The Radio Hut is a mobile interactive art space themed around radio and its interplay with community and the imagination – a miniature museum of radio that can tour around different places, collecting site-specific stories and playing them back as an interactive installation.
Radio Droogdok was first conceived as a sound connection between creative spaces – the SVA in Stroud and creative communities ADM and NDSM in the docklands of Amsterdam – and was supported by Arts Council England. Visitors on both sides were able to step into an evocative, otherworldy little tin shed and start a conversation with a curious passerby on the other side. In this first iteration, the Radio Hut proved to be a playful, spontaneous and intimate space for experiment and connection.
Our beautiful little tin hut, which formed the shell of the Radio Droogdok installation, has since been fitted out with bespoke ‘Bakelite digital’ audio and recording equipment, and is now a ready-to-roll, self-contained multi-media ‘art hub’. It makes an attractive and effective collaborator both as ‘pop-up’ partner at (for instance) more ‘formal’ museums as well as on a wide range of community projects. A primary function of the hut is a ‘gathering and broadcasting station’: drawing on crowdsourced voices, stories and experience to produce ‘site-specific responses’- ‘audio art’, podcasts and live spoken word theatre.
Last summer, The Radio Hut has played host to an emergent collaborative art piece, conceived and brought to life with spoken word artist and theatre-maker Jonny Fluffypunk. This new iteration of the project created a fusion of museum, installation and micro theatre space. Jonny wrote a bespoke theatre show about the magic of radio – “Test Transmissions from the Edge of the World – which was performed in and around The Radio Hut at the Museum in The Park as part of Stroud Theatre Festival.