planetary
listening

I hear the ear / of an ancient technology / . . . It is the hiss / of listening— / I did not hear then / that I hear now

︎ Paul Carter, from The sound in between : voice, space, performance, 1993: 7

…looking for the dream submarine

︎ Laurie Anderson, The City: Spending the War Without You, 2021

O vis eternitatis

que omnia ordinasti in corde tuo,

per Verbum tuum omnia creata sunt

sicut voluisti

︎ Hildegard von Bingen,
O vis eternitatis

Pacific community experiments in music and listening, low-power FM, mesh radio and resilient communication

ecologies.fm is an ongoing experiment in radio, low-power FM, mesh communication, listening and music cuultures in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa New Zealand, based in Haewai / Houghton Valley.

By working with radio and FM across place-based communities, it explores how shared radio practices can support learning, creative exchange, and resilient local communication.

Ecologies of radio?

Activities weave listening, music and story-telling and communication with community experiments with radio, low-power FM, and off-grid mesh messaging via LoRa, including MeshCore and Meshtastic.

These projects grow disaster readiness by cultivating solidarities across places and networks and practicing fully offline communication, that will be vital when mobile or Wi-Fi networks fail.

EF—’25

Meshes of the Dawn is held as para-institutional radio playfulness by ecologies.fm

ecologies.fm is slowly growing a stream of work connected to Soundcamp’s project Reveil through LoRa and mesh networks in the South which we are calling Meshes of the Dawn.

Meshes of the Dawn weaves together curious listening, cultural practice, eco arts and communication stewardship across islands to grow capacities that support communicating in uncertainty.

Soundcamp is an arts cooperative based in London and part of the wider Acoustic Commons network. Since 2014 they have coordinated Reveil, the long-form dawn broadcast that moves west with sunrise through a distributed ecology of live streams. Reveil is a collaborative 24+1 hour radio broadcast that has followed sunrise around the Earth through live sound streams for over 13 years.

While Reveil has long connected live dawn listening across distance, participation is not equally possible everywhere. Across the many islands of Vanuatu, internet and mobile coverage is often uneven. The Meshes of the Dawn work explores how community-held communication practices can begin to widen a space of connection to not only Reveil but groups in the Pacific and support longer-term resilience.

In 2026, ecologies.fm is contributing by weaving connection across Santo, Vanuatu, and Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa with a project called [ ]. Reveil largely avoids speech and music, but we are continuing a text experiment with some of the Reveil participants in the South in practicing with the mesh network: alongside opening an audio stream, we share short text messages with ecological observations across a LowRa mesh channel. These may be some words naming the birdsong, weather, light, wind (very likely in Poneke!) and the full moon in the sky: poetics that carry some sense of place and presence. We also share these messages in the wider Reveil web chat, as a bridge from offline experience to online, and welcome anyone who has an interest to join us in the mesh experiment.

Reveil and the Mesh: Connecting in 2026

The immediate aim of the May 2026 activity is to test the new solar mesh nodes through Reveil 2026 in Aotearoa New Zealand and Vanuatu by carrying out a live dawn communications experiment on the morning of Sunday 3 May 2026. Using the nodes in prototype form, the activity will combine dawn audio streaming, text communication across the mesh network and the Reveil online chat, and participation in the planetary Reveil network. This gives us a practical shared test between Vanuatu and Aotearoa New Zealand, and a good basic prototype outcome for the mesh emphasis.

The longer-term aim is to grow permanent, community-led nodes across Santo in Vanuatu, Mātui/Somes Island in Te Whanganui-a-Tara and Te Raekaihau ridgeline, Haewai ridgeline in Wellington. This work expands the experimental radio practice of Reveil with listening and mesh experimentation, although the mesh does not audio stream, we are prototyping another way of participating and listening, that strengthen communication infrastructure across connected sites in support of both creative exchange and disaster resilience.

Connecting Islands: Further Arts Vanuatu and Aotearoa
In Vanuatu, Further Arts developed workshops after the Ambae evacuation of 2017 that brought people together to weave connection and conversation, connecting and growing community and integrating displaced people from the Ambae community in vital ways. This work continues to develop in 2026 and Vivien Obed’s vision is that it is a way of connecting across places and islands, growing resilient communication through creative culture.

Further Arts is exploring how these workshops might grow alongside creative technology experiments: listening to community need and curious about the possibilities of radio practice and mesh communication towards setting up a solar node running on mesh core at Further Arts in Port Vila.

In Pōneke, work is underway with Clay Joy Smith towards a solar node for Matiu/Somes Island that could support the wider Wellington (Te Whanganui-A-Tara) mesh network. The intention is that this virtually uninhabited island node could support the wider Wellington mesh while also opening a communication potential in emergencies, for example if visitors are stranded on the island during a power or telecommunications outage.

Though separated by the big ocean, named Te Moananui-a-Kiwa in Aotearoa, we are sharing knowledge across our efforts to grow friendship and solidarity across the Pacific through these local experiments embedded in local stewardship and community activities.

Who is involved?

Further Arts Nesar Studio
is a cultural organisation based in Port Vila, Vanuatu with deep experience in community-led creative work, including work shaped in response to displacement and disaster. Founded in 2000 to support culturally, socially, environmentally, and financially sustainable work in the creative arts, communications, and agriculture. Using culture and the arts as vehicles for community building, popular education, and social transformation, it works to strengthen local capacity and solidarity across Melanesia. In 2023, Further Arts established Nesar Studio, a community-access multimedia space for grassroots storytelling, creative digital media, and local voices.

Viviane Obed
Viviane Obed is General Manager of Further Arts Nesar Studio. She has extensive experience in community development, youth work, and advocacy across gender, culture, and environment, and has been with Further Arts since 2017. She plays a leading role in the organisation’s work on gender equality, women and girls’ rights, and community resilience in Vanuatu.

Marcel Meltherorong (Mars Melto)
Marcel Meltherorong, widely known as Mars Melto, is a ni-Vanuatu author, poet, storyteller, playwright, producer, musician, songwriter, and artist. A longstanding figure in Vanuatu’s cultural life, his work in community media has helped amplify stories of kastom, land, and local memory, especially for younger generations. Raised in Nouméa and from Vao Island, he works across English, French, Bislama, and Latavao.

nicole valele colmar
nicole valele colmar is a writer and creative producer from Vunasori on Tutuba Island in Vanuatu and Devonport in Tāmaki Makaurau. After working in news and current affairs, she studied at the International Institute of Modern Letters in 2017. Since joining Further Arts Nesar Studio in 2018, she has helped develop its production work across communication tools, short documentaries, film, and web-based storytelling.

Kate Genevieve
Kate Genevieve is an artist and Adjunct Research Fellow at Pūtaiao ki te Pāpori / the School of Science in Society, Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. She leads the Cosmoimaginaries programme (Astro Ecologies Institute) and works on projects on ecological communication, space futures and planetary imaginaries in the Second Space Age.

Clay Joy Smith
Clay (they/them) is a culture scout and poetic tinkerer from Te Whanganui-a-Tara (Wellington region) who believes that community and knowledge are too sacred to be gatekept by profit-driven, unelected power hoarders. Moved by their dream of community-owned spaces that spark our commitments and feed our spirits, their multidisciplinary work seeks to stitch our contextual fabrics into collective power, providing alternative narratives to rising techno-tyrannies. With a wide-spanning background including hospitality, event production, permaculture and software-oriented product management, they are now focused on creating conditions for experimentation, play, commoning, and learning - especially together.