Shortwave Collective – No go-go girls (on the dancefloor)
Thursday, 10 September⋅9:00 – 10:00am
At 9am this morning international feminist artist group, Shortwave Collective explore the world of CB radio in “No ‘go-go girls (on the dancefloor)’”
Citizens Band (CB) radio is a frequency range dedicated to licence-free communication. As artists interested in radio as a way to bypass corporate communications infrastructures and harness atmospheric conditions, we are drawn to CB’s potential as a shared mode of connection.
Yet while CB radio presents itself as an open community, our experiences have been marked by inaudibility and exclusion. We investigate the gendered and discriminatory codes embedded in CB slang and speak back through poetic interventions: No ‘go-go girls (on the dancefloor)’ rejects a CB code that equates women with livestock, originally used to describe a truck hauling pigs or cows.
Working from locations dispersed across the globe, we explore our local environments, magnetically mounting antenna extenders to metal surfaces in attempts to meet on an 11-metre wave. These efforts to connect open speculative possibilities for a future collective CB radio community and shared poetic transmission.
This piece was developed during a tekhnē online residency supported by OUT.RA and Skaņu Mežs, between September 2025-January 2026. A companion text titled ‘Becoming Citizens of the 11 Metre Band’ is available via Skaņu Mežs.
Shortwave Collective’s active members are Alyssa Moxley (FR), Brigitte Hart (AU/UK), Georgia Leigh-Münster (UK), Hannah Kemp-Welch (UK) and Maria Papadomanolaki (GR).