What needs to be communicated at a time of climate and ecological emergency?Working with economy of words, what is it that we want to transmit out into the world and who will hear us? 

Visitors to the MayDay MayDay event in 2019 worked with local poet and haiku expert Paul Conneally to create a morse code transmission to send out into the world.  At times of emergency and potential breakdown of power supplies, morse code is a fallback radio-based low-energy, low-fi communication device. Amateur radio, low-fi radio transmission and pirate radio is an ‘underground’ alternative to satellite based global communication channels we are so familiar with. Messages are sent out via radio waves into the ether and we sometimes don’t know who is hearing us.

Tom Dixon an amateur radio enthusiast who co-founded the workers-cooperative V3 Power set up a morse code station in the Barefoot Orchard yurt. He is particularly interested in making ultra long-range communications using the minimum amount of power.

During the day, visitors wrote collaborative, family or individual messages about their own feelings about the climate & ecological emergency and these messages were transmitted live by hand on citizens band from the yurt field station.

MayDayMayDay was a collaboration between Paul Conneally, Anne-Marie Culhane and Tom Dixon

A poem written on a piece of paper, reads: "Environment bleeds (needs crossed out), Everyone has to help), Save our planet please". Followed by Morse Code
A poem written on a piece of paper that reads: "Anita, Overwhelmed, is how I feel, the end of icebergs" the rest is scribbled out
A girl holding up a piece of paper with a poem written on it. The writing is too small to be legible
A man holding a piece of paper, with a poem written on it, reading: "Terry, Greed, Save our planet, for our childrens future"
A person reading from morse code on a sheet of paper while in front of a computer