Archive of Wavematters
wavematters team
Whether environmental noise or radiating heat: sound and electromagnetic waves are increasingly becoming sources of social conflict and public concern, even though, or precisely because, they are hard to grasp. The exhibition WAVEMATTERS explores their spectrality through ethnographic and artistic approaches.
Opening: October 1, 2026, 6–9 pm. Location: TAT – Tieranatomisches Theater. Free entry. German/English
Waves matter. They light our streets at night, carry our voices, grow our food, send our text messages. Sound and electromagnetic waves are the ever-present, invisible forces that shape social life — connecting people, landscapes, and artifacts. And yet, we lack a language to talk about how they affect us, even as they become matters of social and political anxiety. Think of the radiating heat that makes life unbearable, the wireless signals that enable dystopic futures, or the environmental noise and artificial light that endanger public health.
At the same time, we are surrounded by wave matters: speed bumps that reduce traffic noise; rooftop antennas that transmit 5G signals; curtains, clothing, trees and new types of pavement that block, reflect or refract radiant heat. But the connection between waves and their matters is neither simple nor stable. Waves mess with bodies, with cities, with devices — their effects are are vague, difficult to put into words, hard to trace. Between physics and politics, they do not only attend to the spectrum. They are also spectral.
This exhibition explores how waves come to matter. It invites visitors to experiment with three modes of attending to the spectral. A sensory mode that plays with the thresholds of perception through works produced with collaborating artists. A narrative mode that reconstructs minor scientific theories, encountered in the course of our research, that articulate how bodies relate to spectral phenomena. And an ethnographic mode that unpacks objects collected during fieldwork across different places, telling stories about how people and governments relate to waves in everyday life. This exhibition is the result of a five-year collaborative research project based at the Institute of European Ethnology of the Humboldt University in Berlin.