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Treeantenna

Using Tree for radio transmission

This was part of my Internship in bioartlab, multidisciplinary art & design group to
recreated an early 20th Century experiment in which live trees are used as antennas for radio communication.




General George Owen Squier, the Chief Signal Officer at the U.S. army not only coined the word “muzak”, in 1904 he also invented in 1904 a system that used living vegetable organisms such as trees to make radio contact across the Atlantic. The invention never really took off as the advent of more sophisticated means of communication made tree communication quickly look anachronistic.
Tree communication was briefly back in favour during the Vietnam War when U.S. troupes found themselves in the jungle and in need of a reliable and easy to transport system of communication but after that, only a few groups of hobbyists used tree antennas for wireless communication.




Squier drove a nail into the tree, hung a wire, and connected it to the receiver.
we used flexible metal spring that wrapped around the trunk as planting a nail into the tree would have damaged it.
Their system definitely works as the team managed to communicate with amateurs radios from countries as distant as Italy and Ukraine.





But the law in the netherland banned any act that consider harming the tree, as this restriction, nailing the tree is prohibited and even,
the metal is advised not touching the tree due to possibility of chemical and electrical side effect.
I was exploring new way of tree antenna which not harming the tree using pvc pipe

This project was craft simple and affordable devices that would allow anyone to use the tree in their backyard as a radio receiver
(it is also possible to broadcast from your tree but the technology is slightly more expensive and it requires permits.)



Obviously, in this experiment the tree is part and parcel of the functionality of the antenna.
We’re thus not speaking of questionable antennas disguised as tree.

2017 © Larasati, Janes Yabukocev  under supervision of BioaArt Lab


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