mirror.me/radio is an offline interactive installation built inside a modified vintage ham radio. Participants search through static to find active frequencies — Storypoints — where they encounter moments from a real person's life and are invited to speak.
/radio_v0 is the first prototype.
Somewhere on the dial, there are voices.
You click "POWER ON" and a radio appears. It plays a wall of unassuming but constant static.
Turn the dial left, right, around itself. The noise shifts at a point, the screen’s static glitches. You tune more carefully, watching every frequency change and waiting for feedback. A frequency locks in, the dial won’t be moved. The static clears and a voice speaks. You listen until the signal returns to noise. You can move the dial again, and repeat the search until the dial can’t be moved and the radio fades away.
Static fills the entire screen.
The radio goes quiet now.
The static fades away one last time.
/radio_v0 is the next work in the mirror.me/ series, following /affirmations. That was something built by me and for me only: a contained emotional journey. /radio is for everyone to experience. With v0, I wanted to see if static, a dial, and a voice could be enough.
Even without a narrative, the core loop created the real emotional reaction I was hoping for. The act of searching through the static, zeroing in on a signal, hearing a voice: it worked before the story existed. The way you search, the patience you bring, the moment you stop… it already means something. The narrative will make it land harder.
Find the project roadmap on Github.
Up next: recreate the build on open-source software and a narrative skeleton. My vision is to run this on a fully local, air-gapped stack: no cloud, no 3rd party services, no data retention beyond the individual session. Technology as intimate rather than extractive.
After that, the hardware: a vintage ham radio system. A device historically built to reach another voice across vast, empty distances.
