Live streamings from Dolmens
DNA-performance-installation- soundart
(LIVE) 19/06/11 14:17 PM
Place: Flintinge, Denmark
Dolmen 2: 54° 44´23.99” N 11° 47´23.36” E elev. 4m
Live Streamings from the Dolmens (2011)
Live Streamings from the Dolmens is an experimental radio work that unfolds at the intersection of archaeology, genomics, and transmission infrastructures. Conceived as a site-specific broadcast, the project consists of streaming fragments of the Neanderthal genome (Homo neanderthalensis) via radio from within prehistoric dolmens located in rural Denmark.
Rather than treating the dolmen as a symbolic monument, the work approaches it as an active transmission chamber: a prehistorical architecture repurposed as a contemporary broadcasting site. The dolmen—traditionally understood as a burial structure and a container of unresolved temporalities—becomes a resonant interface through which genetic information is emitted, dispersed, and rendered audible as signal.
Fragments of genomic data are converted into audio and streamed live via low-power radio systems. The broadcast does not aim at clarity or legibility; interference, noise, atmospheric conditions, and technical instability are integral to the work. Genomic information is not presented as knowledge to be decoded, but as material subject to loss, distortion, and delay. Listening becomes contingent, partial, and situated.
The work establishes a temporal short circuit between deep prehistory and contemporary networked media. Neanderthal genetic material—already fragmented, incomplete, and reconstructed through scientific inference—is retransmitted from a structure whose own origins remain archaeologically uncertain. Both genome and monument resist full historical resolution, operating instead as unstable archives.
As an experimental radio piece, Live Streamings from the Dolmens foregrounds broadcasting as a performative act rather than a neutral conduit. The radio signal does not simply carry content; it produces space, activates geography, and inscribes presence across distance. Transmission replaces representation. What circulates is not a message, but a condition of mediated existence.
By situating genomic streaming within a prehistoric architectural context, the work displaces dominant narratives of technological progress and linear time. It proposes radio not as a tool of immediacy, but as a medium capable of holding temporal density, archaeological opacity, and biological residue simultaneously. The dolmen listens as much as it transmits.