Long before the Internet, ham radio operators built a buzzing web of communication around the world. Artist Cindy Bernard's grandfather, Bill Adams, got his license to operate a ham radio in 1923 and kept in touch with operators in distant countries until his death in 1999. Each contact was confirmed with a postcard, called a QSL card - QSL is ham lingo for "I hear you." Adams kept the cards, creating a treasure trove of documents that, incidentally, chronicle 20th-century geopolitical history.
Postcards from the edge
More than 100 of these cards are in "Deleted Entities 1925-1996," the centerpiece of "Silent Key," Bernard's poignant exhibit at the Boston Center for the Arts' Mills Gallery. Laid out chronologically and geographically, all the cards come from regions in which the system of government has changed. The Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and colonized regions in Asia and Africa are represented here.
Bernard has arrayed the cards in a grid, leaving blanks to signify places Adams didn't reach in a given period of time. The result reads rhythmically, visually capturing ham radio's Morse code stutter.
The pictures, symbols, alphabets, and old typescripts tell their own stories. A card from the Soviet Union in 1964 shows Sputnik emblazoned with the Soviet hammer and sickle, hovering over an image of the moon taken by the Soviet interplanetary station in 1959. A 1948 card from Angola (Portuguese West Africa) depicts a white man in a pith helmet pointing a rifle at a leaping tiger. These pictures were often the attempts of individual operators to artfully represent their countries, but through the lens of time they conjure bluster and stereotypes.
"Silent key" is the term used when an operator stops transmitting. For "Portraits," Bernard has blown up some of the grainy passport-style photos that grace a few of the cards and titled them with, among other things, the operator's name and the date he or she died. If the last is unknown, the title reads "Silent Key, Unknown." These put human faces on the communication. In one short, graceful video, Bernard shows us the bungalow at the street address of a New Zealand operator who communicated with Adams in 1934.
The overall effect - right up to a comical cache of erotic postcards Bernard found stashed among Adams's QSL cards - wonderfully evokes the community of individuals who kept in touch across social and political divides, through revolutions and upheavals throughout the 20th century. Interestingly, despite the ease with which the Internet connects people today, ham operators are still going strong.
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