Radio-Tuner-Thing is an experimental radio artefact developed in collaboration with Anthony Forsyth. The device accesses a large directory of online radio stations via the Shoutcast API, selecting from tens of thousands of available streams. Rather than presenting stations through a digital interface, tuning is achieved using a single dial that navigates an invisible landscape of listening zones. These zones are mapped as circular regions across the tuning surface. Clear audio is only available at the centre of each zone, while movement between zones produces static. This creates a tactile and exploratory tuning experience that resists direct selection and foregrounds uncertainty and discovery. To introduce constraint within this randomness, the system incorporates time as a governing parameter. Available stations shift throughout the day according to global time zones, resetting to a home location at midday. As the day progresses, listeners encounter stations from increasingly distant locations.
This temporal and spatial behaviour echoes experiences associated with shortwave radio listening, where distant broadcasts can be received under particular atmospheric conditions. By abstracting these phenomena into a contemporary networked radio, the artefact explores transparency and metaphor as ways of shaping how people understand and relate to objects and systems.