A Radiating Body

From heartbeats to brainwaves, economic cycles to cosmic orbits, oscillations can be found everywhere. This podcast takes artists and listeners deep into the Powerhouse Collection of half a million objects to unearth stories about the vibrations, fluctuations, and movements woven through our world – and beyond it.

A Radiating Body Miyuki Jokiranta turns to the not-so-distant past, when the body still held mystery and medicine still had a touch of magic about it. This replica of a multi-wave oscillator machine, built by Angas Vivian Jones in 1970s Sydney, is at once a homemade therapeutic device, and a container for desire, faith and an irrepressible spirit of invention.

Neil Wilson The sort of person who'd like to take on a project like this is obviously driven. They're driven to either experiment or explore or both. They may even be driven by a health concern. It could be in a loved one, it could be their own, but they're certainly driven by something.

Eloise Oxer The home security system, The Quadra Phonic Stereo. Sydney's first kitchen lit up with fluorescent bulbs, possibly. A long list of homemade devices fill the house and homemade remedies like the green and yellow shed in the backyard. Object number 200442 1: homemade multi wave oscillator therapeutic device.

And it's got a blackboard on the front with some diagrams about waves. It's interesting that he chose to put it in a metal shed because if I was developing something that's going to produce radiation in any form, I want to make sure that I've got a safety shield around it because it would act like a Faraday cage and stop it being transmitted outside the shed. My name is Neil Wilson. My current job is the laboratory manager at St Vincent's Hospital. I do a range of things, but one of the things that I've always been interested in is amateur radio.