placing “lost” objects in public space that contain login credentials for hidden networks, or staging transmissions that appear to interrupt existing broadcasts with unfamiliar signals. Through installations, performances, and embedded artifacts, KDZU creates situations in which people encounter signals and objects, follow their curiosities, and uncover connections. KDZU also takes the form of a fictional radio station, transmitting from locations that are both real and constructed. Past transmissions have originated from sites such as the San Bernardino Mountains, Goldfield, Nevada, and Gothenburg, Sweden.

A listener contacts KDZU

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 raid on their squat in upper floors of the Memphis Pyramid in Memphis, Tennessee. According to this letter, while many OMSA (Our Map Suggests Acra) 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 (Original Myth Site, Acra). This mesh-enabled multi-node instrument will be fictitiously unearthed, activated, and presented in four spots across the Wave Farm site.

KDZU will reveal that this is a long-buried transmission art project created in the 1990s and surreptitiously maintained by OMSA (Ongoing Maintenance and Systems Attunement) while awaiting its discovery and activation.

The installation

The installation will present four sites on the Wave Farm grounds, each site containing one of the four nodes from OMSA's (Our Memphian Signaling Architecture) New AfterLife Array, 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 (O, L, D, I, and C) may exist elsewhere in Upstate New York, possibly awaiting discovery or may be permanently lost.

Each node will transmit a sound work. The sound works are co-authored by the other three nodes, and the receiving node will interpret and perform the composition. For example, Node H will receive compositional guidance from nodes G, F, and N and play the composition through its amplified speaker.

The New AfterLife Array at Wave Farm functions as both a fictional field test of a long-dormant system and a contemporary experiment in decentralized collaboration and transmission practices. The radio network values slowness, purposefulness, and collaboration as continual processes.

Each of these four nodes consists of five components

How it works

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. There is a more detailed technical description of this project below on this page.

OMSA’s (Our Mesh Subverts ARPANET) creative goals

When experiencing the piece, we will discover the RF research group was interested in creating a “New AfterLife” for themselves after the “Great Raid” of their home in Memphis. The group had become fascinated by and judgmental of 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.” So, they developed the New AfterLife Array as an antagonistic response to the bankruptcy of Licklider’s vision, which was based on an entanglement with military power and a universalizing technical logic.

Reinterpreted by KDZU at Wave Farm, the New AfterLife Array embodies OMSA’s vision through a recently unearthed, low-power, collectively maintained system contingent on human presence, proximity to others, and human+transmitter+receiver collaboration.

Regional & historical

This work also draws on the legacy of numerous historical intentional community experiments in upstate New York that I encountered while living in Troy: utopias that collapsed or dispersed, yet left important traces, urgencies, and ideologies that sometimes resonate more powerfully than the original intentions and methods of the utopianists. The New AfterLife Array views failures as symbolically generative transmissions that sometimes endure and grow in strength beyond their initial purpose.

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: