Brennan McGaffey and the artists' group Temporary Services collaborated on this project but have distinct practices. McGaffey has been developing a series of projects-the Intermod Series-for the past five years. These beautifully crafted objects allow the individuals who use them to temporarily disrupt much larger systems such as the electrical power grid and radio waves. Temporary Services has been working together since 1998. Their work is emphatically social: through short-term projects they seek to create dialogue and to emphasize the relationship between aesthetics and ethics. One key initiative, their ongoing Mobility series, involves portable archives and other materials that can be transported efficiently and used by Temporary Services or others as the raw materials for social events.

McGaffey designed and built the first version of the Audio Relay in 2002 in response to Temporary Services's request for a device to store and broadcast an archive of audio works. It can broadcast them either locally-like a standard stereo-or over the airwaves as an unofficial radio broadcast. (Posters alert people within its small transmission radius of upcoming broadcasts.) McGaffey designed the piece for easy portability, and it can be powered in remote sites by solar panels and a standard car battery. Temporary Services curated the initial audio exhibition for the Audio Relay, which they broadcast in Chicago in 2002, but as the piece has traveled to cities from Baltimore to Leipzig others have taken over the curatorial duties: those who host the project are invited to add new audio works and curate their own broadcasts. A new audio archive will be created during the Beyond Green exhibition tour as exhibition venues add audio works to the Audio Relay.

Both in form and function, the Audio Relay embodies a nomadic, self-sustaining approach to producing and disseminating art: although it can be adapted for use in museum spaces and exhibitions like Beyond Green, it does not require such standard channels of art-world circulation. When it broadcasts the archive, the work allows individuals to enact change within large systems and also serves as a focal point for actual gatherings and virtual connections among people. And as a portable archive of works of art, the Audio Relay takes the private-museum-in-a-box premise of Marcel Duchamp's boоte-envalise (1934-41) and makes it generous by including not only an ever-growing group of artists who contribute material to the archive, but also a changing community of listeners.