Wireless House is a project by Australian Sound Installation Artist Nigel Hellyer. The project reclaims a small brick structure in a public park in the inner-western suburb of Glebe in Sydney. The structure ‘Wireless House’ is heritage listed by the National Trust. Built in 1934 and opened officially in 1935, Wireless house allowed members of the working class community to gather together in the park and enjoy free access to broadcast radio. The house operated from 1935 until the early fifties. With the development of television and the private car the park gradually lost its patronage and the structure was converted to a council toolshed.
Hellyer’s Wireless House project aims to reclaim, or rather ‘resound’ the structure. In the process the Wireless House project reclaims the potential for sound to produce a communal space within the park as public space. There is an intriguing differential evoked here between the communal and the public.
The installation reacts to people who approach the structure calling on a substantial archive of audio, in part contributed by the National Sound and Music Archives and supplemented by an open call for local citizens to record their own recollections of Glebe’s past. This audio recollections are played back at a level that invites engagement without disturbing the park.
In an interesting twist the Wireless House becomes more than simply a memorial to a media passed. Equipped with an Unwired wireless internet node the site also becomes Sydney’s first (official) free outdoor hotspot. The wireless of today and the forms of sociality, communality, interaction into which it folds begs comparison to yesterdays community gathered around the radio transmitter.
The Wireless House project is supported by the City of Sydney Council and Unwired.