Radio as Art: Concepts, Spaces, Practices 9783839436172

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction
The Editors
“I am an artist. I am not anything else.”1: —Robert Adrian Smith, 1935–2015
The Reception of Electricity: Art as Radio in Literature, Painting, and Performance
On Radioart
I. RADIO SPACE
The Museum as an Agent of Radio Art
Considering the Sonic Aspects of the Media Environment as an Exhibition Space for Creative Sound-Based Works
The Avant-Garde and a Popular Medium: The Berlin Novembergruppe and Radio in the Weimar Republic
II. RADIO ART: ARTISTIC PRODUCTION AND/OR POLITICAL PRACTICE
The Radio and/as Digital Productivism
Everyone a Listener, Everyone a Producer! A Collective Journey toward Another Sound of Radio
Radio Art in the “… Everyday Hand-to-Hand Struggle with Apparatuses?”
Radio as a “Minor” Art Practice
III. INSTITUTIONAL FRAMING AND AGENCY
Radio as a Research Medium for Artistic and Oral-History-Based Research Projects
Community Radio as Post-Capitalist Art
Radio Art as a Field of Study: The Experimentelles Radio Professorship at the Bauhaus- Universität Weimar
Radio as Art? Heart or Gall Bladder?
IV. RADIO ART AS ACTION
In Simulcast: Archigram and Radio Piracy in 1960s Britain
The Radio Voice That Is Telling Me to Go for the Throat of the Other: Two Lessons on Media Politics from LIGNA’s Oedipus, Tyrant
Doing Radio Art: Direct Media Association’s Pacific Rim / Slow Scan
Radio Prolife: Eavesdropping on Life
V. WORDS-SOUND-MUSIC
John Cage’s Cinema for the Ear
Peter Roehr’s Sound Montages
Hörspiel-Pop, Radio Opera, Media Art: On the Reinvention of the Hörspiel by Andreas Ammer and FM Einheit
Listen and Participate: The Work of the Hörspielmacher Paul Plamper
Dead Spot in Art History
Author Biographies

Citation preview

Anne Thurmann-Jajes | Ursula Frohne Jee-Hae Kim | Maria Peters Franziska Rauh | Sarah Rothe (eds.)

Radio as Art Concepts, Spaces, Practices

Schriftenreihe für Künstlerpublikationen | Volume 8

Radio as Art Concepts, Spaces, Practices

Published on the occasion of the international symposium “Radio as Art: Concepts, Spaces, Practices; Radio Art between Media Reality and Art Reception” held at the Gästehaus of the University of Bremen, Germany, June 5–7, 2014, hosted by the Centre for Artists’ Publications at the Weserburg Museum of Modern Art in cooperation with the University of Bremen and the University of Cologne. Series Editors of the Schriftenreihe für Künstlerpublikationen: Research Association Artists’ Publications e. V. for the University of Bremen, University of the Arts Bremen, Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen, Centre for Artists’ Publications at the Weserburg Museum of Modern Art Bremen.

Imprint

Published on the occasion of the international symposium “Radio as Art: Concepts, Spaces, Practices; Radio Art between Media Reality and Art Reception” held at the Gästehaus of the University of Bremen, Germany, June 5–7, 2014. Symposium hosted by: Centre for Artists’ Publications at the Weserburg Museum for Modern Art in cooperation with the University of Bremen with the University of Cologne. The symposium has been realized with the generous support of the Volkswagen Foundation.

Publication edited by: Ursula Frohne, Jee-Hae Kim, Maria Peters, Franziska Rauh, Sarah Rothe, Anne Thurmann-Jajes Series Editors of the Schriftenreihe für Künstlerpublikationen: Research Association Artists’ Publications e.V. for the University of Bremen, University of the Arts Bremen, Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen, Centre for Artists’ Publications at Weserburg Museum of Modern Art Research Association Artists’ Publications e.V. c/o Weserburg Teerhof 20, 28199 Bremen, Germany Internet: kuenstlerpublikationen.de, [email protected] Editorial Management / Proofreading / Copyediting: Jee-Hae Kim, Corinna Kühn, Franziska Rauh, Sarah Rothe, Peter Sämann, Marie-Christine Schoel English Copyediting: Dawn Michelle d’Atri Translations: Dawn Michelle d’Atri, Judith Rosenthal, Steven Lindberg Layout, Typesetting, Cover: Toni Horndasch, Daniela Schmitz Photography Credits: We would like to thank all those who gave their kind permission to reproduce material. Every effort has been made to secure permission in all cases and we apologize for any inadvertent errors or omissions. Andreas Ammer, Anja Beutler, Tibor Bozi, Bettina Brach, Natalja Brüggemann, German Federal Archives, Dieter Endlicher, Christophe Fellay, Sascha Fuis, Brian Franczyk, Zeno Graton, Felix Grünschloß, Günter Guben, Toshiyuki Maeda, Kaspar Metz, Sibylle Omlin, Vito Pinto, Axel Schneider, SuNa Galerie and Susanne Schapowalow, ullstein bild.

© Courtesy: Akademie der Künste Berlin, Archiv Peter Roehr, MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Ash Arevena / EACV, Bertolt Brecht Archiv, Bundesverband der Kriegsblinden Deutschlands e.V. and Deutsches BlindenMuseum Berlin, John Cage Trust, Calder Foundation New York/Artists Rights Society New York for Herbert Matter, Peter Cook /Archigram Archives, John Duncan, Andrea Frazer, Kunsthalle St. Gallen, Terry Humphrey, Suzanne Lacy, Kunsthaus Lempertz for Hans Siebert von Heister, Cildo Meireles, Dan Mihaltianu, Claire Morales, Marko Peljhan, Dieter Roth, Marinella Senatore/Estman Radio, State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, Ta Trung Berlin, Tate Modern London, Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft, Yale University Art Gallery, ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe.

© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2019 for Peter Roehr, Rudolf Belling, Isa Genzken, Aleksandr Rodchenko All texts © 2019 the authors and the Research Association Artists’ Publications e.V. Artworks © 2019 the artists, their heirs, or legal successors Cover artworks on pages: 171, 83, 108, 261, 198, 232, 271, 105, 85 (from right to left) All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without prior permission from the copyright holders. Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.ddb.de. © 2019 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-3617-8 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-3617-2 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839436172

Contents

Introduction



The Editors Ursula Frohne, Jee-Hae Kim, Maria Peters, Franziska Rauh, Sarah Rothe, Anne Thurmann-Jajes Jee-Hae Kim “I am an artist. I am not anything else.”: —Robert Adrian Smith, 1935–2015 Hank Bull The Reception of Electricity: Art as Radio in Literature, Painting, and Performance

Tetsuo Kogawa

On Radioart



I. RADIO SPACE



Sarah Rothe

The Museum as an Agent of Radio Art

9

36 39 50

55

Colin Black Considering the Sonic Aspects of the  Media Environment as an Exhibition Space for Creative Sound-Based Works

64



80

Andreas Zeising The Avant-Garde and a Popular Medium: The Berlin Novembergruppe and Radio in the Weimar Republic



II. R  ADIO ART: ARTISTIC PRODUCTION AND/OR POLITICAL PRACTICE Philip Glahn

The Radio and/as Digital Productivism

99

Claudia Wegener Everyone a Listener, Everyone a Producer!  A Collective Journey toward Another Sound of Radio

107



118

Franziska Rauh Radio Art in the “… Everyday Hand-to-Hand Struggle  with Apparatuses?”

Ursula Frohne

Radio as a “Minor” Art Practice

127



III. INSTITUTIONAL FRAMING AND AGENCY Sibylle Omlin Radio as a Research Medium for Artistic and  Oral-History-Based Research Projects Sarah Washington

163

Community Radio as Post-Capitalist Art

173

Nathalie Singer Radio Art as a Field of Study:  The Experimentelles Radio Professorship at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar

178

Andreas Hagelüken

Radio as Art? Heart or Gall Bladder?

182



IV. RADIO ART AS ACTION

Roksana Filipowska In Simulcast: Archigram and Radio Piracy  in 1960s Britain

191



205



Kai van Eikels The Radio Voice That Is Telling Me to Go  for the Throat of the Other: Two Lessons on Media Politics from LIGNA’s Oedipus, Tyrant Jee-Hae Kim Doing Radio Art:  Direct Media Association’s Pacific Rim / Slow Scan Irina Gheorghe





232

V. WORDS-SOUND-MUSIC Lauren Rosati

Nadine Hahn

Radio Prolife: Eavesdropping on Life

224

John Cage’s Cinema for the Ear243 Peter Roehr’s Sound Montages

Ania Mauruschat  Hörspiel-Pop, Radio Opera, Media Art:  On the Reinvention of the Hörspiel by Andreas Ammer and FM Einheit Vito Pinto Listen and Participate: The Work of the Hörspielmacher Paul Plamper

255 268

276

Anne Thurmann-Jajes

Dead Spot in Art History

292



Author Biographies

303

Introduction

Introduction

7

The Editors Ursula Frohne, Jee-Hae Kim, Maria Peters, Franziska Rauh, Sarah Rothe, Anne Thurmann-Jajes



In memory of Robert Adrian X 1

Radiophonic art long occupied a peripheral position within the spectrum of ephemeral forms of creative expression. In spite of its acknowledged significance for experimental art movements from Futurism through Fluxus to the electronic age, acoustic and radio-transmitted concepts have widely eluded the—primarily visually based—parameters of arthistorical methods. Audio works in general, and yet again radio-related sonic material, have so far escaped most academic writing within the field of art and remain a desideratum in surveys on conceptual and performative contemporary art production. In fact, the discourses in art have been shaped for the most part by the study of visual artifacts. Against this backdrop, the compilation of essays in the book Radio as Art marks a starting point for addressing exemplary strategies and features through which radiophonic art is generated, staged, and negotiated in the realm of the visual arts and in relation to its spatial venues and institutional framing. The contributions assembled here open a broad perspective on the range of concepts, practices, and settings that apply to broadcasting technologies and diverse usage of the radio medium from the avant-garde in the early twentieth century to the present day. While on the one hand the apparatus-based structure constitutes the features of artistic approaches to radio transmission, on the other hand the parameters of radio have been deployed for disseminating practices of creative and critical content, often implying tactical impulses for self-empowerment or resistive subtexts. Also applied like a tool for interconnecting diverse spatial and cultural spheres, radio concepts create public environments that enable participating actors to engage in experimental collaborative processes. In view of these tendencies and developments, this book is dedicated to retrieving and reconstructing, in a kind of media archaeology, the significance of past and recent radio artworks—as well as forgotten or virtually forgotten ones—from the archive. It confronts the technosociological nature of radio today and accounts for its transformations as a cultural phenomenon within a more global sphere of commu­ nication and more direct practices of production, particularly in the field of art. In an era when almost everyone is able to produce, edit, and transmit his or her own acoustic concepts on home computers

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or the Internet, the specialist status of artistic creation is blurred in general and also opens up new dimensions for experiments with radio as art. In this context, acoustic signals, voice, language, sound collages, and experimental music have amplified the aesthetic repertoire as much as the realm of radiophonic transmission has expanded the medium to include multifaceted platforms for activist strategies and global networking in contemporary media practice. In the age of Twitter and online communications, the creative features of the radio medium deserve a fresh positioning of their aesthetic and cultural potential. Focusing on the artistic and activist usage of radio transmission and revealing the often close entanglement of these approaches, this volume moreover seeks to situate works that use the radio medium within the contemporary art landscape and connect their reception to relevant discourses. In view of the historical emergence of broadcast components in creative production and the rapidly changing nature of radiophonic art concepts today, it seems relevant to also explore the technological advances of the radio medium within its institutional frameworks, which are situated between public broadcasting and today’s exhibition culture, between archival documentation, activism, and ephemeral processes, between economic constraints and societal effects, cultural and geopolitical transformations.

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This book collates the results of a long-term research collaboration between the Centre for Artists’ Publications at the Weserburg Museum of Modern Art in Bremen, the Institute for Art History – Film Studies – Art Education at the University of Bremen, and the Department of Art History at the University of Cologne, which was funded by the Volkswagen Foundation between October 2011 and September 2015. This interdisciplinary project was based on the exceptionally rich resources of radio art, located at the Centre.2 This internationally renowned, unique, and comprehensive compilation of radio art by artists from all over Europe, North America, Latin America, and Australia has been made accessible in exhibitions, enactments, and through documentation. It provides monographic or thematic insights into the cultural and aesthetic diversity of radiophonic concepts, while also placing them within a historical perspective. As an exceptional inventory of a wide variety of hitherto inaccessible and unexplored electroacoustic artworks, all relevant forms of radio broadcasts have been collected and archived by the Centre for Artists’ Publications with a view to encompassing the broadest range of sonic concepts. Its expanding collection of radio art constitutes a singular and likewise representative selection of this heterogeneous artistic practice, which has been inventoried comprehensively and scholarly analyzed over the course of the research project. Since radio artworks are for the most part today located in the archives of either artists or broadcasting stations, the access is at best limited and in most cases completely restricted, with the effect that these

works have hardly been addressed as a genuine component of the cultural heritage and an important contribution to aesthetic and political meaning production. The sonic presence of the ephemeral and material components of these works is therefore widely unknown and remains to a great extent virtually nonexistent in societal knowledge and in broader public reception. In effect, neither empirical nor theoretical art- or media-historical research has been dedicated to a systematic study of the public and aesthetic relevance of this intangible and invisible cultural heritage.

Exhibition view of Beyond Radio: 25 Years of Art Radio—Radio Art, Centre for Artists’ Publications at the Weserburg, Bremen, 2012

Under the title Radio Art: On the Development of a Medium between Aesthetic and Socio-Cultural Reception History the research project documented here investigated central questions about the technological, conceptual, sociocultural, and discursive parameters that have, at least since the 1960s, furthered the emergence, development, and spread of art forms that make use of analogue and electronic communication media. Three aspects were derived from this to structure the project into three areas in order to study the historical and current status of radio art: first, the reconstruction and transformation of the technological conditions of radio art; second, the study of the institutional contexts of the creation and broadcast of radio art and the associated power structures in different political and cultural contexts; and, third, the medation of radio art in museums and extended cultural areas. The fulfilled goals involved, on the one hand, the grounding of pioneering trends in radiophonic art forms within art-historical discourse

11

by means of scholarly research of their aesthetic specifics and their potential sociopolitical significance since the 1960s in the area of conceptual and performative art forms. For example, radio art could be included in the history of art and media. On the other hand, we sought to characterize the challenges of the reception of these forms of expression defined primarily by acoustic signals and their intended production and linking of “public environments” in the museum context and to develop specific models for innovative strategies of mediation. The focuses of this research project have pointed the direction for discursive fields of media and art studies and for arts mediation. The interest in the context of acoustic phenomena in the field of art were documented, among other ways, by the exhibitions of anniversaries that occurred while the project was ongoing (e.g., John Cage’s hundredth birthday) and by thematic approaches to the role of sound as an aesthetic means in art (addressed, for example, in shows including A House Full of Music, Mathildenhöhe, Darmstadt, 2012, Sound Art: Sound as a Medium of Art, ZKM, Karlsruhe, 2012, and His Master’s Voice, Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund, 2013). The research project on radio art anticipated the development of this area of research early on and profited from the opportunity to embed itself in this expanded field of discourse that was evolving in parallel with it. At the same time, it became clear that artistic radiophonic broadcast formats were still barely established at all as a subject for study in art history, and it became necessary to work out a methodological and contextualizing framework for scholarly study that went beyond a first documentation of artistic practices and projects. This radio art research project was also able to provide basic foundations with an eye to the emerging paradigm shift to the iconic turn and the spatial turn, which has only just begun, in the direction of a debate over acoustic forms of expression, semantics, and spatial conceptions, as well as networking.

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Instead of simply developing concepts to put archives of existing material of radio art on display, it became more and more obvious in the process of research that we would have to also engage with the theme of unavailability. Moreover, while tracing the history of radio as a medium of aesthetic creation from our art-historical and mediational point of view, we realized that overlaps between radio art and political activism—with dynamic collective processes that elude precise determination by non-hierarchical and unpredictable interactions between producers and recipients—marked the expanded field of production and reception of radio art. Taking these co-emergent aspects of radio art into account, our central concern—namely, to introduce the aesthetic, institutional, and political radio art into the established aesthetic orders of radiophonic works in the art-historical field and to sensitize our visually orientated discipline to the performative and experimental scope of radio art in its broadest sense—continues to be relevant today.

In order to sound out the artistic and media diversity, the project operated on several levels, in an effort to develop as a whole a multiperspectival set of instruments with an interdisciplinary network of cultural and media studies. This included not only archiving and systematizing methods of analysis but also conducting exemplary, more detailed descriptions and historical contextualization (incorporating interviews with producers, artists, and contemporaries), preparing works for presentation in retrospective exhibitions, and developing media and personal formats to disseminate works, which were also given a scholarly foundation through the evaluation of the reception of radio art. In addition to workshops with international figures from radio art and scholars, the grant supported smaller monographic presentations of works, and an extensive survey exhibition titled Über das Radio hinaus: 25 Jahre Kunstradio—Radiokunst (Beyond Radio: 25 Years of Art ­Radio—Radio Art) that were produced at the Centre for Artists’ Publications (November 10, 2012 to February 10, 2013). This offered students diverse opportunities, integrated into the university curriculum, to become familiar with works of radio art and to position them in the historical context in which they were created. The occasion for this concept for the exhibition was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the broadcast format initiated by Heidi Grundmann: Kunstradio—Radiokunst in Austria, first broadcast on December 3, 1987. From the very outset, Kunstradio was more than just a weekly radio program. As a pioneering initiative, it became a catalyst for radiophonic productions, supporting international projects while serving as a platform for innovative work in this creative field. For more than two decades, Kunstradio enabled

Concha Jerez/José Iges, Expanded ­Radio, Performance at the exhibition Beyond Radio: 25 Years of Art Radio—Radio Art, Centre for Artists’ Publications at the Weserburg, Bremen, Germany, 2012

13

Exhibition view of Beyond Radio: 25 Years of Art Radio—Radio Art, Centre for Artists’ Publications at the Weserburg, Bremen, Germany, 2012

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collaborations with radio institutions, art associations, festivals, and museums worldwide. It also facilitated exhibitions and encounters of artists, theorists, and activists with conferences and symposia, publications, and the launching of a discursive forum implemented in the sphere of broadcasting. The comprehensive overview of radio art projects realized in the context of Kunstradio’s twenty-five-year activities gave insight into the significance of this internationally renowned program, which never ceased to encourage artists to challenge the institutional limits of radio and art. Situated at the intersection of art, literature, music, media, performance, and Internet art, Kunstradio provided abundant opportunities to explore diverse technologies, contexts, and public environments for radiophonic experiments.3 In this sense, it also served as a laboratory and testing ground for creative radio works, including both classical and new technologies in unusual applications or combinations for artistic means. Moreover, it is remarkable that the majority of the radio art pieces were commissioned or specifically produced for Kunstradio. The exhibition realized at the Centre for Artists’ Publications in collaboration with Kunstradio, and as a result of the joint research project, was conceived as a restaging or reenactment, rather than a documentation of the conceptual breadth of significant projects that emerged from this exceptional cultural initiative at the ORF (Austrian Broadcasting Cooperation) in Vienna. The works on display at the Centre for Artists’ Publications in Bremen also revealed how radio—as a mass medium and as a creative resource—continues to pass through technological and communicative transformations. Its many roles include being a medium for shortwave broadcasting,

FM and 5.1 satellite transmission, web radio, podcasts, and wireless technologies, all of which are reflected in the artistic methods and became the subject of the research project as well. The context of the exhibition that emerged in collaboration with Heidi Grundmann and Elisabeth Zimmermann, both auteurs and acteurs of Kunstradio, also provided opportunities to present and mediate initial research results and to widen the discursive scope by engaging in a public discussion about the project’s central issues. Moreover, the exhibition, which was co-curated by the research team, functioned like a projection screen for the verification and calibration of the elaborated mediation concept. Learning from these experimental studio practices and platforms of dissemination, the research of the documented project here further explored the adaptability of radio art to new technologies, their linkage to institutional structures and to the sociopolitical sphere. As Reinhard Braun underscores, thanks to this eminent expansion of what radio can be, it long ago became part of a tradition of artistic telecommunications projects from the nineteen-seventies and eighties, intermeshing with forms of radio art that, in turn, considered themselves constituent in this telecommunications art, constantly reflecting on the changes in radio due to new communication technologies.4 The range of places and locations that are interlinked via radio is complemented by mobile and wireless technologies today, creating countless dislocated media environments and architectures, connecting geopolitical spheres across the globe. The concept of “milieu,” understood as an atmospheric and living environment, may account for this expanded radio space and its potentiality of cultural action in interdependency to social activity and political protocols.5 Addressing these “sociotechnical” aspects of radio, Braun emphasizes that the development of the radio medium must be reflected as “a public space of interventions, a soundscape, a sculpture, and ultimately also a ‘horizontal’ medium of communication in the scope of hybrid media networks that temporarily interlink the most diverse settings.”6 And he further explains that “[t]he broadcasting format of radio and its content therefore exist in direct relationship to countless other media and communication formats.”7 In consequence of the intermedia status of radio, it cannot be seen primarily as a space of reception, but must also be considered a space of heterogeneous forms of collaboration, of diverse representations, an environment of variable meaning productions, and of fluid aesthetics— in short, radio is hence entangled with the mediatic—material and receptive—conditions of an expanding field of communicative and cultural interactions between dislocated individuals. Radio as art therefore evades the normative categories in as much as deterministic

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concepts of scientific models do not take account of the medium’s chimeric character and its vital impurity that connects innumerable acteurs in inconclusive, open-ended liaisons. From ephemerality to durability, the double destination of radio programs (on air and archived on the Internet) raises new questions about the status and the process of a radio artwork. Internet streaming has changed the nature of content transmission and podcasting, just as other kinds of online archiving formats have transformed the nature of radio. As Étienne Noiseau, initiator of an independent radio art platform in France, has pointed out: Spreading the content toward a new or larger audience and paying more attention to sound composition, podcasting and radio on demand have … given more credit to the creative potential of radio. The materialization of radio in the form of digital data which we can save and share invites us to fully consider creative radio programs as artistic works and their producers as artists or auteurs. However, the operating radio signal reduced to digital audio data thrusts radio into the larger, blurred field of audio.8 Within this perspective, the spreading of austerity politics, which abandons step by step the communal funding of public media, also needs to be considered with its impact on “elaborate, creative, artistic programs [that] are at risk to be directly or indirectly hit by these cuts.”9 In fact, the strict use of analogue broadcast is decreasing while digital terrestrial broadcasting raises problems so that radio art can lose the connection with the broadcasting technique. In the context of economic crisis, governments are cutting off funds for public broadcasting as well as support for community ­radio.10

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With this tendency in view, questions arise in regard to radio art’s technological expansion, while the role of content seems to fade into the background in the digital age. The issue at stake here is the fact that radio art has continuously redefined its position within the media landscape and the public sphere. Most of all, it is the accessibility and the experience of co-presence, so characteristic of radio, which defines the genuine publicness of radio and the experience of an extended social space on various levels. As ambiguous as this effect of radio has been since its early history as a propaganda instrument and in view of growing populist tendencies in Europe and worldwide, as relevant and urgent is the analytical engagement with the power relations of broadcast technologies, also as a prehistory of social media and socalled “alternative” information distribution. Monitoring these transfor-

mations of the political landscape and the concomitant media usage, it seems necessary to think about the kind of interplay that can be imagined between radio art and strategies of reappropriation of the public realm by means of resistance against anti-democratic and nationalistic tendencies. In the contested field of growing public conflict, poetic imagination and new forms of collective action may also be the subject of performative radio interventions and sensitization for media’s criticality in the sense of Jacques Rancière’s reconfiguration of the sensible, which, he stresses, is the political dimension of the aesthetic.11 In this discourse, radio’s ability to generate a public sphere by creating convivial spaces may be characterized not only by a notion of hospitality where the host receives the guests in her own house, but also by myriads of relations evolving between hosts and guests in transcultural processes of exchange and interactions. It may well be that this notion of a publicly displayed hospitality, based on a collective experience of presence experienced in the shared public space of the radio landscape, imparts a sense of the residual utopian spirit of radio as art. The results of the first subproject, “The Influences of (New) Technologies on Radio Art,” with a focus on broadcasting technologies, such as radio, Internet, and satellites, show that radio art always emerges in the tension between technological developments and possibilities, on the one side, and the artistic will to design, on the other, whereby the factors mentioned represent only a focused subset of the diverse elements whose reciprocal interactions constitute the collaborative projects and collective creative processes in radio art. Based on the

Exhibition view of Beyond Radio: 25 Years of Art Radio—Radio Art, Centre for Artists’ Publications at the Weserburg, Bremen, Germany, 2012

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particular focus on the technologies and techniques of radio art, it made sense for the first project area to pursue an interdisciplinary approach from the outset, so that—in addition to musicology, sound studies, and media studies—approaches from science and technology and hence also sociology were integrated into the studies. This made it clear that it is neither true that technology and technique determine artistic works nor that technical devices are passive artifacts that can be employed without restriction by the artist. A one-sided influence of technologies is controverted by the fact that broadcast technologies such as radio, Internet, and satellites, which are also used in the stateregulated, commercial, and military fields, are sometimes employed in the context of radio art in ways antithetical to those in the areas just mentioned. At the same time, however, with the rise of new technologies, new formats and practices of radio art were also explored. For example, the show Kunstradio—Radiokunst (Austrian Broadcasting Ö1/ORF) approached the Internet as a new, additional space for its radio art program when it introduced its homepage in 1995. The website combines aspects of an information platform and of an archive (in addition to a broadcast schedule, it has detailed additional information about specific shows and associated events, sound samples, and theoretical texts) and is also used to encourage and implement collaborative radio art projects via the Internet. The radio aporee project, which is constantly being expanded by collective collaboration and was initiated by Udo Noll, combines high-tech mobile telephones with a global positioning system (GPS) so that site-specific listening experiences are created in which real and virtual space overlap. In light of such reformulations, representing a purely progressive idea of radio art would not do it justice. In fact, many radio artists still insist on analogue radio technology. Knut Aufermann and Sarah Washington, for example, do not see mobile radio as an anachronistic, nostalgic decision but above all as a political one when, in parallel with setting up Internet radio situations, they always insist on analogue broadcasting. For unlike the Internet, they argue, analogue radio technology is not only easily employed by anyone interested but also in principle autonomous from existing infrastructures, so that they can also be employed in places that have little or no access to communication networks like the World Wide Web. The question of the role of technologies in radio art is thus always connected to political questions of accessibility, of the inclusion and exclusion of groups of people and territorial hegemonies. It is thus unsurprising that a number of works of radio art have affinities with activism and social commitment. The alternative radio network INSULAR Technologies (International Networking System for Unified Long-Distance Advanced Radio) of Marko Peljhan and Project ATOL, for example, aimed to connect remote regions or towns in particular to secure communication and to network them globally. 18

In conclusion, it can be confirmed that scholarly engagement with radio art has revealed the relationship of art and technology/technique to be a reciprocal one that connects relationally to choices of themes that can lead us forward. Moreover, historical study of early forms of artistic appropriation, modification, and dissemination of technologies and techniques can also free up a critical perspective on the current approach to so-called social media and the associated phenomena of network. These current developments in media, communication technology, and social policy were reflected on in the framework of the project as a prospect for productive perspectives for research and pioneering approaches, such as Kai von Eikel’s theorizing about concepts of radio art that aim to study performative and collective processes, revealing the transitions from formerly public spaces to corporative and surveillance spaces.12

Exhibition view of Beyond Radio: 25 Years of Art Radio—Radio Art, Centre for Artists’ Publications at the Weserburg, Bremen, 2012

Building on these findings, new methodologies for a non-essentialist understanding of not only radio art but also artistic practice in general were developed as well. This approach, which dissolves preset boundaries while at the same time allowing a focus on processes of enactment in the analysis of concrete situational settings, is applied by Jee-Hae Kim in her doctoral thesis in which she explores telecommunications projects involving the technology of slow-scan television from the late 1970s until the mid-1980s. The second research area, “The Institutional Context of Radio Art and Its Power Structures,” pursued the question of the influence of radio as medium and power apparatus on the emergence and development

19

Workshop Mediation of Radio Art: Concepts, Formats and Experiences in the context of the research project Radio Art: On the Development of a Medium between Aesthetics and Sociocultural Reception History, Bremen, Germany, 2012

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of radio art. This question assumes that the specific initial situations and assumptions in each of the radio systems decisively influence creative and artistic work. In that sense, the factors influencing radio art should be considered with an eye to their country-specific and historical constitution: the accessibility and quality of the available technical equipment are manifested in turn in the concrete realization of radio artworks, just as are the traditions of radio (art), the cultural zeitgeist, geopolitical conditions, and daily political events. Studies of these factors focused on Germany, Austria, the United States, and Turkey and touched on Australia, the former Yugoslavia, Italy, and the Netherlands. For Germany, Austria, and the United States in particular, a paradigm shift can be seen since the late 1990s. It was triggered by structural changes in the public radio system. The introduction of format radio, overall budget cuts, and the retirement of aging personalities relevant to the production of radio art have led to the near complete disappearance of radio art from the public radio system in these countries. This art form never succeeded on private or commercial radio. The production and performance of radio art is shifting to the Internet more and more, as well as to community radio stations and temporary (illegal) broadcasters. The artists are increasingly producing the works themselves and organizing in independent networks or in the context of art and radio festivals. In comparison to their peak in the late 1980s and 1990s, radio art today is more individualized, isolated, and occasional. Series of radio art, a marginal but nonetheless regular component of the public radio program, are being replaced by temporary, often precarious projects and events in cooperation with museums and other cultural institutions.

The change from state radio space to private (digital) radio space, which was not (entirely) voluntary, means, first, a certain freedom in production but also, second, the loss of all influence on and presence in the public radio sphere. It also means the loss of funding and access to professional radio technology. Country-specific differences in terms of content and aesthetics were worked out in a comparison of radio art in Germany and in the United States. American radio artists in the 1980s often tried to distance themselves from their European colleagues. Above all, they rejected the intellectual orientation of European radio art and the “old avant-garde” that was influential there, such as John Cage and the exponents of Fluxus, and positioned themselves instead with alternative formats. Their subject matter is dominated by themes related to the United States, such as borders and migration, the struggles of marginalized groups, and “black” history. Aesthetically, coming from performance art, narrative had a more important role than the influence of New Music in comparison to Europe. The effects of daily political events on the role of radio was studied using the example of, among others, the artists’ collective Oda Projesi in Istanbul. In the radio project 101.7 EFEM (2005), the collective addressed urban transformation processes in Istanbul and their effects on the population. Such forms of critique of the Turkish government, particularly those concerning the underprivileged, are not possible on public radio in Turkey, so that the artists’ collective Oda Projesi instead turned to an illegal pirate radio station. In terms of its content, the project can be seen as an anticipation of the Gezi Park protests and testifies to the social relevance of radio art. It can be said in general that artistic reflection on the medium of radio as an apparatus of power is an important precondition for the production of radio art. Analyses of specific works of radio art have shown that artists are overwhelmingly critical in their approaches to radio structures and the medium itself and try to expose and challenge their borders. This results in criticism being more or less clearly expressed in the works themselves. The points of attack are above all the alleged truth character of the medium, censorship, freedom of speech, and one-sided reporting. In the course of studying mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in radio art, the question arose of the role of women and female artists in radio art or of the category of gender as a topic calling for research. The work of women in all areas of the production and distribution of contributions to radio, explicitly feminist media practices, and the treatment of general roles on the level of subject matter are approaches that have scarcely been considered in research with this focus until now. Initial results are offered in Franziska Rauh’s dissertation, especially

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thanks to the analysis of the radio art of the American feminist artist Suzanne Lacy. The third area of research, “The Mediation of Radio Art,” covered radio art’s desiderata of mediation, addressed its specific challenges by developing innovative strategies for mediation and presentation, which can have positive effects both on the perception of radio art and on the implementation and analysis of theoretical concepts and actionbased methods for bringing radio art to a broad target audience (children, teenagers, and adults). The point of departure for project work was research that has shown that since its emergence in the 1960s only a few exhibitions and an even smaller number of associated museum offerings have been dedicated to it.

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As part of researching the extent to which the theory-based development and application of innovative mediation formats could help to increase the relevance and recognition of radio art, the research project conceived, studied theoretically, contextualized, and established concrete mediation formats. The strategies developed for dealing with radiophonic art encourage performative strategies for action and reflection on them, activating complex processes of perception and language. In addition to generating museum formats for mediation, methods of analysis in art history and media studies were worked out on the basis of theory and transformed to suit the specific context of radio art. A complex analysis was developed in this way as the basis for the mediation of radiophonic art. Its application to exemplary works of radio art both in seminars and in publications helped to identify specific challenges and derived from them the formulation of professional and educational goals that can guide the mediation process. On that basis, the project team worked out a concept for the aforementioned exhibition Beyond Radio: 25 Years of Art Radio—Radio Art with three focuses in terms of context, adopting in the process participatory structures of radiophonic works and modifying them for their curatorial and mediation-related presentation. The effects of the extensive offerings of specific mediation formats for radiophonic art were evaluated qualitatively in the context of the exhibition. Data was collected during the exhibition: questionnaires, the visitors’ own acoustic productions, entries in guestbooks, and problem-focused interviews with museum workers were incorporated into this part of the study. Starting out from the research question of the extent to which radiophonic works and their mediation setting stimulate visitors to reflection, the material collected was analyzed according to categories and systematically structured. The results of studying exemplary radiophonic works were the point of departure for adapting them to current theories of art mediation. On the basis of the empirical material, a broad spectrum of the influence of the reception of radiophonic works could be documented, as Sarah Rothe points out in her dissertation. Radio art may

trigger reflection in its listeners that ranges from media-critical considerations by way of expanding their own concept of art to critically engaging with multilayered perceptual experiences. It makes both individual and collaborative aesthetic experiences possible and offers listeners occasion to question and scrutinize not only artistic work as such but also the medium of radio. In addition, it supports the unfolding of abilities and contexts of knowledge that are relevant to education. Starting out from these results, a broad spectrum of recommendations, suggestions, and opportunities to work out concepts for the mediation and presentation of radiophonic art was generated, focusing on artrelated, participatory, and reflective processes of perception and action. In thinking about the future of radio and radio art, it may well be necessary to strengthen the synergies of collaborative projects between public broadcasting stations and museums. These perspectives were first articulated at the symposium Radio as Art: Contexts of Radio (Radio as Art: Kontexte der Radiokunst) held at the Centre for Artists’ Publications, Bremen, in 2008. One decade later, the transformation of the institutional framework for radio art has progressed, and it seems appropriate to rephrase the set of questions that address what is indicative of broadcasting—being public, free, local, or independent— today. How do we describe the contemporary institutional frameworks for radio art producers and how significant is it? What is the role of museums for the distribution, the archiving, and the production of new radiophonic art? How are the genealogies of radio art defined by different ways of archiving, narrativizing, and theatricalizing the archive? Where is the place of radio art within the broader context of

Workshop Mediation of Radio Art: Concepts, Formats and Experiences in the context of the research project Radio Art: On the Development of a Medium between Aesthetics and Sociocultural Reception History, Bremen, Germany, 2012

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Workshop Mediation of Radio Art: Concepts, Formats and Experiences in the context of the research project Radio Art: On the Development of a Medium between Aesthetics and Sociocultural Reception History, Bremen, Germany, 2012

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the museumization of sound art? Related to these questions is the demand for stronger concepts of radio art mediation in general, also reflected in curatorial concepts and new approaches to create broader contexts for the accessibility of radio art. In fact, the development of new methods for mediation of historical and current radio art were of central concern for the research in this context. Radio art does not have just one space but rather an infinite number of spaces in which it is mediated or can be mediated and invites “playing” with conventional boundaries, that is, reflecting on and shifting them. The heterogeneity of radio art in terms of technology, medium, and symbolic context offers further challenges for their mediation. As part of the research project, the mediation of radio art was studied and thematized on different levels. In addition to the medium of the exhibition and personal mediation in museums and schools, it focused on mediation via broadcasting and multimedia formats on the Internet. To what extent are curatorial formats, for example, compatible with other dimensions of mediation that are based on them? Discussion concerned especially the various spaces that are constituted and imagined via radio. Radio results in alternative spaces that in turn produce dislocated references to places as platforms of publication and distribution and, last but not least, installations of an expanded sculptural space taking form through the practice of broadcasting. Common scholarly interests and efforts for public mediation had a positive effect on the collaboration of cooperating institutions in Bremen

and Cologne and offered optimal conditions for successful work on the project. They are documented in the systematic processing of archival holdings and exhibition results, numerous lectures and texts, and the organization of three workshops and an international symposium. Finally, the symposium had the goal of presenting the results of the project’s research to an international professional audience and to stimulate with specific questions a discussion of central issues of radio art in the broadest sense. In addition to scholarly lectures, the Englishlanguage event included artistic contributions that shed light on the expanded spectrum of radiophonic art forms by offering impressive examples and proved to be an outstanding way of establishing connections to theoretical discussions. In general, the scholarly result of the symposium was reciprocal inspiration and an intense exchange of information among scholars. It was a summary in the sense of committing to intensifying the mediation and study of radio art in order to open up the great potential of scholarship on radio art and to make clear its importance for the media society of the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries. The symposium was preceded by an international call for papers. More­ over, a worldwide network of the events at the conference with a broader audience was achieved by live streaming the presentations via mobile radio (Knut Aufermann and Sarah Washington). Over the course of the three-day event, commentaries and questions from listeners from all over the world were integrated into conference events. They participated via email and Twitter in the often highly charged discussions of questions such as how radio frequencies can undermine surveillance technologies and how artists can intervene in politically precarious situations. During breaks, live interviews with scholars, artists, and visitors at the symposium were broadcast, so that the event was characterized by extremely vital international participation in the themes and contributions presented. A series of opening questions offered orientation for the subject matter of the symposium. One such question involved how far the terms coined by post-structuralism in the fields of media, theater, and curatorial studies contribute to deciphering the complexity of radiophonic art concepts and their response aesthetics. Can exhibition contexts serve to restructure, replay, and reinvent the primarily disseminationoriented radio art practices, and to what extent are these institutional constellations constitutive components of radiophonic artworks and their transformation by diverse forms of documentary “arrest”? How can we document the geopolitical contexts that animate artists—and motivated them in the past—to work with radiophonic media? Can radio art projects contribute to the formation of new forms of community? And how is the abuse of radio art for propagandistic purposes and

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the impact of the same on a displaced radio public reflected artistically? What role does radio art play in the ongoing transformation of aesthetic orders within the framework of a trans-media-oriented and (trans-) cultural global art development? For in the convergence of broadcast, reception, interaction, installation, and exhibition, radio art goes beyond the media definition of radio, which is always determined in part by politics and society. Within this context, radiophonically disseminated art forms bear a relationship to the interconnections between the technology, voice, body, and cultural and geopolitical formation likewise discussed in cultural and gender studies. Radio art concepts undermine the spatially regulated dispositifs of art reception and the related locations of the museum and the private reception context. Through the blurring of spatial boundaries with the public sphere, new horizons open and widen, horizons that address the collective, historically anticipate the concept of the network, and to an extent reconnect them with the local circumstances. The structure of the present volume corresponds to the structure of the symposium’s content. Several additional authors were invited to each of the five sections in order to supplement their themes with crucial aspects. We are pleased that we were granted the opportunity to publish “On Radio Art,” a remarkable reflection on the significance of airwaves by the Japanese artist Tetsuo Kogawa. Also, the Canadian radio artist Hank Bull, who together with Patrick Ready broadcast the legendary HP Show on Vancouver Co-operative Radio for eight years (starting in 1976), illustrates as vividly as impressively in his keynote lecture “The Reception of Electricity” the significance of the technological constitution of radio by the use of electricity.

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Radio Space, the first session of the symposium, was dedicated to the realm of radio’s impact. The contextual and conceptual expansion of radio space is reciprocally related to issues of relevance to current discourses on space and the public sphere. Auditory recordings create correspondences between locations and spatial settings, temporalities, perceptions, and meanings. Radiophonic works have the capacity to constitute alternative spaces of art and social convergence, thus they also function as auditory occupations of the public realm. As a publication and distribution platform (gallery space), a communication medium and space, or an artistic working space (recording studio), radio can designate imaginary spaces as well as a specific physical location or the institutional frame. Through the acts of broadcasting and listening associated with radio, it creates heterogenous spaces that may either be condensed to landscapes of sound where various cultural presences overlap or compete with one another by conceptual interplays of broadcasting in the public environment. At stake in this constellation is also the question of who is included in the so-called public spaces—but also who is excluded—and how these mechanisms inter-

relate with the expansion of private property and corporate power structures. Performative radio interventions, such as those staged by the artists’ collective LIGNA, are committed to marking and mapping the overlapping territories of public-private zoning in urban spaces. By usage of broadcasting facilities, their concepts for idiosyncratic, participatory choreographies expose the subcutaneous mechanisms of control and exclusion in allegedly public spheres. Sarah Rothe devotes her analysis of the exemplary work Nacht. Stimme. Zerstreuung. (Night. Voice. Dispersal.) to the radio performances of the LIGNA group. She studies the connections between the presentations and how their approach is received, which are exampled for the opportunities to disseminate in the context of the aforementioned exhibition Beyond Radio: 25 Years of Art Radio—Radio Art. The focus here is on grappling with the performative and participatory structures of LIGNA, which unfold in the repetition and deliberate restaging of an effectiveness that should be positioned contextually in each case. The results of this empirical experiment prove that radiophonic artistic productions can contribute to an attitude in the listeners that is media-critical and reflective. At the same time, radio art turns out to be an effective way to reexamine the limits of the museum and of the reception spaces of broadcasting and to initiate innovative forms of dissemination. “Considering the Sonic Aspects of the Media Environment as an Exhibition Space for Creative Sound-Based Works,” Colin Black conceptualizes from the point of view of an artist and theorist the notion of the radio environment as a “public sculptural space” that also constitutes a kind of ephemeral “non-contiguous art gallery space.” In this sphere, a multiplicity of dislocated radio broadcasts converge to new forms of “‘we-ness’ and ‘immediacy’” that also overlap and become part of the expanded discursive field of art in public space.13 From the perspective of an art historian who has researched the public landscape of early radio programming, Andreas Zeising elaborates on the medium’s role in serving as an “important interface” in the process of familiarizing a wide audience with the aesthetic dimensions of the avant-garde during the Weimar Republic.14 The left-wing-oriented Novembergruppe (November Group) provides an illustrative example for the ambitious project of popularizing and communicating modern art by the new mass medium of radio with a didactic intent, supported by visual artists, critics, and radio practitioners. The second session, Radio Art: Artistic Production and/or Political Practice, focused on the controversy that frequently flares up on the boundary between artistic work and political action, when question arise as to whether a certain work is (still) art or belongs more to social involvement, sociological experiment, or political intervention. Instead of following such preestablished concepts of art’s alleged autonomy, reconstructions of the production circumstances and the politics of broadcasting as well as the usage and reception of the radio

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medium in society are echoed in multiple contemporary artworks with reference to specific cultural and historical constellations. The potential of conspirational radio in times of conflict sets the thematic focus of Ursula Frohne’s essay, dedicated to an overview of citations of radio’s role for audiences living under repressive regimes or censorship in artworks within the extended field of activism and civil resistance. The futuristic emphasis of Gustav Klucis’s constructivist displays designed for public radio transmissions anticipates Tamás St. Turba’s contemporary sculptural adaptations of fake transistor radios that people had used in demonstrations during the Warsaw Pact Army’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 at a time when people were forbidden to listen to the radio. It also anticipates Dan Mihaltianu’s installation of his Bucharest studio, filled with the sound of the radio coverage on the revolution in Romania in 1989, or Marko Peljhan’s empowering mission pursued by his globally operating, high-frequency radio network projects. On the basis of these works, the role of broadcasting as an instrument of dissidence is discussed also in its potential to interact with collectives during times of political precariousness. While the specific relevance of radio in these processes for the pre-1989 period is at stake, the virtually uncontrollable mediatic structure of radio transmission continues to be relevant in the age of electronic communication, mass surveillance, and “cloud” computing. In this vein, Philip Glahn likewise investigates “The Radio and/as Digital Productivism” in view of critical initiatives such as the Berlin-based Mikro.fm project, Philadelphia’s Radio Prometheus, and Free Radio Linux. His essay assesses the possibilities and limits of artistic-activist radio practices as critical implementations and examinations of renewed historical avant-garde premises in reference to collaboration, participation, and the formation of new audiences and constituencies, as well as past and present discussions around telecommunication. Widening the cultural horizon, Claudia Wegener gives insight into the production and distribution conditions related to the traditions of the art of listening and storytelling in South Africa and Zimbabwe. Wegener’s focus is set on projects that she co-initiated as “entry points for radio to happen, with and among the people, and begin to ‘radiate’ among communities of listeners across a ‘global village.’”15 Another facet with an explicitly political effect of radio art is addressed by Franziska Rauh. In reference to Giorgio Agamben’s theory of the dispositif or apparatus, her contribution “Radio Art in the ‘… Everyday Hand-to-Hand Struggle with Apparatuses?’” analyses the work of the Istanbul-based artist collective Oda Projesi and reveals how their radio projects become instruments of political agency and a challenge for the institutional apparatus.

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Institutional Framing and Agency defines the focus of the third chapter. The conditions of the production and distribution of radio art and the strategies applied by the artists are at stake when the actual context of radio art within various institutions, including museums,

academies, and radio companies, as well as practices outside the institutional frames, center around the issue of what it means to produce and broadcast radio art in today’s political, economic, and cultural contexts. How have radio artworks evolved over time and what are the future challenges? These aspects are touched upon by Sibylle Omlin, who gives insight in her work with “Radio as a Research Medium for Artistic and Oral-History-Based Research Projects” related to her ongoing research projects in the arts that use radio formats (sound essays, features, soundscapes). She also explores them within the social context, where nomadic media like radio, web radio, and Skype films are used to transport content or to generate participation in collaborative projects. Examples of experimental radio art productions launched by the radio collectives Resonance 104.4fm, Radia and Mobile Radio are introduced by Sarah Washington. Her experience with new forms of community radio are rooted in artistic broadcasting that responds to fast-changing technological development. Washington’s survey on “Community Radio as Post-Capitalist Art” reflects on the conditions that have led to significant change in artists’ requirements for cultural production and

From top left to bottom right: Anne ThurmannJajes, Colin Black, Hank Bull, Elisabeth Zimmermann, Sarah Washington, Anna Friz, Ralf Homann, Philip Glahn, Andreas Hagelücken, Lauren Rosati, Ursula Frohne at the International Symposium Radio As Art— Concepts, Spaces, Practices: Radio Art between Media Reality and Art Reception, Bremen, Germany, 2014

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have given rise to the adoption of new working principles. The still rare implementation of “Radio Art as a Field of Study” in the academy is addressed by Nathalie Singer who has the Professorship for Experimental Radio at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. As one of the few laboratories for the development of creative audio and radio formats for teaching and research purposes, the constellation in Weimar provides a rich context for reflection on creative radio since its beginnings in the 1920s as well as for the development of new radio formats in the digital age. As curator of the extensive exhibition radiophonic spaces, held at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin (November 1 to December 10, 2018), Nathalie Singer in her contribution links the perspectives of production and reception with the need to also reconsider the mediation of historical works of radio art.16 As an experienced radio practitioner, author, and producer of radio plays for several German public broadcasters, including Sender Freies Berlin (SFB) / Radio BerlinBrandenburg (RBB) and Deutschlandradio, Andreas Hagelüken fathoms in his contribution “Radio as Art? Heart or Gall Bladder?” the place of radio “alongside other sites of culture” today and underscores its stimulating role for the arts. Thanks to its ubiquitous presence and the impact of new media, it “radiates in all directions” and has increasingly become “a playground” of the creative sphere in general.17

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The performative features of Radio Art as Action are thematic for the fourth chapter, focusing on works associated with aesthetic concepts of radio communication, with joint music-making, networking, collaboration, experimentation, inquiry, and research often playing a central role. In fact, the majority of such works emerge from and are existent only during the actual performative process. The action, which is generally—or at least primarily—an end in itself and is not represented or substituted by relics or objects, appears to also be of constitutive significance for radio art in a general sense. The discussion accordingly refers to the consequences that arise when “radio art” is conceived of less as a media-specific art form, but on the contrary as a structural setting whose foremost function is to initiate a process of something that is meant to be performed or acted out. On the basis of specific examples and also from theoretical perspectives, the contributions to this chapter investigate how (inter)action and its ephemeral features manifest as artistic content. How are processes consummated in the interplay between acteurs and—in the case of radio art—also among dislocated protagonists? In her essay “In Simulcrast: Archigram and Radio Piracy in 1960s Britain,” Roksana Filipowska explores the proposal for “Instant City” by the experimental British Architects Group. The setting allowed the visitor to move through a space filled with speakers and screens, while observing the multiplicity of audiovisual messages within a single radio or television broadcast. Placing Archigram’s “broadcast architecture” in conversation with the pirate-radio phenomenon, Filipowska discusses the programmatic conflation of advertising

language—and actual—advertising with the aesthetic of piracy, to propose plurality of broadcasts as a challenge to Britain’s age of consensus. Focusing on participatory radio concepts, Kai van Eikels addresses in the perspective of theater studies the construction of the recipient, who is situated in an ambiguous position between agency and imposed suffering in LIGNA’s adapted version of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex transmitted by a “Radio Voice That’s Telling Me To Go for the Throat of the Other.” In his in-depth analysis, the interplay of radio waves with the receiving apparatuses in relation to the bodies of the participants is characterized as an uncanny experience of diverse collective processes. The physical, psycho-sociological, and political dimensions of these collective formations are seen as interrogations of the established dichotomies of communal/individual, public/private, violent/nonviolent. The engagement with the ephemeral dynamic of participation in conceptual broadcasting scenarios is approached from a different angle in Jee-Hae Kim’s essay. She offers insight into the artistic practice of the Direct Media Association (DMA), a loose collective founded by Bill Bartlett in 1978 to promote the development of creative applications of telecommunications technology. While focusing on DMA’s exhibition project Pacific Rim / Slow Scan (Vancouver, 1979), Kim shows how the featured broadcasting of still images via the technology of slow-scan television (SSTV) can be interpreted in terms of an “art as experience,” as formulated by John Dewey. Characterized by a notion of “doing” that comprises elements of activity and receptivity in a reciprocal process, the experiments in SSTV manifest through the dynamic interplay of such various elements like people, technological artifacts, or governmental and industrial sponsorship. The enactment of Life on Air, a twenty-minute radio performance presented by Irina Gheorghe (The Bureau of Melodramatic Research) on the occasion of the symposium in Bremen, is documented and commented in her text collage as a “homage to the dark medium” by Radio Profile, a broadcasting project in Bucharest, Romania, that has been producing radio programs since 2012 in a team of artists, philosophers, and sociologists. With their project EAVESDROPPING on Life, they counteract the strong influence of the Orthodox church in Romania on the spreading the populist ideas of “pro-life” which is seen against the historical backdrop of the restrictive abortion politics during the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaus¸escu in the 1980s. The last chapter Words – Sound – Music is dedicated to the aesthetic experience of listening to and perceiving works of radio art. Only in the presence of the recipient can radio art take place, namely, during the act of listening. To what extent does this specific constellation of an active participation in the formation of a radio piece have significance, on the one hand, for the constitution of the recipient by conceptions of silence, sounds, tones, volume, editing, montage or overlapping, narration or voice and, on the other hand, for the conception

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of a specific work and of radio art in general? How can this impact of a non-site-specific, rather ubiquitous acoustic experience be preserved? What categories and terms are productive in the interpretation of the specific aesthetic of the listening event? Lauren Rosati underscores in her analysis of John Cage’s notion of “Cinema for the Ear” the intermediatic and relational conditions of radio within the modern mediascape. That the technology of the speaker would radically and simultaneously transform the domains of radio and cinema had an impact on John Cage, who conflated these media in multiple projects over nearly six decades. With an archaeological approach, Rosati reconstructs how Cage adopted the basic structural apparatus of the film—the frame—as the optimal marker of time in his compositions and works intended for radio broadcast. With her method of bracketing the discipline of cinema as a way of reconsidering Cage’s audio works as “cinema for the ear,” the example of the visual treatment of sonic material discussed here provides a framework for assessing Cage’s audio compositions through the “lens” of moving pictures. Rosati’s endeavor approaches the field of radio art from the perspective of other art forms with a methodology that may also be useful for future implementations of radio artworks in the discourse of art and media history. Intermediatic relations between radio and other art forms are also central for Nadine Hahn’s discussion of Peter Roehr’s Sound Montages from the 1960s. Roehr’s visual as well as literary works, his photomontages, films, and his poetry resonate with the conception of his radio plays that he produced for the Hessian Broadcasting Corporation (Hessischer Rundfunk). Exemplary of his sound montages that use ready-made elements and are, similar to his visual works, marked by repetitive structures, Untitled (T-20) is centrally featured in this essay. Its full adaption of a radio advertisement for the Volkswagen 1500 launched in 1961 is characteristic of his work in the way it transposes the visual language to the acoustic medium and, by its repetetitve gesture, also the commercial from mass medium to the sphere of art. In her essay, Ania Mauruschat covers an extended period of the history of the German Hörspiel (radio play), beginning in 1924 with Weimar Radio up to the mid-1990s. She focuses on Andreas Ammer and FM Einheit, who created a collage of television, theater, and radio as well as pop music and avant-garde pop broadcast in their radio opera Apocalypse Live TV as an experimental reinvention of the radio play under digital conditions. Also, Vito Pinto’s elaborations are centered around the format of the radio play. His assumptions about how to perceive radiophonic art by focusing on different listening modes are based on the “Work of the Hörspielmacher Paul Plamper.” Pinto’s close reading of Plamper’s projects reveals that active listening evokes sociopolitical participation. In conclusion of the wide spectrum assembled in this volume, Anne Thurmann-Jajes locates radio art as the “Dead Spot in Art History” and a desideratum in the scholarly discourse. Once again the specific conditions of radio art as an aesthetic format that is nonvisual,

immaterial, placeless, time-based, and disseminated are emphasized and situated within the development and the context of artist publications as well as within art history since the second half of the twentieth century.

Acknowledgments The three nearly complete dissertation projects on radio art, dedicated to an in-depth study of the research perspectives outlined here, have managed to shed light on the value of radio art and its archives for the development of the visual arts in general and to lay the foundations for further research. Many collaborators were involved in implementing the research perspectives, and we would like to thank them sincerely. They include all the employees of the research project—Melanie Köhnicke, Sarah Monique Lücker, Marvin Otten, Susanne Vögtle, and Zainad Haidary—who accompanied the project on all levels. For diverse support in organizing and setting up the symposium, we wish to thank Iris Blenklein, Bettina Brach, Hartmut Danklef, Leah Drury, Miriam Frerks, and Jule Kahrig. The contributions and engaged discussions of the speakers and participants in the three workshops held as part of the project in 2012 and 2013 provided important stimuli and contributed to insights that without this intense exchange would not have formed in such a concentrated way. For their willingness to contribute to this research forum, we sincerely thank Özge Açikkol (Oda Projesi artists’ group, Istanbul), Jacki Apple (artist/producer/art theorist, Los Angeles), Regine Beyer (editor/producer, Bremen/Berlin), Colin Black (artist/scholar, Sydney), Yanna Black (artist/producer, Sydney), Sabine Breitsameter (University of Darmstadt), Marita Emigholz (Radio Bremen), Ole Frahm (Ligna artists’ group, Berlin), Heidi Grundmann (Kunstradio, Ö1/ORF, Vienna), Christine Heil (Kunsthochschule Mainz), Marko Pelhjan (University of Santa Barbara), Britta Petersen (University of Bremen), Glenn Phillips (Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles), and Elisabeth Zimmermann (Kunstradio, Ö1/ORF, Vienna). Special thanks are accorded to all the presenters of the symposium who made the effort to travel to Bremen, as well as to the authors who have offered insight into their artistic and scholarly work and whose expertise has contributed to making available an extensive compendium of sources on diverse conceptual facets and international contexts of radio art. For the crucial support of our research project and cooperation on various levels, we are deeply indebted to Peter Weibel (ZKM, Karlsruhe), Glenn Phillips (Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles), Sabine Himmels­ bach (formerly Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst, now House of the Electronic Arts, Basel), and Heidi Grundmann and Elisabeth Zimmermann

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(Kunstradio, Ö1, ORF, Vienna). As proven experts at relevant institutions, they have supported our research with their knowledge and collegiality. We would like to take this opportunity to thank the artists working in the field of radio art and the broadcasters of radio art throughout the world for entrusting the Centre for Artists’ Publications with recordings of radio art and archival holdings to preserve, document, and research and for remaining in contact. It is only thanks to this close collaboration that the holdings of this art form can be made available, in the future as well, to researchers and the public: students, scholars, and the broader public interested in the field. The research project on radio art has profited substantially from these international relationships, and the research it has done in a context of expanded reception can be presented only in this wide-ranging, internationally networked discursive context. It was only with the support of the Volkswagen Foundation that this project could be implemented and its goal achieved of establishing a publicly accessible, internationally networked research institution for radio art at the Centre for Artists’ Publications—in the spirit of sustainability as well—in Bremen. It has opened up an expanded space of discourse for the recording, analysis, reconstruction, presentation, and mediation of the aesthetic and sociopolitical features of an art form that has hardly been considered at all in the history of art. The editors are particularly grateful to Dr. Adelheid Wessler, who supported the project with constructive advice and frequent cooperation during its nearly four years of existence. We are also sincerely grateful to Dr. Wilhelm Krull for his faith in a research perspective that is still being established. Accordingly, our greatest thanks are extended to the Volkswagen Foundation for making this work possible in the first place!

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 1 We are dedicating the present publication to the Canadian-Austrian radio artist Robert Adrian X, who passed away in the summer of 2015. He decisively influenced the emergence and evolution of radio art. We are also dedicating it to Tetsuo Kogawa and Hank Bull, with whom he frequently collaborated.  2 The Centre for Artists’ Publications (Zentrum für Künstlerpublikationen, Bremen) covers several archives with approximately 300,000 publications from all around the world. It is the largest and most outstanding collection of published artworks in Europe. This unique assortment includes twenty-five different types of genres, including artists’ books, multiples and book objects, artists’ newspapers and magazines, ephemera such as posters and invitations designed by artists, photographs, postcards, artists’ stamps, and stickers, graphic works, Xerox copies, and stamp works, sound art on records, tapes, and audio CDs, radio art, multimedia editions on CD-ROM and DVD, artists’ videos and films, secondary literature, and documentation material. See www.zentrum-kuenstlerpublikationen.de.  3 Kunstradio—Radiokunst is a weekly radio program on the culture channel of ORF—Austria 1, broadcast on Sundays at 11:05 p.m. In 1995, the Canadian media and telecommunication artist Robert Adrian X launched the website kunstradio.at, offering announcements and documentation of the program, and for some projects it also provides an “on air—on line—on site” as a networked environment that connects the dislocated venues of collaborative radio art concepts. See http://www.kunstradio.at (all URLs accessed in July 2018).   4 Reinhard Braun, “Radio amidst Technological Ideologies,” in Re-Inventing Radio: Aspects of Radio as Art, eds. Heidi Grundmann, Elisabeth Zimmermann, Reinhard Braun, Dieter Daniels, Andreas Hirsch, and Anne Thurmann-Jajes (Frankfurt am Main: Revolver, 2008), pp. 233–46, esp. p. 235.  5 The notion of “milieu” is mainly based on Jakob von Uexküll’s focus on the “phenomenal worlds” of animals whose life, he contended, has to be interpreted in view of the specific environments that they inhabit. See Jakob von Uexküll, Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere (Berlin: J. Springer, 1909). This new idea of “Umwelt” became a key concept for Leo Spitzer’s and Georges Canguilhem’s elaborations on the “environment”; see Leo Spitzer, “Milieu and Ambiance: An Essay in Historical Semantics,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 3 (1942), pp. 1–42 and 169–218, and Georges Canguilhem, “Das Lebendige und sein Milieu,” in Die Erkenntnis des Lebens (Berlin: August Verlag, 2009), pp. 233–79. The term “milieu” has also been adapted by media theory that understands media as shaping the environment by multiple networked operations—analogue as well as digital, including their cultural observations in literature, theater, and fine arts, which in turn affect the production of new milieus. On the discourse of “milieu” in media theory, see Maria Muhle, “Medienwissenschaft als theoretisch-politisches Milieu,” Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft 10, no. 1 (2014), pp. 137–42.   6 See also Reinhard Braun, “Anomalous Territories,” http://www.kunstradio.at/THEORIE/ rb-anomalous-e.html.   7 Braun, “Radio amidst Technological Ideologies,” pp. 235–37.  8 Étienne Noiseau, “Proposal for ‘RADIO AS ART – Concepts, Spaces, Practices: Radio Art between Media Reality and Art Reception,’ International Conference in Bremen, June 2014. Durability of radio art in the frame of global digitization,” unpublished.  9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (London and New York: Continuum, 2004). 12 Kai van Eikels, Die Kunst des Kollektiven: Performance zwischen Theater, Politik und SozioÖkonomie (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2013). 13 See the essay by Colin Black, “Considering the Sonic Aspects of the Media Environment as an Exhibition Space for Creative Sound-Based Works,” in this volume. 14 See Andreas Zeising, “The Avant-Garde and a Popular Medium: The Berlin ‘Novembergruppe’ and Radio in the Weimar Republic,” in this volume. On early radio and its relations to art and modernism, see also Andreas Zeising, Radiokunstgeschichte: Bildende Kunst und Kunstvermittlung im frühen Rundfunk der 1920er bis 1940er Jahre (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2018). On the history of the radio medium, see Solveig Ottman, Im Anfang war das Experiment: Das Weimarer Radio bei Hans Flesch und Ernst Schoen (Berlin: Kadmos, 2013). 15 See Claudia Wegener, “Everyone a Listener, Everyone a Producer! A Collective Journey toward Another Sound of Radio,” in this volume. 16 The manual for the exhibition radiophonic spaces is available as a download: https://www. hkw.de/media/texte/pdf/2018_1/programm_2018/radiophonic_spaces_manual.pdf. 17 See Andreas Hagelüken, “Radio as Art? Heart or Gall Bladder?,” in this volume.

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“I am an artist. I am not anything else.”1: —Robert Adrian Smith, 1935–2015 Jee-Hae Kim

There are a lot of labels that people attach to Robert Adrian when reviewing his life and work of the past fifty-something years. “A pioneer of telecommunications art,” for instance, is one of the most popular and common denominations by which Adrian is identified. Yet by tying Adrian to a single medium alone or to one specific strand of artistic practice, one not only shortens his manifold interests and activities but also fails to acknowledge that he considered the diverse realms of art and other fields of interest to be merely different perspectives from which common questions can be approached. As a matter of fact, Adrian moved freely between them. For him, painting and drawing, taking photographs and shooting works on video or for television, forming small sculptures, as well as establishing cooperative organizations, developing a mailbox system, setting up and utilizing networks of people and things for telecommunications projects, and hosting a website were all various ways to analyze the preconditions of art, the role of the artist, the interplay of art and politics, and the function of media in today’s society.

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Born 1935 in Canadian Toronto, Adrian moved to London in 1959 before relocating once again, this time to Vienna where he lived starting 1972. Adrian grew up in a family of artists and was soon introduced to landscape painting and outdoor sketching. After studying commercial art in high school, he rented a studio to pursue a career as an artist. The early landscape-themed larger paintings Adrian coined with the term “lyrical abstraction”; at the same time, he also created smaller drawings, monotypes, and pastels. Later, he concerned himself intensively with formal problems of painting that led to works like Black Silk (1976), the Grey Series (1975–76), and Arcs (1977), attesting to the artist’s perception of painting as an object whose foremost function it is to convey ideas rather than an illusionistic representation of the outer reality. Further inquiries asking for the codes that influence the appraisal of an object as art are represented in a series of works entitled Great Moments in Modern Art (ca. 1981–91). Here, Adrian chose iconic images and narratives like Yves Klein’s jump into the void, Joseph Beuys’s plane crash, but also multicolored geometric forms as motifs of three-dimensional installations and figurines, therefore confronting the spectator with the myths and preconceptions that define

his or her notion of especially modern art. At the same time, since 1979, Adrian was engaged in experimentation with telecommunications technology. Best known for his involvement in large-scale projects such as The World in 24 Hours (1982), Wiencouver IV (1983), and Planetary Network (1986), he grasped early on the idea of an electronic space that functions as a new platform of art and allows communication over distance. Together with Gottfried Bach and Bill Bartlett, Adrian initiated the development of the electronic mail program ARTEX (1980–91), the first computer network established and used by artists, launched the electronic Bulletin Board System ZEROnet (1992–93), and hosted the website Kunstradio On-Line (since 1995). From the first, Adrian thereby concerned himself with matters of access to and availability of the means of telecommunication and its infrastructures. Hence it was less an uncontested enthusiasm for technology in itself that motivated a project like Telephone Music (1983) in which artists, musicians, but also audiences in the cities of Vienna, Berlin, and Budapest were connected by common telephone lines. Connectivity and cooperation weren’t just yet fashionable catchphrases of a creative industry, but a sincere concern and logical conclusion of the search for different ways of artistic practice that take an interest in the exploration of the conditions governing society. Invested with a deep skepticism toward any given frame of thinking and hierarchic power structures, Adrian already in 1966 had co-founded the Fulham Artisans (until 1970), an enterprise producing glass paintings which in retrospect could be called a work collective that tried out an alternative way of production in a more flexible and egalitarian work environment. In the following years, Adrian repeatedly assembled cooperative relations, some of which took the shape of formal partnerships, as in the case of the nonprofit organization BLIX (1983–86), but also more loose forms of collaboration. Furthermore, Adrian expressed his critical thinking in his writings that follow the question “What is art?,” comment on the politics of the art market, and examine how electronic technology changes our perception of the world. Though Adrian took a great interest in the influence of new technological developments and the formation of the contemporary media landscape by considering all its possible dangers (e.g., the four-part project Surveillance, 1979–2000), he just as well was a sharp analyst of the past. In his radio works Damals (1988) and Long Slow Train (1995), and in the multipart work series Art & Politics (1990–94), he refers to the time of National Socialism and deals with its cultural politics as well as how people attend to or rather suppress the memory of this part of history. During his time working as an artist, Adrian was awarded the art prize of the City of Vienna (1993), the Nam June Paik Art Center Prize (2009), and the Österreichischer Kunstpreis (Austrian Art Award, 2011). He participated in a number of prominent exhibitions like the Venice Biennale (1980, 1986) and the Biennale of Sydney (1986). In

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2001, the Kunsthalle Wien dedicated a comprehensive retrospective to the artist, while people in Vienna can still appreciate his façade installation Picasso’s Eye (1993, an outdoor version of a work from 1990) when taking a walk in the city. As multifaceted as his artistic practice was, as versatile were the many occupations by which Adrian supported his life as an artist. In the group of miniature sculptures called 24 Jobs (1979), Adrian presents himself as a gallery assistant, display designer, exhibition sculptor, but also as a hotel clerk, fruit picker, baths attendant, and houseman, among others. By referring to activities such as pouring beer and vacuum cleaning, and re-creating the settings of their performance in his sculptural work, even those moments that seem to have little or no connection to the art world ultimately become part of Adrian’s artistic oeuvre. Hence, apart from hinting at the economic necessities to which an artist’s life is subject in general, and wittingly telling the story of the alternate course of Adrian’s professional life in particular, 24 Jobs subtly hints at Adrian’s self-conception as an artist—the one commitment that remained constant throughout the many changes in geography, employment, and working medium.

 1 Josephine Bosma, “If Art is Possible at All: Robert Adrian X, 1935–2015,” in Rhizome, December 30, 2015, http://rhizome.org/editorial/2015/dec/30/if-art-is-possible-at-allrobert-adrian-x-1935-2015/ (accessed August 2016).

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The Reception of Electricity: Art as Radio in Literature, Painting, and Performance Hank Bull With illustrations by HP

Electricity crossed over from nature into culture sometime in the late seventeenth century. Joseph Priestley’s seven-hundred-page treatise on the History of the Present State of Electricity, published in 1767, includes a bibliography of over forty volumes in four languages, evidence that by then new theories were widespread.1 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was familiar with this research. He wrote about electricity in Theory of Colours (1810), is known to have possessed a number of Leiden jars, and some sort of electrical apparatus is apparently still on display at his house at Weimar.2 Since these early investigations, the effects of applied electricity have become pervasive, affecting all aspects of human life. Among recent developments, the proliferation of mobile phones and satellite communications has made radio in its various forms one of the principle carriers of the global imaginary. We live today in a wireless world. Throughout the nineteenth century, people around the world became increasingly aware of a new medium: electricity. Newspapers abounded with reports of the latest invention, encouraging intense popular interest and even wild speculation. That which up until then had belonged Hank Bull and ­Patrick Ready started the HP Dinner Show in 1976, a weekly radio program that would broadcast for eight years on CFRO_FM Vancouver Co-operative Radio, see Hank Bull and Patrick Ready, “The Story of the HP Show,” in Radio Rethink: Art, Sound and Transmission, eds. Daina Augaitis and Dan Lander (Banff: Walter Phillips ­Gallery, 1994)

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to the natural world, or even to the supernatural—lightning, for example—became, in a few short years, a material to be controlled by humans and made to serve human needs and desires. Society was progressively transformed by telegraphy, the telephone (both sound transmission media), electric light, and, by the end of the century, X-rays, Hertzian radio waves, and radioactivity. Artists and poets were early to sense and predict the radical effects that electricity and telecommunications media would have on both art and life. Coinciding with the climax of European colonialism, the adoption of electricity not only accelerated the global economy; it also promised to deliver understanding of the paranormal, offering potential explanations for telepathy, magic, and even communication with the dead. The doors of perception were opened to a vast and powerful world beyond the physical senses. In the early 1780s, Luigi Galvani made a frog’s leg twitch and called it “animal electricity.” Not long after, Alessandro Volta discovered the electrochemical principle of the battery, a purely physical phenomenon. A wider debate ensued around the question of “Vitalism.” Theologians were pitted against scientists: Is the origin of life a mystery known only to God, or can it somehow be explained by science? In writing Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus in 1818, Mary Shelley displayed her familiarity with, aside from the history of alchemy, the contemporary theories regarding the relationship between electricity and the body.3 After various references in the story to lightning and other forms of natural electricity, Dr. Frankenstein, at the crucial moment of his experiment, is made to say, “I collected the instruments of life around me that I might infuse a spark of being in the lifeless thing.” Although he refuses to reveal his secret, the implication is made clear in the unfolding nightmare. Electricity has come to life and stalks the land, as it does to this day. In this prescient novel, Mary Shelley initiates the debate about the “post-human.” The discipline of neuroscience, and what is today called “brain science,” develops throughout the nineteenth century. In the world of robotics, artificial intelligence, big data, and surveillance, borders are blurred between human and nonhuman, life and death.

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By 1850, following the tracks recently laid down by the railway, the telegraph was beginning to transform distance communication. Edgar Allan Poe understood the implications. In his last book, an extended nonfiction work entitled Eureka (1848), he attempts a comprehensive description of the nature of the universe. “Space and duration are one,” he declares, calling electricity the binding medium. “To electricity— so, for the present, continuing to call it—we may not be wrong in

Among HP’s various inventions was The Time Dilation Machine, 1975, a trunk fitted with mirrors and a peephole, which came with a set of instructions for time travel. Time dilation was employed on the radio as a way of taking the audience back in time, in particular to the “Land of Science.”

referring the various physical appearances of light, heat and magnetism; but far less shall we be liable to err in attributing to this strictly spiritual principle the more important phenomena of vitality, consciousness and Thought.”4 “I sing the body electric,” wrote Walt Whitman in 1855. Jules Verne referred to electricity in virtually all of his stories and, in a work of nonfiction, Paris in the XXth Century (1863), he predicts video conferencing and a network something like the Internet, describing a dystopian future in which only business and technology are valued. In 1865, James Clerk Maxwell demonstrated mathematically that electricity, magnetism, and optics are all manifestations of a single “electromagnetic field” and concluded that they must all be traveling through space as waves moving at the speed of light. Heinrich Hertz proved Maxwell’s theory in 1887 by transmitting radio waves across the room.5 Alexander Graham Bell’s first demonstrations of the telephone took place not before closed meetings of academics or entrepreneurs, but in a public theater. They were a scripted blend of musical concert, illusionist performance, scientific exposition, and commercial promotion. Already intimated by Goethe, Shelley, and others, the boundaries between art, science, magic, and economy were dissolved in one fell swoop by the telephone.6 By 1887, the world was fully wired. It was possible to send a telegram from San Francisco to London and on to Shanghai in a matter of a few

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hours. The era of instant global communication had arrived. Friedrich Nietzsche sent his fair share of telegrams, while his typewriter (one of the first) shaped what he called his “telegram style.”7 Introduced in 1881, the incandescent light bulb soon proliferated along the Champs Elysée, attracted thousands to Coney Island, and even began to appear in private homes. Imagine: for the first time, there is no match—you flick a switch and there is light!8 Electricity encouraged belief in magic. The Tarot proliferated, along with spirit communication and masonic cults. Prominent scientists were interested in extrasensory perception. William Crookes, for example, a leading member of the Royal Society, who developed the vacuum tube (soon to be an essential component of broadcast radio and television), was a lifelong advocate for telepathy. At the same time, in a contrary movement, gas and electric light were turning night into day and, in the process, depriving night of its numinous power. Much that had hitherto belonged to the supernatural world was suddenly unveiled, exposed to the human gaze. Modernist angst is a direct result of the collision between superstition and materialism.

Vincent Van Gogh, The Night Café, 1888, Yale University Art Gallery

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Vincent van Gogh described the schizophrenia of the age, as he documented the transition from candle to electric light. Under the flickering glow of an oil lamp, The Potato Eaters (1885) evokes a preelectric

The floating sieve, from The Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician, presented as a shadow play by HP and friends in 1976. Shadow theater was employed by Alfred Jarry and was popular in pre-cinema Paris.

world, engulfed by dark shadows, while Café Terrace at Night (1888), painted a few years later, represents urban night, brilliantly illuminated by gaslight, now overpowering the distant stars. Garish green and red, The Night Café (1888) is a painting devoid of chiaroscuro. It depicts a bleak, quasi-deserted café in the early hours of the morning. “Some poor night-prowlers are sleeping in a corner,” said Van Gogh in a letter. It nevertheless seems odd that the room would be so brightly lit at this time of the night. Several gas lamps can be seen hanging from the ceiling, but directly over the billiard table, there is a spherical light source that can only be a light bulb. Its harsh light casts a hard shadow onto the floor, not the soft penumbra of a flame, but the sharp separation of light and dark imposed by electricity. The year is 1889. Could this be the first representation of an electric light bulb in the history of painting? By the time we reach the Sunflowers (c. 1880) there are no shadows at all. Almost pure yellow, this is the brightest painting ever made up until that time. Shining like a light directly at the viewer, here is Vincent van Gogh, no longer satisfied with mere representation, aspiring to become the light, to make a painting that embodies the effect of the new electric light. In fact, the flowers even resemble light bulbs. In its dazzling power, Sunflowers can be called the first work of electronic art. Van Gogh described his conversations with Gauguin around this time as “electric.” He noted, “After a day with him, I feel like a run down battery.” Finally, in The Starry Night, comes a premonition of the space age. Van Gogh’s swirling galaxies announce the coming century of radio astronomy

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and relativity. Within a few years, Guglielmo Marconi would bounce radio waves off the ionosphere. While Van Gogh sensed these things in an uncanny, intuitive way, his near contemporary, Alfred Jarry, was keenly interested in contemporary scientific developments and referred to them directly in his writing. The Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician, a novel written in the 1890s, recounts this extensive research. The Doctor’s vehicle—a floating sieve—is based on physics explained by the English scientist C. V. Boys. Jarry describes Boys as a friend of Dr. Faustroll and quotes at length from his book Soap Bubbles: Their Colours and Forces Which Mould Them (this delightful classic is still in print). One chapter of The Exploits is devoted to William Crookes, and another to William Thomson, Lord Kelvin of Largs, a leading proponent of the theory, then prevalent, that the propagation of light depended on a “luminiferous ether” which permeates the universe—in Jarry’s words, “a perfectly elastic and infinitely attenuated solid,” reminiscent of today’s “dark matter.”9 At the end of the novel, and after his own demise, Dr. Faustroll composes two telepathic letters to Lord Kelvin, describing his mathematical models of the universe. These theories later came to the attention of Crooks, who accepted them as curious science, but plausible. Standing on the brink of the new century, Jarry is an emblematic figure. His extraordinary blending of art and science in “pataphysics” can be understood as an attempt to comprehend the psychic upheaval precipitated by the arrival of electricity. A fact not lost on Jarry was that on August 1, 1890, William Kemmler became the first person to die by the electric chair, a fact he included in his tale of electric love, The Supermale.10 Late in his short life, Jarry became an avid photographer and he died just as radio was born. In 1895, the Lumière brothers demonstrated moving pictures for the first time. Their invention was a hybrid of mechanical, chemical, and electrical technologies. In the audience was their friend Georges Méliès, a stage magician. Méliès immediately recognized his destiny, acquired one of the Lumière devices, and the next year made the first vampire film, The Devil’s Castle. At almost the same moment, in England, Bram Stoker wrote his novel Dracula, unleashing a new monster, one to rival Frankenstein. The vampire was a newcomer to the mythological pantheon. While it may be possible to find precedents lurking in folklore, there is no vampire in Shakespeare, none in Greek myth, not in the Mahabharata, nor the classics of China.

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The coincidence of the Stoker novel and the film by Méliès is telling. Well before the release of F. W. Murnau’s definitive Nosferatu in 1922, a plethora of vampire films had already appeared, and today the vampire

The HP Tesla Coil, 1976, based on the principles set forth by Tesla, this electronic sculpture was used in performance. It made a loud noise and gave off a charge of 200,000 volts.

is everywhere. I believe that the vampire belongs to cinema, that it is, in fact, the embodiment of cinema. Like a vampire, the cinema requires darkness in order to live. It is killed instantly by sunlight. Nosferatu has no reflection, and refuses to appear in a mirror. Similarly, film projected on a mirror returns no image but only its own beam of light. Cinema looms over the twentieth century, returning again and again, larger than life, terrifying, dead, yet condemned never to die, the undead. These technobeings—Frankenstein’s monster, Nosferatu, and more recently the Space Alien—are both fictional and real, creations of the collective imagination that help us to make sense of the inexplicable trauma that is electricity. They are among the popular gods of the twentieth century. Nikola Tesla was a character not entirely unlike Nosferatu. He fulfilled the archetypal requirements of the “mad scientist” and was regarded by the general public with a mixture of fascination and awe. But, unlike Dr. Frankenstein, Tesla was fearless, welcoming the electronic age and ready to take full responsibility for his discoveries. Tesla gave a lecture in Paris in 1892, in which he stunned the audience with his demonstration of lightning bolts and fluorescent tubes. This made headline news and would certainly have been known to Jarry, who may even have been in the audience.11

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The Tesla Coil can be considered a harbinger of the radio transmission tower. Tesla indeed claimed radio as his own discovery. He worked out the mathematics in 1892 and launched the first public demonstration of radio in 1898, a remote controlled model boat that he presented at the New York Electrical Exhibition. Wilhelm Röntgen had discovered X-rays in 1895 (using a variation of the Crookes vacuum tube). Two year later, J. J. Thomson named the first subatomic particle, the electron. Marie Skłodowska-Curie discovered radioactivity in 1898.12 These stunning discoveries were widely publicized. X-rays in particular attracted a huge amount of popular interest. They confirmed the presence of an invisible world, a vast field of powerful unseen forces that could not be detected by the physical senses. It comes as no surprise that that Sigmund Freud would develop his theory of the unconscious at this time. The Interpretation of Dreams was published in 1899. Radio transmission arrived at the turn of the twentieth century and very quickly became available to nonspecialists. A wireless transmitter was installed atop of the Eiffel Tower, and residents of Paris were encouraged to use their balconies as receiving antennas. People started building their own radio transmitters and forming clubs. By 1912 there were as many as 400,000 amateur radio enthusiasts in America alone.13 In 1905, reports of riots in Beijing were telegraphed to Shanghai, Chongqing, and Hong Kong, contributing to upheavals in those cities and promptly ending four hundred years of Qing Dynasty rule. A revolution in art took place at the same time. Cubist painting explored four-dimensional space. In the first Futurist Manifesto, F. T. Marinetti advocated a “wireless imagination.” He had even considered naming the new movement Elettricismo.14 Ezra Pound and Guillaume Apollinaire both took up “transmission” as a poetic idea. In 1913, Pound described poets as writing “in new wave-lengths” appropriating the terminology of wireless telegraphy, and would later declare that “artists are the antennae of society,”15 developing the metaphor of art as communication. In his 1912 book Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Wassily Kandinsky referred to “electron theory.” Kazimir Malevich painted his Suprematist Composition Expressing the Feeling of Wireless Telegraphy in 1915. Vladimir Tatlin’s tower, conceived in 1919, would have functioned as a radio transmitter.

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Just as Pound allowed himself to be caught up in fascism, Marinetti’s promotion of violence and speed would soon be mocked by the industrialization of war. Gertrude Stein deflated his bombast in 1915, with a text called Marry Netty, in which she brought electricity down to earth. Sheltered from the First World War on the island of Ibiza and talking of domestic life with Alice B. Toklas, she said more modestly, “We will also get a fan … an electric one.”16

The artist who most fully assimilated the discoveries of contemporary physics at the beginning of the twentieth century and embedded them into his work was Marcel Duchamp. “Make a painting of frequency,” he declared in the notes for The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–1923).17 Linda Dalrymple Henderson’s illuminating book, Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works, shows that his idea of the “post-retinal” was an expression of his desire to represent the invisible forces of electromagnetism. By careful analysis of Duchamp’s written notes, Henderson demonstrates that what Duchamp was attempting, in the “large glass,” was to somehow portray the world of four-dimensional space, X-rays, and wireless tele­graphy.18 Among its many levels of meaning, the Large Glass contains references to wireless transmission. One of the key functions of the Bride, above, suspended in the sky (or outer space?), is to transmit messages wirelessly, by Hertzian waves, to the Bachelors on earth below. Her antenna, or “Wasp,” is similar in form to the transmitter atop the Eiffel Tower. The Bachelors receive her messages in their rather more prosaic, mechanical, 3D space. Reinforcing the radio motif, “The Chocolate Grinder” is a set of wire coils (delineated by Duchamp in metal wire, glued directly to the glass); the “Malic Molds” resemble Crookes vacuum tubes; and the “Scissors,” as well as the “Sieves” (Jarry’s Faustroll is an influence here), indicate antennae. Further analysis of the notes reveals that the Bachelors are also able to transmit Hertzian waves back up to the Bride on her cloud of “Cinematic Blossoming.” In the words of Duchamp’s close friend H. P. Roché, “Thus, the mischievous Bride swings out of the sky. The other bracket that she keeps directed toward the Bachelors, down there below, is an emitter and wave receptor.”19 In The Large Glass, Duchamp has produced what can be accepted as a work of proto-radio art, not so much radio as art than art as radio. “The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength. They are radical. Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.” Thus wrote the mathematician Hermann Minkowski in 1908, identifying the “space-time continuum.”20 Edgar Allen Poe’s prophecy of 1848 had come to pass: “space and duration are one.” Albert Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity proceeded to show that space and time are not only linked but also relative, changeable and dependent on the observer’s point of view and velocity. Relativity upset the Newtonian apple cart. It provided an explanation of the universe that did away with the “luminiferous ether” and dealt a severe blow to spiritualist fantasies. The Theory of Relativity supports a pluralist

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The author performing Merzmuseum, an early experiment in networked Internet radio, for Art Barns, an exhibition and symposium on Kurt Schwitters, Ambleside, United Kingdom, 1999.

view of the world, one in which different, simultaneous points of view are not only possible but also valid, each one leading to its own version of truth. This of course has political and religious consequences, as well as perceptual implications. The idea that uncertainty equals truth is difficult for the mind to accept. Yet pluralism is the only way forward for us, as individuals, nations, and as planetary societies.21 After the First World War, state governments from Mexico to China were quick to adapt radio, which had become a significant military technology, to civilian purposes. Along with the automobile, cinema, and electric light, listening to broadcast radio became a part of daily life. In a short time, the conditions and technological context that had been obtained for The Large Glass were superseded by an advancing tide of innovation, and Duchamp left his project unfinished. The Golden Age of Radio was upon us. Together with the loudspeaker and the phonograph, radio would soon fill the world, and the museum, with sound.

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 1 Early experiments in art and electricity are reported in Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means, trans. Gloria Custance, with a foreword by Timothy Druckery (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).   2 Reported in a letter to the author by Tetsuo Kogawa.  3 Sharon Ruston, Shelley and Vitality (2005; repr., Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). The Shelleys were “linked publicly and intellectually with this band of men who questioned the existence of a soul, the need for an external, controlling principle to regulate the natural impulses of the body, and the nature of life itself.” Ibid., p. 86.   4 Edgar Allen Poe, Eureka (1848; repr., Auckland: The Floating Press, 2011), p. 30.   5 See Daniel Gethmann’s archaeology of the discovery of radio, “Media Space,” in Re-Inventing Radio: Aspects of Radio as Art, ed. Heidi Grundmann et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Revolver, 2008).  6 Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), pp. 268–74.  7 Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (1984; repr., Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 200.  8 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).   9 Alastair Brotchie, Alfred Jarry: A Pataphysical Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), p. 33. 10 Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 50. 11 Ibid. 12 On Marie Skłodowska-Curie: “Because of their levels of radioactivity, her papers from the 1890s are considered too dangerous to handle. Even her cookbook is highly radioactive. Her papers are kept in lead-lined boxes, and those who wish to consult them must wear protective clothing.” Cited from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie. 13 Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Gernsback. 14 Marjorie Perloff, “The First Futurist Manifesto Revisited,” in Rett kopi dokumenterer fremtiden: manifest, ed. Ellef Prestesæter and Karin Nygård (Oslo: Dokumenterer Fremtiden, 2007), pp. 152–56. 15 Henderson, Duchamp in Context, p. 100. 16 Quoted by Marjorie Perloff in Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 98–112. 17 Duchamp, Box of 1914, notes on The Large Glass, cited in Henderson, Duchamp in Context, p. xxi. 18 Henderson, Duchamp in Context, Part One: “Duchamp and Invisible Reality.” 19 Robert Lebel, ed., Marcel Duchamp (New York: Grove Press, 1959), p. 85. 20 Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Minkowski. 21 Thinkers as diverse as Hannah Arendt, Vilém Flusser, and His Holiness the Aga Khan have espoused this view.

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On Radioart Tetsuo Kogawa

In my view, radio art is an art to use airwaves for the material (“morpheme”). This means that airwaves are not a means to carry the content (sounds) but the “autopoietic” entity of how they appear by themselves. I differentiate “radio art” and “art radio” and call the former “radioart.” The latter is a radio program that has artistic and experimental content in it. There are many radio stations that broadcast sound art programs, but few are conscious of why they use the airwaves and how they use the airwaves except when really conscious radioartists use the stations for their experiments in unusual ways. Except for the engineers, how to transmit is an untouchable and solved matter: the broadcasting condition should be constantly “stable” and “clean.” Only the content of the broadcasting could have “unstable” and “noisy” sounds. But no artist could control the “technical” side of the transmission, even at an art-oriented radio station. This is the basic reason why the radioartist has to self-build a transmitter or to “squat” at the existing radio station: otherwise there is no way to participate in the transmitting that is the basis of radioart. Also, this partly explains why many radioartists have been interested in finding and receiving “natural” airwaves such as very low frequency (VLF), cosmic airwaves, and sonification signals. From VLF to light, the frequency range of airwaves is so wide that the radioartist will never stop finding new ways of receiving them. This is a solution to pursue radioart without touching the transmitting process itself. But I think that the radioartist should challenge new forms of transmission and build new transmitters. The range of transmitters, too, is very wide—from radio transmitter to neurotransmitter.

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What is the difference between radioart and soundart? Sound for a radioartist is a virtual body or an interface of the airwaves to let them perceive through our human senses, such as ears and skin. Airwaves directly touch our bodies and do not need such interfaces per se. Depending upon the interpretation of airwaves and transmission, every sound device and instrument is a transmitter.

How do I explain “net radio” in relation to my argument of radioart? The working field of radio transmission is the ionosphere. The Internet is a virtual “ionosphere” of algorithms. At the moment, the ionosphere for radio transmission using airwaves is beyond the algorithms. But for quantum electronics, the Internet field should be algorithmic. Either way, the transmitter of the Internet is the software. So I could say that Internet radio might be considered “augmented” radioart. Tokyo, May 31, 2014

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I. RADIO SPACE

I. RADIO SPACE

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The Museum as an Agent of Radio Art Sarah Rothe

Although radio art could potentially reach a mass public and is practically no more than the push of a button away from its potential listeners, most people are unfamiliar with it to this day. As Pierre Bourdieu writes, the artwork exists “as a valuable symbolic object only … when it is known and acknowledged, that is, when the beholders who are equipped with the necessary aesthetic attitude and competence institute it in society as an artwork …” 1 Even if artists have avoided and still today avoid art institutions with their radiophonic works and projects, it is the museum, of all places, that has proven to serve as an “agent” for radio art. In the museum, a venue charged with the respective symbolic capital, radio art can become visible—or, more precisely, audible. By that means, a basis can be created for acquiring a new circle of addressees for radio art, for making it known to a broader public, raising an awareness of it, obtaining recognition for it, and making it a subject of critical discussion. Within the framework of our project Radio Art: On the Development of a Medium between Aesthetics and Sociocultural Reception History, we organized workshops, the Art’s Birthday 2013, and the exhibition Beyond Radio: 25 Years of Art Radio—Radio Art presented from November 10, 2012 to May 12, 2013 at the Weserburg. The show was developed jointly by the project participants, and their r­esearch questions formed the basis of the three exhibition sections: collaborative work and projects, political positioning, and participatory work and projects. The latter section presented radio artworks in which the audience was actively involved. For many of the works and projects selected for this section, the listeners or other addressees were asked for auditory material, small contributions in the form of sounds or voices. In other cases the recipients were granted greater scope, even to the extent of active coauthorship. In the following, I will introduce one of these works and elucidate it in somewhat more detail, not only with regard to its content and structure—and thus the potential for reception that we have already identified as an especially important aspect—but also with respect to the visitors’ experiences. Nacht. Stimme. Zerstreuung. (Night. Voice. Dispersal.)2 is a work by the Hamburg artists’ group LIGNA that was broadcast by the Austrian radio

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Exhibition view of Beyond Radio: 25 Years of Art Radio—Radio Art, Centre for Artists’ Publications at the Weserburg, Bremen, Germany, 2012

channel ORF 1 on September 17, 2006. The work was aired during the regular time slot of the series Kunstradio–Radiokunst from 11:05 to 11:45 p.m. The moderator Helmut Bohatsch read a text live, or, more specifically, acted according to a script developed by the artists’ group. “Each individual [listener] receives his voice in the private situation at home. The speaker does not know what happens with his voice. It is a weird feeling …”3 Bohatsch conducts a pseudo dialogue, in the course of which he addresses the individual listener directly, while at the same time pointing out again and again that the medium actually does not make that possible. He calls on the listeners to be aware of their situation and his situation, and to question the medium critically. With regard to content, the piece addresses the following themes: Space: the imaginary linking of spaces and the extension of the acoustic space. Example from the script: “What elements might link the space in which you are presently listening with the space in which I am speaking?”

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Voice: the (un)natural sound of the voice as well as its dispersal by way of radio. Example: “Take a look at your radio: Does my voice sound natural?”

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The medium’s “explosive power”: the political potential of the dispersed reception situation as well as the uncontrollable situations brought about by radio. Example: “In the simultaneous dispersed gesture, the constellation of the radio listeners has transformed into an association.”

•

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In this work, content and form unite in a special way. Not only the text, but also the various instructions for action and experiments the speaker calls upon the listeners to perform, target the above-listed themes or the raising of a consciousness of the same: 1. Listening experiments in which the speaker directs the listeners’ attention explicitly to the sound of the radio or the sound of the voice being transmitted by the radio. Example: “Turn on a radio in a different room. If you don’t have another radio, think about whether you haven’t just simply forgotten one. Maybe there’s one that’s a component of something else that you’re just not thinking of at the moment. Can you find my voice on that radio, too?” 2. Targeted instructions serving the purpose of changing the reception situation, for example: “Turn off the light in your room. I’ll also turn off the light in the studio. Go ahead and turn off all the lights. I’ve got time.” 3. Instructions to perform gestures in which the dispersed listening audience becomes associated. This type of instruction culminates in the speaker’s request to turn the radio off for fifteen seconds: “Excuse me, I’d like to be alone for fifteen seconds. What would it mean if all of you turned off your radios simultaneously for fifteen seconds? It would be a unique moment in the history of Austrian radio; that’s for sure. As long as someone is talking on the radio, there’s someone listening. There’s always a radio on somewhere. Do me this favor. Go over to your radio. Have you ever thought about everything it’s not receiving? All of the other stations are broadcasting something else besides my voice tonight. There are countless Exhibition view of Beyond Radio: 25 Years of Art Radio—Radio Art, Centre for Artists’ Publications at the Weserburg, Bremen, Germany, 2012

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constellations of listeners, completely different universes, innumerable undrawn maps of the stars. Nobody will ever draw them. But I would now like to ask you to make a small difference. I’d like to ask you to turn the celestial map of this station into a black sheet of paper. For fifteen seconds.” The staging of the work for the exhibition Beyond Radio was carried out in cooperation with the LIGNA artists. They attached great importance to making the museum visitors conscious of certain aspects that were of central significance for the 2006 broadcast, even though the visitors were experiencing only a documentation of that broadcast in the exhibition. This applied particularly to the experience of the radiophonic meta-space, the listening event in and of itself, which represents the special perception of a unique moment.4 For this reason, the recorded broadcast was radiated from an MP3 player into the exhibition rooms by a transmitter as a loop. Three identically designed seating areas with portable radios, table lamps, armchairs, and carpets provided settings where visitors were welcome to take a seat and listen to the work. Of course, the work could also have been listened to with any other radio device as well, as long as it was tuned to the right frequency. Thanks to completed questionnaires, observation, and above all entries in the notebooks with which we supplemented the concrete setting of the work Nacht. Stimme. Zerstreuung., I was able to obtain comprehensive insights into the visitors’ experiences. The entries exhibit a wide spectrum of forms; they include, for example, drawings, poems, and wordplay. Doodles not directly related to the work allow conclusions to be drawn about the listeners’ reception behavior and attention span.5 At the same time, the notebooks also served the purpose of communication between the visitors. On the basis of a qualitative analysis of the content with the aid of the Philipp Mayring method,6 I was able to draw up the following categories of visitors’ entries: 1.  Visitors described their experiences from the perspective of associations and feelings, and described the perception of their own perception, for example: “Relaxing in the WITHIN, frightening in the LOOK FROM ABOVE!” 2. The visitors reported on their activities, among other things, the performance of the actions the speaker called on them to carry out and the consequences of those actions. They also mentioned actions which failed for various reasons, for example: “It was unfortunately not possible to open the window.” 58

3. Meta-level: this category involves concrete expressions about visitors’ realizations that are explicitly associated with perception itself, with the work Nacht. Stimme. Zerstreuung., and/or with the medium of radio. For example: “We, the listeners, are made aware of how great an impact we can have collectively, and how much our actions can trigger in someone.” 4. They evaluated the work, distinguishing between the script, the speaker, and the specific staging in the exhibition, for example: “Good script, pleasant narrator.” It can be assumed that the perceptive experiences people had while listening to the documented broadcast within the exhibition framework were distinctly different from how people perceived the live broadcast Drawing from a  visitors’ book

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back in 2006. Even if the work was once again broadcast, as it had been originally, it was essentially a documentation that could be ­listened to not in a private situation but in a museum, and thus in a public institution. So when the visitors followed the instructions for action, there were eyewitnesses and “earwitnesses” of their actions.7 Many visitors described negative emotions to the effect that they had the feeling of being manipulated. Yet it was not the content and form of the recorded broadcast alone that created this impression, but also the presentation form. The visitors assumed that the work was actually being spoken and broadcast live in the museum. When they became aware of this misunderstanding, often in moments when the speaker mentioned the time of night, they felt deceived and reacted with bewilderment and/or disappointment. This confirms the following statement by Anne Thurmann-Jajes: “And indeed, radio as a phenomenon per se is still regarded as a supposedly ‘transitory’ moment regardless of the form of broadcasting.”8

Page from a  visitors’ book

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As described, Nacht. Stimme. Zerstreuung. evoked a wide range of different feelings, associations, interpretations, reflective processes, and (physical) actions. It led to the raising of an awareness of radio art as a non-visible and non-representational art form, and in this context challenged the visitors to question their own concepts of art. The ­reception of the work encouraged them to focus their attention on their own perception. Because, as Bertolt Brecht once observed: “If sight is turned off, it doesn’t mean that you don’t see anything, but that you see just well enough to see infinitely much, as much as you want.”9

Drawing from a  visitors’ book

The visitors were offered a new perspective on the “old” medium of radio and its potentials. And not least importantly, the presentation— or, more specifically, the reception—of the work led to uncontrollable situations, even within the exhibition framework. Despite—or precisely because of—the misunderstandings that came up, the work proved capable of contributing to a media-critical, reflective attitude on the part of its recipients. Radio art can thus perhaps, conversely, serve as an “agent” of the museum and of art mediation in general because its admission to the museum context, beginning with the collecting and cataloguing aspects, requires the institution to change. It is capable of contributing to a transformation of the museum because, as a rule, it is created

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entirely independently of that institution and emerges from other contexts, which are in turn subject to other conditions. To the extent that the visitors are open to experiencing something new, presentations or stagings of radiophonic works and projects can counter repetitive behavior and break through the routines of the museum space. Carmen Mörsch (director of the Institute for Art Education at Zurich University of the Arts), who distinguishes between four different ­discourses of art mediation,10 makes the following observation about transformative discourse: “In this discourse, exhibition spaces and museums are conceived as changeable organizations where the concern is less with introducing groups to them than, conversely, with the necessity of introducing them—owing to their deficits that have come about through long isolation and self-referentiality—to the world around them, for example their local surroundings.”11 And she continues: “The practices associated with this discourse work against the categorical or hierarchical differentiation between curatorial work and mediation. Fundamentally, they not only expose and/or criticize the institution’s functions in cooperation with the public, but enhance and expand them.”12 Perhaps one of the chief potentials radio art thus lies in exploring the possibilities and limitations of the museum anew, and initiating and establishing formats and structures that change the institution and make the museum walls permeable. At the Centre for Artists’ Publications, two projects are in planning: The first project revolves around setting up a permanent “listening room.” The room would be open to all visitors and allow them sensory experiences above and beyond the visual. What is more, the room would make the reception of art in the museum possible for target groups such as sight-impaired and blind persons. The second aims at the establishment of a free radio station. This would make it possible once again to mediate the Centre’s radio art holdings by broadcasting them,13 and to carry out participatory projects. Fundamentally, radio’s claim “to be not only a transporter of art but, in its intrinsic characteristics, ‘capable of being art’ itself had been left to the dreams of Futurists, just as progressive artists had been needed at Bauhaus and elsewhere to reconceive the record medium from being a player for art to a medium capable of being art. So from this angle, while radio art happens on and through radio, it happens as art in spite of radio.”14

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Author’s note: This text was completed in July 2014. I have followed up on the ideas presented here in my dissertation, which will be published in 2019 under the title Kunst auf Sendung: Zur Analyse und Vermittlung von Radiokunst (Art on the Air: On the Analysis and Mediation of Radio Art).

  1 Pierre Bourdieu, Bernd Schwibs, and Achim Russer, Die Regeln der Kunst: Genese und Struktur des literarischen Feldes (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2010), p. 362.   2 This work is available for listening at: http://www.kunstradio.at/2006B/17_09_06.html (all URLs accessed in May 2015).   3 LIGNA cited from: http://www.kunstradio.at/2006B/17_09_06.html.   4 See Anne Thurmann-Jajes, “Radio Art: The Perception of a Special Form of Dematerialized Art,” in The Challenge of the Object / Die Herausforderung des Objekts, ed. Georg Ulrich Grossmann and Petra Krutisch (Nuremberg: Germanisches National Museum, 2012), pp. 1305–8, esp. p. 1307. It was the 33rd Congress of the International Committee of the History of Art, Nuremberg, July 15–20, 2012. The publication includes the congress program with abstracts of all sections and lectures.   5 On the attention-fostering effect of doodling, also see: “What does doodling do?” Applied Cognitive Psychology 24, no. 1 (2010), pp. 100–106.   6 Philipp Mayring, Qualitative Inhaltsanalyse: Grundlagen und Techniken (Weinheim: Beltz Pädagogik, 2010).   7 Even just the museum guards who later told us what they had witnessed.   8 Anne Thurmann-Jajes, “Radio as Art: Classification and Archivization of Radio Art,” in Re-Inventing Radio: Aspects of Radio as Art, ed. Heidi Grundmann et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Revolver, 2008), pp. 387–405, esp. p. 405.   9 Bertolt Brecht, 1920–1932: Aus Notizbüchern; über alte und neue Kunst; Radiotheorie der Dreigroschenprozeß (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1967), p. 128. 10 Carmen Mörsch differentiates between the following four discourses of art mediation: affirma­ tive discourse, reproductive discourse, deconstructive discourse, and transformative discourse. 11 Carmen Mörsch, “Am Kreuzungspunkt von vier Diskursen: Die documenta 12; Vermittlung zwischen Affirmation, Reproduktion, Dekonstruktion und Transformation,” in Zwischen kritischer Praxis und Dienstleistung auf der Documenta 12: Ergebnisse eines Forschungsprojektes, ed. Carmen Mörsch (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2009), pp. 9–33, esp. p. 10. 12 Ibid., p. 11. 13 This stands in distinct contrast to many broadcasting companies that archive radiophonic works by artists but rarely rebroadcast them and in general hardly make them accessible to a broad public. 14 Christian Scheib, “The Medium as Midas: On the Precarious Relationship of Music and Radio Art,” in Grundmann et al., Re-Inventing Radio, pp. 313–28, esp. p. 321.

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Considering the Sonic Aspects of the Media Environment as an Exhibition Space for Creative Sound-Based Works Colin Black

One of the things that I especially like about radio, and why it is such a good vehicle for performance of my compositions, is that the music is presented in an abstract way … I find that the most direct and convincing presentation of my music takes place in situations in which the audience is taken to a level where they can experience a performance in a more abstract way. —La Monte Young1 Like La Monte Young, as an artist and academic I am fascinated by the “abstract way” in which the radio medium presents creative artworks. It is a media environment or space that has been discussed by various media, audio culture, and sound studies academics who have unveiled many of its dimensions, properties, and implications. In spite of this, it is a platform that is often overlooked by potential stakeholders (be they from fine arts, music, or media backgrounds), who all have in common their own vested interests in creative sound-based works and how they are promoted and presented within each of their fields. So while I have chosen to start my radio-art-focused discussion with a quote from a musical composer, I have selected this quote to highlight these potential cross-disciplinary opportunities for all who are willing to explore this territory. Nevertheless, in contrast to La Monte Young’s view of radio as “a good vehicle for [the] performance” of his works, I prefer to conceptualize the broadcast itself as creating a temporary exhibition space within an ephemeral art gallery, which will be elaborated on in this text. In the following, I will compile some of the aforementioned discussions and explore notions associated with the radio landscape that focus on radio art practice so as to gain a deeper understanding of this space and its potential. It is my hope that artists, theorists, and educators with an interest in sound-based works, from all disciplines, will find something of interest in the following text that they can themselves integrate into their own work.

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The idea that the broadcast can give rise to an art gallery space develops logically from the field of activity associated with the engagement of conceptual artists at Kunstradio in Austria. In 1994, Heidi Grundmann

(the then producer of Kunstradio) stated that “ … an increasing number of artists, like [Bill] Fontana, consider their radio work as a sculpture, not in the sense of transmitting sound sculptures but rather a delineation of sculpture itself.”2 This notion of the interrupted/dislocated acoustic profile of a radio broadcast constituting a single non-contiguous radio sculpture, which only exists while the work is being transmitted, was further developed by conceptual artists in the 1990s. Grundmann claimed that this collective of artists made it conceivable “to consider the radio (broadcast) space as a public sculptural space in which music, sound, and language are the material of sculptures …”3 Moreover, these artists also asserted that any audio recording of the broadcast work was not the radio sculpture, but simply a form of documentation similar to program notes from a gallery. This delin­eation of a “radio sculpture” is further expounded in the Kunstradio manifesto “Toward a Definition of Radio Art,” where it is described as “radio space.” It puts forward the notion that “Radio art is composed of sound objects experienced in radio space.”4 Furthermore, R. Murray Schafer explains that “Radio extended the outreach of sound to produce greatly expanded profiles [the area in which a sound can be heard], which were remarkable also because they formed interrupted acoustic spaces. Never before had sound disappeared across space to reappear again at a distance.”5 I have interpreted this radio space or the sum of these interrupted acoustic spaces not only as forming a public sculptural space, but also as constituting a kind of non-contiguous art gallery space that is curated and generated by the radio broadcaster.6 While the idea of radio broadcasting creating a kind of gallery space may not be new,7 it is my intention as an artist and academic to use this conceptual scaffolding to discuss the presentation of radio artworks within the media landscape.

Exploring Elements of the Exhibition Space The affordances8 offered by the phenomena of radio broadcasting are highly contrasting to that of the concert hall experience or that of other media. We interact with the radio and invite it into our lives in a very different way than is the case with television, the Internet, listening to prerecorded music tracks, and attending performances. Moreover, radio has a different set of shared cultural meanings, which Jo Tacchi has found in her research: … radio sound is integrated into daily life in an intimate way and can be understood as forming an important part of domestic environments, or soundscapes, that hold meaning and significance that reaches beyond the immediate context and physical confines

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of the home … Radio sound can be seen to mediate between individuals in the home and the wider world.9 In effect, we can be alone together, separated yet simultaneously connected by the shared experience. A public space superimposed on non-contiguous private spaces, where Theodor W. Adorno’s concept of “we-ness” is animated and “creates an illusion of immediacy in a totally mediated world, a proximity between strangers … as if one were still living face to face in spite of it all.”10 For Adorno, “we-ness” is this illusionary state of connectedness that is produced by the consumption of reproduced sound, such as radio, that can allow social or direct experience to be replaced by mediated forms of experience.11 Therefore, the properties and dimensions of this kind of radio art gallery space are very different to that associated with a specific, fixed-location gallery space or a concert hall. Moreover, the Kunstradio manifesto “Toward a Definition of Radio Art” highlights some of these contrasting features of the radio space, which include an awareness of the sonic aspects of each radio-space component. It also discusses the interactive aspects of radio art, where the listener determines aspects of the sound quality and “hears their own final version of a work … combined with the ambient sound of their own space.”12 It follows that an important aspect of radio space is the overlaying of the spatiality of the radio artwork (be it a specious resemblance of a real acoustic space with a coherent aural image or an abstract acoustic space) onto the potential multiplicity of received locations. Therefore, in presenting radio artworks within the media landscape, the aim is not to erase the spatial qualities of the reception location and temporarily replace them with those of the radio artwork. This is in contrast to recordings of concert music that can effectively obliterate the spatiality of the domestic enviroment, as Peter Doyle has argued.13 With a radio artwork it is aesthetically acceptable and desirable to allow for a composite of the spatialities to coexist. As the Kunstradio manifesto implies, the aim is to create a subtle blending of the spatial qualities of both the radio work and the reception locations, to form a unique listening experience at each location. Moreover, Lars Nyre suggests that this designing of sound media “can be called [its] acoustic architecture,”14 in which, as Ross Snyder states, “contemporary man will live and move and have his being.”15

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The range of the reception locations associated with a potential networked, syndicated broadcast, however, can be geographically16 and sociologically vast, with highly contrasting acoustic properties. These locations can consist of a wide range of environments, including domestic and public environments, automobile interiors, and personal stereo headphone implementations (with fixed and mobile localities in

private and public spaces). Nevertheless, as Adorno points out, all these applications instill a sense of “we-ness” across the different received locations. Moreover, Tony Schwartz postulates that we live in a world that “resonates” with media communication and that radio resonates in both domestic and public environments.17 In public environments, radio can “resonate” from cars, shops, cafés, clubs, malls, and so forth. This “resonance” can, as Adorno argues, create a sense of “we-ness” even though the spatiality of the radio broadcast consists of a distantly originating alternative sonic presence. Moreover, Siegfried Kracauer has argued that the sense of individual isolated space in these public environments can vanish as a result of this “resonance”: Even in the café, where one wants to roll up into a ball like a porcupine and become aware of one’s insignificance, an imposing loudspeaker effaces every trace of private existence. The announcements it blares forth dominate the space of the concert intermissions.18 Or as Susan Douglas states, radio “envelops us, whether we want it or not, including, involving us …”19

Electroacoustic Dislocation A distantly originating sonic presence is an inevitable fact with all audio media, where this distance is a dislocation from the original sound in space and time. Even though this distance can sometimes be very small and not noticeable, the separation is always present and is an integral part of the presentation of radio artwork. Moreover, radio broadcasts facilitate a complex set of dislocations in space and time across the potential multiplicity of reception locations, as each receives the transmitted signal at ever so slightly different times.20

Schizophonic Considerations In 1969, R. Murray Schafer defined “the split between an original sound and its electroacoustic transmission or reproduction”21 as schizophonia. Schafer states that “Originally all sounds were originals. They occurred at one time and in one place only. Sounds were then indissolubly tied to the mechanisms that produced them … Every sound was uncounterfeitable, unique.”22 Schafer chose to use the prefix “schizo” to evoke a “nervous” association with schizophonia23 having connotations with the word schizophrenia. However, as Barry Truax explains, because modern society now has a “conventional acceptance” of this split, that is, we make sense of and expect sounds to emanate from speakers,24 schizophonia’s ubiquitousness has removed almost all sense of a “nerv-

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ous” association with the split between the original and its electroacoustic transmission or reproduced counterpart. Moreover, by nuancing schizophonia from the viewpoint of the cultural aspects inherent in listening and by questioning sonic essentialism, Jonathan Sterne has argued against the distinction between the “original sound” and its audio reproduction. They assume that sound-reproduction technologies can function as neutral conduits, as instrumental rather than substantive parts of social relationships, and that sound-reproduction technologies are ontologically separate from a “source” that exists prior to and outside its affiliation with technology. Attending to differences between “sources” and “copies” diverts our attention from processes to products; technology vanishes, leaving as its by-product a source and a sound that is separated from it.25 While a detailed analysis and assessment of the “original” would be a fascinating and lengthy topic to explore in-depth, an important aspect of the presentation of radio artwork is Sterne’s idea that “reproduction does not really separate copies from originals but instead results in the creation of a distinctive form of originality.”26 This is a viewpoint that Francisco López also takes when he states, “I don’t think ‘reality’ is being reproduced with these techniques; rather, a hyperreality is being constructed. … it is not a version [of the original sound] but a different entity with its own inherent value.”27 It is this notion of “the creation of a distinctive form of originality” and “hyperreality” that I believe best describes the resulting implication of R. Murray Schafer’s term, schizophonia. As radio artworks are also innately schizophonic, I therefore view them as “distinctive originals” and “hyperreal” audio material that is intended for broadcast. Considering the transformative effects of schizophonia, an understanding of how the whole audio chain and communication system works (i.e., from conception, recording, editing, mixing, broadcasting, and reception), and how this impacts the work, would also be beneficial to better comprehend radio artworks. To partly address this aspect, I will briefly contemplate how the transportation theories of communication could be applied.28

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In essence, this theory involves a sender who formulates “meaning” from his or her experiences gained from their engagement within the world. This “meaning” is then coded in a symbolic form (e.g., words, images, etc.) and consideration is given to how to best “package” the message. Next, a channel of communication (e.g., radio, television, etc.) is selected by the sender and is utilized to transmit the message. This theory indicates that channels of communication can induce vari-

ous levels of noise into the message that can be caused by mechanical and/or technical limitations of the channel or be imposed by forms of editorial control. This message is then received at the other end of the channel of communication by the receiver where, as Tony Schwartz states, they “must decode the symbolic forms in the message, assess the damage produced by the noise in the channel, and match the ‘meanings’ in the message against his [or her] understanding of the world to comprehend the meaning intended by the sender. Communication may be said to take place when the two ‘meanings’ are alike, or to the extent that they match.”29 Transportation theories of communication draw our attention to two important aspects of the presentation of radio artwork: the factors that transform the signal from sender to receiver and the fact that signals are coded in symbolic forms. While I understand the concept of the matching of “meanings” between the sender and receiver, I would, however, argue that an important aspect of radio art is not the exactness with which the two “meanings” match, but how it allows the receiver differing levels of opportunities to interpret their own idiosyncratic “meaning” from the message (or work). This leads us into post-structuralist theory where it is acknowledged that many meanings can be drawn from a single work, determined largely by how the receivers decode the meaning. This relationship and engagement partly constitutes what I have called the matrix of radio, which is the social and cultural environment (held together by people at both ends of the broadcast) in which radio develops and exists. Moreover, as an artist and academic, I am fascinated with how the whole communication system can transform both the sonic and decoding aspects of the work. Focusing on the transformative effects of schizophonia, I agree with Francisco López when he states “that the microphones we use are not only our basic interfaces [with the sonic world around us], they are non-neutral interfaces.”30 In effect, they are tools that assist us in gathering “distinctive original” and “hyperreal” audio material from which the work is created. López states: “The consequences of the choices made regarding which microphones will be used are more dramatic than, for example, a further re-equalization of the recordings in the studio.”31 Extending on this notion, I would argue that all parts of the audio chain, from recording to reception, transform the audio, although this may be more or less dramatic than the choice of microphone. For example, microphone pre-amps all sound slightly different to each other, circuit boards and analogue to digital converters, digital to analogue converters; the broadcaster’s equipment and compression settings, the strength of the signal being received, and the loudspeaker the work is heard through all transform the work. Taking into consideration the range of the multiplicity of potential locations in which the work may be received, it becomes clear that all components of

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the non-contiguous, and yet connected, art gallery space experience their own “distinctive original” and “hyperreal” sonic events. In effect, we listen not only to the sound that has been recorded, but also to the aesthetic of the media itself. That is, we hear the microphone, the mic pre-amp, et cetera, even if we are not aware of it— we are listening to the transformative effects of the media on the original sound source. Further to this, with digital audio we also hear the lossy and lossless encoding formats, such as PCM, FLAC, DSD, MP3, AAC, and Ogg. I call this perception of the transformative effect of audio media “electroacoustic perception,” for electroacoustic is defined as “involving the direct conversion of electrical into acoustic energy or vice versa.”32 Other artists who demonstrate an awareness of electroacoustic perception include Kaye Mortley, who in an interview explains that “even for outdoor recordings I prefer to use ‘studio’ mikes (Neumann U87, for instance) because they can restitute a sound which is larger than life, and more detailed: plastic, transparent.”33 Likewise, Chris Watson’s CD liner notes for the track “Elephants” mention his use of a “Sennheiser mkh 60/30* [microphone set up] via SQN4s [pre-amps] to PDR100 [portable DAT recorder].”34 In effect, this information allows us to understand the original sound source more thoroughly as we gain a deeper understanding of the equipment that has contributed to its transformation into the “distinctive original” and “hyperreal” audio material recorded. Not all components of the whole audio chain and communication system are within the control of the artist, as the Kunstradio manifesto “Toward a Definition of Radio Art” reminds us. It is not possible to control the volume settings of the radio receivers, the choice of loudspeaker/s, the conditions of the location of where the work is received, the ­attentiveness of the listener, the broadcaster’s equipment, the interference that may be added by the transmission; however, all these factors contribute to the overall electroacoustic perceptual aesthetic and the uniqueness of each component of this radio art gallery space.

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While further research needs to be conducted to reach conclusions, there is, however, a tendency—as Gestalt theory and Trevor Wishart’s explanation of “contextualization cues”35 suggest—that listeners make sense of audio information even when parts of the information are missing or not perceptible to humans. As David Sonnenschein claims, “Gestalt psychology (the theory that a pattern or unified whole has specific properties that cannot be derived from a summation of its component parts) uses terms in regard to visual perception, which can find equivalents in aural perception as well.”36 One of these Gestalt principles according to Sonnenschein is that the ear tends toward

“completeness, good continuation and closure,” which is very similar to Wishart’s “contextualization cues” where “It can be shown that the brain is capable of reconstructing a message from partial information, even where the remainder of the message is not present.”37 If the brain is capable of reconstructing a message from partial information, then applied to audio deterioration and the transformative effects of the communication system, it becomes intriguing to ponder at what level we imagine the message we receive and how that is different from what we actually hear. Electroacoustic perception is essentially focused on listening to what we actually hear purely for the enjoyment of the aesthetic qualities of the medium. In this context, being aware of how we reconstruct a message from partial or deteriorated audio information has the effect, I would argue, of creating another form of imagined, interiorized schizophonic sound that is idiosyncratic to each listener and with each repeated listening. An example of this is when we tune into a lowfidelity shortwave transmission, at times becoming immersed in the broadcast and imagining the sound source without the sonically distorted electroacoustic perception. This imagined interiorized schizophonic sound is yet another “distinctive form of originality” and offers yet another layer of interpretation for the listener or patron of the radio art gallery space to enjoy and to deconstruct against their understanding of the world. These factors, I would argue, do not diminish the radio artist’s need to be highly attentive to the components of the audio chain and commu­ nication system that are in his or her control. For me, as for many radio artists, microphones are like painter’s brushes, with each adding a distinctive quality to the work that other brushes simply cannot achieve. Moreover, an appreciation of electroacoustic perception can reveal an intriguing element of the work by giving the artist an intricate tool kit to use. For example, techniques include contrasting lowfidelity and high-fidelity audio aesthetics or sampling broadcast audio material and feeding this back into the work to create a type of audio media feedback or resonance when it is sequentially broadcast and further transformed by the audio chain and communication system.

Schizochronic Considerations In 1995, John Potts described the phenomenon of dislocations of audio material across time as “schizochronic,”38 or the split from an original sound source in time. In fact, all audio recordings and media are both schizochronic and schizophonic; even a microphone connected to a PA system that reproduces the audio live is schizochronic, as there is a very slight time delay needed to allow the electricity to pass through the system. This delay time is increased with the use of digital audio,

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which needs even more time to convert the signal to digital and back to analogue. Podcasts, as related to radio broadcasts, are an obvious example of schizochronia. Generally this form of schizochronia is known as time shifting and further complicates radio and its art gallery space. I am aware that in 2007 I argued that since time-shifted media could not produce multiple simultaneous interrupted acoustic spaces, then podcasts could not be considered as components of the radio art gallery space;39 however, when considering that all audio media are fundamentally schizochronic, this situation becomes even more curious and complex. If we consider Tony Schwartz’s notion that we live in a world that “resonates” with media communication40 and compound this with the tendency that we perceive sound (even recorded sound, especially of human activity) as happening in some kind of simultaneous presence,41 then this immediacy and “resonance” creates a sense of “liveness” in the media soundscape. In effect, it could be viewed that when an audio recording is broadcast or when a podcast is played after the broadcast, it can create a sense of “liveness” that resounds from the “resonance” of its transmission. Dr. Virginia Madsen prefers to explain this link between podcasts and their terrestrial broadcasts/webcasts by describing that the podcast contains the “residue” of the broadcast.42 Further, if we consider Adorno’s concept of “we-ness” that seemingly connects us by creating “an illusion of immediacy in a totally mediated world, a proximity between strangers … as if one were still living face to face in spite of it all,”43 then podcasts could be considered conceptually as a schizochronic component of the radio art gallery space. Therefore, in this way podcasts can be seen as more than just documentation of the terrestrial “radio sculpture,” and they extend the acoustic profile of the radio art gallery, not only in space, but also resounding in time.

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Evolving Conceptual Considerations and the Internet Exploring the potential of the Internet to extend, reinterpret, and re-invent radio art, the Swedish state-owned broadcaster Sveriges Radio invested in developing a dedicated experimental radio art web-channel simply called SR c. Under the leadership of Marie Wennersten from 2001 to 2008, SR c engaged three hundred artists44 globally to experiment with creating content, to design innovative graphical user interfaces for their website (at http://sverigesradio.se/src/ which was later dismantled in 2012), and to create installations/performances in Stockholm and Uppsala. SR c in essence investigated a range of online interactive access points for the audience to engage with radio art that went far beyond the experience of streaming audio

or the podcast (which Apple was promoting in 2005 as the “rebirth of radio”45). Moreover, Wennersten, inspired by Marcel Duchamp, conceived of radio to include “anything made within the institution of radio,”46 not just the medium of radio. This conceptually extended the notion of what radio art, in a Duchampian sense, could be, to include artworks and performances that were only related to radio via the connection of being made within the institution of radio. This allowed works that did not utilize the medium of radio to be considered ­radio art within this conceptual framework. Therefore, it must be noted that when considering the current evolving media landscape as nuanced from Marie Wennersten’s expanded concept of radio, what can be considered radio becomes much more complex, technologically, conceptually, sociologically, and ontologically. For example, if we consider the French web-only, audio-on-demand radio art station Arte Radio47 as presenting works “made within the institution of radio,” then even without an associated terrestrial broadcast or live webcast Arte Radio is arguably still generating schizochronic components of its own radio art gallery space. While it is not within the scope of this discussion to explore the conceptualization of radio art further, it does offer fascinating possibilities for artistic developments within this art form.

Acousmatic Considerations and Suggested Listening Strategies Legend has it that Pythagoras conducted lessons for his students from behind a curtain in a dark cave so as to focus his student’s attention solely on the sound of his voice. Many years later, Pierre Schaeffer pondered the ramifications of Pythagoras’s technique and applied it to musique concrète. In essence, Schaeffer used the term acousmatic to describe any sound that is split (or hidden) from the visual mechanism which produced the sound originally.48 While in 1983 Michel Chion wrote that Schaeffer differentiated between acousmatic listening and direct listening, “which is the ‘natural’ situation where sound sources are present and visible,”49 contradictorily Schaeffer himself describes “direct listening [as] (through a curtain).”50 Schaeffer writes that “between the experience of Pythagoras and our experiences of radio and recordings, the differences separating direct listening (through a curtain) and indirect listening (through a speaker) in the end become negligible.”51 However, I find Schaeffer’s claim—that with acousmatic listening the differences between acoustically generated sounds and electroacoustic sound (from a loudspeaker) are insignificant—problematic for the presentation of radio art, where electroacoustic perception is a significant aspect of the presentation of the work. Moreover, while Schaeffer’s phenomenologically reduced listening approach offers an intriguing method for analyzing what he calls “sound objects” (objects sonores) by rejecting the causal nature of the sound and only considering its intrinsic acoustic properties, this can be prob-

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lematic to the presentation of radio artworks. Effectively, Schaeffer was endeavoring to transmute sound recordings that are linked indicatively to prior human experience, to an abstract level that is similar to that of analyzing musical notes. In the end, Schaeffer himself also found this problematic, when he admitted in an interview conducted in 1986 that, “Unfortunately, it took me forty years to conclude that nothing is possible outside DoReMi. In other words, I wasted my life.”52 Although Francisco López has openly endorsed Schaeffer’s concepts of the “sound object” and reduced listening approach, with his preferred “blind” or profound listening,53 López’s intention, unlike Schaeffer’s, is not to totally negate the representational aspects of audio recordings. López states that while profound listening “delves deeply into the sounds … [it] doesn’t negate what is outside the sounds but explores and affirms all that is inside them,”54 that is, he only draws the listener’s focus to the intrinsic acoustic properties. Nevertheless, López has also argued that he is not being representational; however, with his work La Selva he is in a sense dualistically evoking the “environmental acousmatic” experience of the La Selva reserve in Costa Rica where the sound sources are also hidden from sight.55 Further to this, Katharine Norman has argued for a similar kind of intense listening that includes elements of Schaeffer’s reduced listening and what she terms “contextual listening,”56 which involves the “making sense”57 of the sounds based on the listener’s previous experience. I also believe that a combination of listening strategies (totally at the listener’s discretion) that include Schaeffer’s reduced listening approach would enhance the acousmatic experience for the listener in the radio art gallery space. Michel Chion, influenced by Schaeffer, describes three listening modes: causal listening, semantic listening, and Schaeffer’s reduced listening.58 Briefly, causal listening “consists of listening to a sound in order to gather information about its cause (or source),”59 whereas semantic listening refers to listening to and interpreting a code or message, which, as Chion states, can be “spoken language, of course, as well as Morse and other such codes.”60

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Furthermore, Barry Truax describes three more listening modes: listening-in-search, listening-in-readiness, and background listening.61 Truax’s listening modes are concerned with a sonic awareness of the environment and varying levels of sound-source recognition. Fundamentally, listening-in-search is a “conscious search of the environment for cues,”62 where the listener is actively filtering out certain sounds so as to specifically target and focus on others in an environment. Listening-in-readiness, in turn, involves the listener recognizing familiar sounds without searching for any sound in particular, which, as Truax states, “depends on associations being built up over time, so that the sounds are familiar and can be readily identified even by ‘background’

processing in the brain.”63 An example of this listening mode provided by Truax is a “mother being awakened by her baby’s cry, but not by trucks or other noises.”64 Finally, background listening is where the listener focuses on sounds that “exist with low volume and low information,”65 which are expected and predictable within the sonic environment. R. Murray Schaffer has described them as “keynote sounds.”66 Keynote sounds are those sounds that are in the background and not an obvious signal or a foreground figure in the auditory environment. This distinction between foreground and background can be habitual, however, such as when Truax draws our attention to his example of residents who live near a hospital. Truax states: “to a visitor, such a sound [of an ambulance] may be noticed as a signal, but to the permanent resident, it is habitually experienced as a background sound.”67 Further, Truax describes a type of background listening called distracted listening, where audio elements “that would normally have been considered a foreground sound, such as voice and music,” are intentionally blocked by the listener and “kept in the background.”68 An example of distracted listening, as Truax has illustrated,69 is the use of radio in domestic environments to accompany daily activities that resonate in the home, so as to mask unwanted sounds,70 distract the listener while undertaking boring activities, or psychologically create a sense of “we-ness.” An awareness of the above listening modes can contribute to a more enriching experience of the acousmatic radio art gallery space. So while this space is split from the visual mechanism that produced the sound, it can nevertheless provide a creative and dynamic multimodal experience. In 1936, Rudolf Arnheim argued that the acousmatic listening experience is not a blind experience,71 and later Gary Ferrington explained that the listener indicatively draws associations from the sound material, based on their life experience, to become directors of their own sonically stimulated, idiosyncratic, imagined “theatre of the mind.”72 Further to this, radio theorist Tim Crook has questioned: “What is the philosophical difference between seeing physically with the eye and seeing with the mind?”73 Andrew Crisell, in turn, has explored the notion of the fictional dimension of the images in the mind’s eye that are stimulated by sonic communication.74 Moreover, the acousmatic “indirect listening” experience, as Pierre Schaeffer would call it and as is the case with radio, is in effect the same as what Marshall McLuhan calls “cool media.” McLuhan explains that with cool media “so much has to be filled in by the listener”75 in contrast to “hot media” like audiovisual media (e.g., film and television) which “do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience.”76 McLuhan concludes that “Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion

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by the audience.”77 Moreover, as I mentioned earlier, this describes aspects of the matrix of radio that is bound together by people at both ends of the broadcast. If we return briefly to the transportation theories of communication, then this cool medium or acousmatic listening experience with its high participatory effect and idiosyncratic imagined “theatre of the mind” is capable of producing a wide range of “meanings” derived from that of the sender to the receiver’s decoding of the message. This situation, I think, is an important aspect of the radio art gallery space that Gregory Whitehead has described as “the poetics and the aesthetics of radiophonic space.”78 Whitehead explains, “I think a successful work of radio art has a lot of space for the listener to play.”79 Or as René Farabet (formerly from Radio France) notes: … it is a “heterotopic” space, which is not a space that is nowhere, but a “different” space, a place carved out of reality which is something like a “reservation,” apart, whose internal structure is absolutely distinctive, a possible place of impossible meetings … a place where one can stitch and unstitch the fabric of reality at will … a factory for knitting sound and sense … a fringe place, marginal, tangential to my world, situated on the edge of my being, familiar, yet foreign.80 Radio art’s acousmatic experience can, therefore, incite a dynamic multimodal experience for listeners and patrons of the radio art gallery space.

Cultural Discursive Space While the scope of this discussion is to concentrate on the phenomenological or experiential sonic aspects of the radio art gallery space, I have also briefly touched on its social/institution implications. Furthermore, if we start to consider Miwon Kwon’s discussion about sitespecific art and apply this to radio art, then we find a range of various permutations that are not in the scope of this text. Nevertheless, I would like to point to the discursive space that is also created beyond the experiential qualities of the radio art gallery space. Kwon makes us aware that the content of the radio artwork itself can also exist in discursive space and can have a lasting impact on the discourse concerning the issues relating to the work.81 In a larger sense, it is hoped that the issues relating to the radio art gallery space also become part of this discursive space.

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Summary Artists including La Monte Young have been acutely aware that radio presents works in an “abstract way,”82 which has been discussed as having “resonance” within the acoustic architecture of sound media and produces a connective sense of “we-ness” and “immediacy.” This sense of connectedness, in spite of the physical dislocations between the multiplicities of reception locations, strengthens the glue that conceptually holds together the ephemeral, noncontiguous, yet still connected radio art gallery space, constituted of what Kunstradio calls with each broadcast “radio space.” This is a space that is schizophonic and resounds with audio material consisting of distinctive new forms of sonic originality and “hyperreality” generated from the transformative effects of audio media, where the sonic spatiality of the radio artwork is overlaid onto the spatiality of the multiplicity of reception locations and blended with other local environmental sounds. Moreover, it is a sonic experience that can be more deeply appreciated with an awareness of various listening strategies and electroacoustic perceptual aspects of the work, a schizochronic space that, conceptually, can be extended chronologically to include time-shifted podcasts and other delivery modes. It is also an acousmatic, dynamic, idiosyncratic, multimodal experience and discursive space open for public “viewings” in a dynamic, ephemeral radio art gallery space.

  1 La Monte Young, “Raminations of Radio,” in Radio Text(E) Semiotext(E) #16, ed. Neil Strauss and Dave Mandl (New York: Semiotext(e), 1993), pp. 181–82.   2 Heidi Grundmann, “The Geometry of Silence,” in Radio Rethink: Art, Sound and Transmission, ed. Daina Augaitis and Dan Lander (Banff: Walter Phillips Gallery, 1994), p. 137.  3 Ibid.   4 Kunstradio, “Toward a Definition of Radio Art,” http://www.kunstradio.at/TEXTS/manifesto. html (all URLs accessed in May 2015).  5 R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1993), p. 92.   6 Damian Castaldi, “Loop Interview with Colin Black,” Loop Magazine, November 5, 2007.  7 Eurydice Aroney, “Radio Documentaries and Features: Invisible Achievements,” paper presented at Radio in the World: Radio Conference 2005, p. 398.  8 James Jerome Gibson, “The Theory of Affordances,” in The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979). Components of Gibson’s theory of affordances include the individual’s inquiry into the resource’s qualities of malleability, permanence, controllability, usefulness, emotional and cross-sensory allurement, and the implications of any shared cultural meanings.   9 Jo Tacchi, “Nostalgia and Radio Sound,” in The Auditory Culture Reader, ed. Michael Bull and Les Back, Sensory Formations Series (Oxford: Berg, 2003), p. 281. 10 Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music (New York: Seabury, 1976), p. 46. 11 Theodor W. Adorno and E. F. N. Jephcott, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (London: New Left Books, 1978), p. 45. 12 Kunstradio, “Toward a Definition of Radio Art,” Kunstradio, http://www.kunstradio.at/TEXTS/ manifesto.html (accessed April 3, 2012). 13 “The spatiality of the concert hall was virtually overlaid upon the space of the home; in a sense it obliterated the domestic space.” Peter Doyle, Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording, 1900–1960 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), p. 58. 14 Lars Nyre, Sound Media: From Live Journalism to Music Recording (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 21. 15 Ross Snyder, “Architects of Comtemporary Man’s Consciousness,” in INTER/MEDIA: Interpersonal Communication in a Media World, ed. Gary Grumpert and Robert Cathcart (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 350.

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16 Especially networks which facilitate online audio streams that can reach global audiences via the Internet. 17 Tony Schwartz, The Responsive Chord (Doubleday: Anchor Books, 1973), pp. 24–25. 18 Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 333. 19 Susan Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (New York: Times Books, 1999), p. 30. 20 The approximate speed at which radio transmissions travel is 300,000 kilometers per second. Therefore, over short distances the perceived time difference is not noticed by humans, yet it is still present. 21 Schafer, The Soundscape, p. 90. 22 R. Murray Schafer, “The Music of The Envirnoment,” in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, ed. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 34. 23 Ibid. 24 Barry Truax, Acoustic Communication, 2nd ed. (Westport, CT, and London: Ablex, 2001), p. 134. 25 Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 21. 26 Ibid., p. 220. 27 Francisco López, “Profound Listening and Environmental Sound Matter,” in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music., ed. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 84. 28 Tony Schwartz, The Responsive Chord (Doubleday: Anchor Books, 1973), pp. 2–3. 29 Ibid., p. 3. Note that the transportation theories of communication is based on the Shannon– Weaver model of communication, see Warren Weaver and Claude Elwood Shannon, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949). 30 Francisco López, “Profound Listening and Environmental Sound Matter,” in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, ed. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 84. 31 Ibid. 32 Oxford Dictionaries, “electro-acoustic,” Oxford Dictionaries, April 2019, Oxford University Press, http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/electro-acoustic. 33 Kaye Mortley quoted in Virginia Madsen, “A radio d’auteur: The documentaire de création of Kaye Mortley,” SCAN: Journal of Media Arts Culture 6, no. 3 (December 2009). 34 Chris Watson, Outside the Circle of Fire, 3rd ed., Touch Music, TO:37, 2012. 35 Trevor Wishart, On Sonic Art, ed. Simon Emmerson, new and revised edition (Amsterdam and Reading: Harwood Academic, 1996), pp. 152–53. 36 David Sonnenschein, Sound Design: The Expressive Power of Music, Voice, and Sound Effects in Cinema (Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions, 2001), p. 79. 37 Wishart, On Sonic Art, pp. 152–53. 38 John Potts, “Schizochronia: Time in Digital Sound,” in Essays in Sound 2: Technophonia (Newtown, NSW: Contemporary Sound Arts, 1995), p. 20. 39 Damian Castaldi, “Loop Interview with Colin Black.” Loop Magazine, 2007. 40 Schwartz, The Responsive Chord, p. 3. 41 Lars Nyre, Sound Media: From Live Journalism to Music Recording (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 25. John Ellis, Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000). Paddy Scannell, Radio, Television & Modern Life: A Phenomenological Approach (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell 1996). 42 Virginia Madsen in conversation with the author, North Ryde, New South Wales, December 9, 2008. 43 Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, p. 46. 44 Marie Wennersten in conversation with the author, Svensk Radiohuset [Swedish Radio Broadcasting House], Stockholm, September 13, 2010. 45 Apple Inc., “Hot News Headlines,” http://www.apple.com, “Radio Reborn iTunes 4.9 with Podcasting.” 46 Marie Wennersten, “To See With Each Other’s Ears: SR c and Ambiguous Radio,” in Radio Territories, ed. Erik Granly Jensen and Brandon LaBelle (Los Angeles and Copenhagen: Errant Bodies Press, 2007), p. 85. 47 Arte Radio, “Arte Radio – accueil,” http://www.arteradio.com. 48 Pierre Schaeffer, “Acousmatics,” in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, ed. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 77. Extract translated by Daniel W. Smith, originally published as: Pierre Schaeffer, Traité des Objets Musicaux (Paris: Edition du Seuil, 1966). 49 Michel Chion, Guide des Objets Sonores: Pierre Schaeffer et la Recherche Musicale, Bibliotháeque De Recherche Musicale, translated in 2009 by John Dack and Christine North (Paris: Institut National de L’Audiovisuel & Éditions Buchet/Chastel, 1983), p. 11. 50 Schaeffer, “Acousmatics” (extract translated by Daniel W. Smith from Pierre Schaeffer, Traité des Objets Musicaux, Paris: Edition du Seuil, 1966), in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, ed., Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 78. 51 Ibid.

52 Pierre Schaeffer, quoted in Tim Hodgkinson, “An Interview with Pierre Schaeffer,” in The Book of Music and Nature: An Anthology of Sounds, Words, Thoughts, ed. David Rothenberg and Marta Ulvaeus (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), p. 35. 53 López, “Profound Listening and Environmental Sound Matter,” p. 85. 54 Francisco López, “Blind Listening,” in The Book of Music and Nature: An Anthology of Sounds, Words, and Thought, ed. David Rothenberg and Marta Ulvaeus (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), p. 163. 55 Ibid., p. 86. 56 Katharine Norman, “Real-World Music as Composed Listening,” Contemporary Music Review 15, no. 1 (1996), p. 2. 57 Ibid., p. 11. 58 Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. and ed. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 25. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid., p. 28. 61 Barry Truax, Acoustic Communication, 2nd ed. (Westport, CT, and London: Ablex, 2001), pp. 21–25. 62 Ibid., p. 22. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid. 66 Schafer, The Soundscape, p. 9. 67 Truax, Acoustic Communication, p. 25. 68 Ibid., p. 169. 69 Ibid. 70 Hildegard Westerkamp, quoted in Barry Truax, Acoustic Communication, p. 169. 71 Rudolf Arnheim, Radio: An Art of Sound (1936; repr., New York: Da Capo Press, 1972), pp. 136–37. 72 Gary Ferrington, “Audio Design: Creating Multi-Sensory Images for the Mind,” Journal of Visual Literacy (1993). 73 Tim Crook, Radio Drama: Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 54. 74 Andrew Crisell, Understanding Radio, Studies in Culture & Communication, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 10. 75 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964), pp. 22–23. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid. 78 Gregory Whitehead in conversation with the author, Toronto, May 28, 2011. 79 Ibid. 80 René Farabet, “The Skins of the Onion” (unpublished), quoted in Donald Richards, “The Creative Ear: The ABC’s The Listening Room and the Nurturing of Sound Art in Australia” (PhD diss., University of Western Sydney, 2003), p. 45. 81 Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2002), p. 28. 82 Young, “Raminations of Radio,” pp. 181–82.

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The Avant-Garde and a Popular Medium: The Berlin Novembergruppe and Radio in the Weimar Republic Andreas Zeising

I. All in all, it would be difficult to refer to programming in the pioneer days of German radio as particularly innovative.1 “In the beginning of radio was boredom,” as general director Hans Flesch later went on record as saying in a spat of self-critique.2 In particular people had little concrete idea at first as to what requirements and possibilities wireless broadcasting presented. And given this lack of concepts, radio was viewed as an ersatz medium for all the existing institutions “that had something to do with the dissemination of things sung or spoken,”3 as Bertolt Brecht aptly put it with a pinch of sarcasm. The cornerstones were musical offerings and educational talks, with which radio met its self-imposed social agenda of education and entertainment. The broadcasting schedules for the new regional stations offered a largely homogeneous picture in this regard, above all because unlike its brothers and sisters in the rest of Europe and the United States, German radio was completely under state control and largely subject to control in its program policies. In institutional terms, radio was anything but avant-garde. Which is all the more reason to emphasize that the people in power at the ministries proved at times surprisingly amenable to opening radio up as a “passive” stage for contemporary art, just so long as political neutrality and democratic principles were upheld. Admittedly one can only speak of a genuine acoustic “radio art,” of the kind discussed on a broad basis at the end of the 1920s,4 in a cursory way at the beginning—as for instance in the early radio plays that were launched by the aforementioned Hans Flesch at Südwestdeutscher Rundfunk in Frankfurt.5 A lot of space, however, was devoted early on to readings by contemporary authors, including the so-called junge (new) poetry.6 Apart from this, it was above all the champions of New Music who spotted the potential of radio as a platform for spreading their work. Not least because the radio stations in Berlin and Frankfurt with their urban flair gave support to the musical avant-garde in various ways.7

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While research in German Studies and musicology has long since focused on the importance that radio played, its mediatory role has not yet been examined by art history—not without reason, one might think,

because the “performance” of the visual arts in an acoustic medium is simply not possible. The following example taken from the early days of the Berliner Rundfunk demonstrates, nonetheless, the close links that existed in the 1920s between the avant-gardes in music, literature, and the visual arts. And it also gives exemplary illustration of how the alliance of the media that was radio—particularly in the early years of broadcasting—served contemporary visual art as an important interface with the general public. Radio was, after all, born in an age in which broad consensus reigned over the need to familiarize a wide audience with modernism.

II. The history of the Novembergruppe (November Group) provides a good illustration of the shift from the left-wing-revolutionary upsurge to the moderate, middle-class avant-garde, as characterized by artistic developments up until the mid-1920s.8 In name at least, the group maintained an echo of the events from the last days of the First World War, when the mood of radical political and social change infected no few artists, above all in the capital. Founded on December 3, 1918, and advanced most notably by Max Pechstein and a number of younger artists from Expressionist circles around the gallerists and publishers Herwarth Walden and Franz Pfemfert—César Klein, Moriz Melzer, Georg Tappert, and Heinrich Richter-Berlin—the alliance was an expression of the conviction that they were living at a turning point in history that called for the pooling of all the creative energies to build a “people’s state.” “We are standing on the fertile soil of the revolution,” as a manifesto drafted by the group proclaimed in December 1918: “We see it as our foremost duty to dedicate our greatest energies to the moral development of a young and free Germany.”9 The much bandied catchword “socialism” seemed in those times to be the mantra of the minute and was associated not only with a new political start, but also with hopes for a fresh start in intellectual and cultural affairs, with the aim of overcoming the social isolation of the avant-garde and its perceived stagnancy. There were overlaps in the membership of the Novembergruppe and the Arbeitsrat für Kunst (Working Council for Art) set up shortly before in Berlin, from which the newly founded Bauhaus also emerged in 1919 in Weimar: the spokesmen for the latter, Bruno Taut and Walter Gropius, presented the similar demand that artists should once again find a connection with the “people” and workaday life.10 Instead of an intellectual tidbit for middleclass elites, the avant-garde, they said, should become a social force with a formative effect acting right to the heart of people’s lives. As with the Arbeitsrat für Kunst, the activities of the Novembergruppe were thus informed by the utopian ideal of bringing the new art into

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democratic society so that people are or will be “transformed and elevated,” as Will Grohmann put it in 1928.11 Admittedly, the purported alliance of all “revolutionaries of the mind”12 changed its emphasis during the consolidative phase of the Weimar Republic. Not only the fact that the Novembergruppe exhibited from 1925 onward on the premises of the Secession, which once had been notorious for its reactionary leanings, showed its integration into the existing establishment. Artists on the left—such as the Dadaists Raoul Hausmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Hannah Höch—had long since left the group by this point. What remained was the claim to make modern art accessible to a broader public and to entrench it in social life. By the mid-1920s, the Novembergruppe had changed from being a revolutionary spearhead to an exhibition society of a liberal bourgeois complexion. And this was the root, as it were, of its ability to persist. While other initiatives with a political art agenda during that transitional period were scarcely more than fleeting episodes, this loosely woven association of artists from all walks of life—in 1923 it already had 120 members13—established itself in the 1920s as what was perhaps the most significant nationwide grouping of the avant-garde. It pursued a variety of activities and, apart from exhibitions, also put on concerts, film shows, and lecture evenings. Incidentally, its success was also due in part to the democratic subsidies policy of the Prussian ministry of culture, which subscribed after 1918 to the furtherance of contemporary art and communicated it to the mainstream, even including the rejection of any favoritism for particular directions and demanding deference to a republican form of state.14 While “radically minded” left-wing artists turned away in disappointment, the Novembergruppe with its politically noncommittal creed of progressive, artistic renewal was among those to profit from these policy guidelines.15 All in all, the Novembergruppe’s aspirations and stance predestined it to be drawn to the medium of radio under state supervision, and the latter’s introduction in 1923–24 basically came from the idea of sharing and democratizing works of high culture. Radio de facto enabled all strata of society to be addressed for the first time without distinction.16 During the period of transition between postwar Expressionism and Neuer Sachlichkeit or New Objectivity that accompanied the economic consolidation of the Weimar Republic, the new medium of radio—regardless of its middle-class conception—seemed to be the medium of choice to gain credence for the avant-garde from all of society.

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III. “At last—after far too much hesitation, the Berliner Sendestelle has also decided to grant space to the young and vital art of our times in its programs,” as could be read in 1925 in the magazine Der Deutsche

Rundfunk, the leading national glossy radio guide at that time in Germany.17 The enthusiastic announcement concerned a live presentation that was transmitted on May 11, 1925, under the title “An Evening with the Novembergruppe” and which, between language courses, educational talks, and radio chess, brought an avant-garde program to the listeners’ ears such as they had never before heard from the normally very staid Berliner Rundfunk.18 The basically unresolved question about the true destiny of the new medium, which was still more or less in its infancy, was ­answered by the article’s author with a clear avowal to the contemporary world and radio’s participation in the manifestations of cultural life: “And those who bring new seeds to our lives—the young innovators—have as children of our time first right to radio, the technical wonder of the day.”19 The excitement about the “Evening with the Novembergruppe” was evidently due to none other than the author of the article,20 the painter Hans Siebert von Heister, who was not only a co-founder and active member of the Novembergruppe but also—as chance would have it—chief editor of the magazine Der Deutsche Rundfunk. Heister, who made a name for himself during the period of the Weimar Republic as a critical journalist,21 had arrived like many another in the field of radio from a completely different background. Born in 1888 in Dusseldorf, he had initially begun to study art in Berlin in 1911 under Lovis Corinth and ­Konrad von Kardorff. He was one of the Expressionist generation whose path in life and ­career as an artist was shaped by the catastrophic experience of the First World War and the ensuing social and political-ideological upheavals. He held office in the Novembergruppe as manager until 1923, before changing to the profession of radio journalist—although it is not known how this came about. Be that as it may, over the following years he exhibited regularly with the Novembergruppe.22 Evidently unbothered by conflicts of interest, Heister used his prominence to repeatedly advertise the group’s activities to the radio audience. And he performed this role of mediator not only as the editor of the magazine, but also as a speaker on the airwaves of the Funk-

Broadcasting program of the Berliner Funk-Stunde on May 11, 1925, cited from Der Deutsche Rundfunk 3, no. 19 (1925), p. 1209

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Hans Siebert von Heister, Embryo, 1921

Stunde. Thus from 1926 onward, Heister regularly presented the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung at Lehrter Bahnhof, the annual overview of Berlin’s art scene in which the Novembergruppe participated as a collective.23 Heister’s reports on the state-funded show—at that time a flagship venture for Prussian art sponsorship24—were among the first ever contributions in which the Berliner Rundfunk looked at the contemporary art scene by reviewing an exhibition. The radio press accompanied the reports in each case with full-page picture spreads— doubtless so that some of the more puzzled listeners would get an idea of what it was actually all about. For the tenth anniversary of the Novembergruppe, Heister did two radio programs.25 In fact, the celebrations also included him putting the neo-religious painting The Madonna of Positano by Moriz Melzer on the cover of Der Deutsche Rundfunk.26

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It would be off the mark to see this simply as cronyism. Rather, it conveyed the well-documented aims of the Novembergruppe to bring the avant-garde to a wider audience. An eloquent expression of these efforts came in fact in spring 1924, when Der Deutsche Rundfunk confronted its readers with a text in its “Art and Life” section written

by the sculptor Rudolf Belling, which examined fundamental issues in contemporary sculpture.27 Belling, like Heister a founding member of the Novembergruppe, not only gave the readers a swift guided tour of art history to explain what apparently are the basic problems of sculpture, which is to say the “synthesis of work and space”; he also pronounced in blustering style his clear dislike of the majority of modern sculpture, which he characterized as “symptoms of appalling banality” which, “with their contorted limbs, stovepipes, copies of ‘Negro sculpture’ and accumulations of dry cubes and prisms,”28 only seem to be forging new paths, while actually—according to Belling—exhausting themselves in a Dadaist obsession with innovation or in illusory formal problems. In a call to return to the “essentials,” Belling demanded that sculpture once again embrace the “organic laws” of nature, by which he meant revealing the “forces” at work in the material.29 In their basic tenor, Belling’s remarks amount to a departure from the phase of aesthetic debates on direction that had marked the Expressionist avant-garde. It is doubtful perhaps whether the average reader of the otherwise down-to-earth radio magazine showed much interest in such tricky issues. That the text was not chiefly addressed to a lay audience is clearly shown by the fact that it had previously been published in the same wording in the specialist journal Kunstchronik.30 But there was plenty of good reason for Heister and his magazine Der Deutsche Rundfunk to lay Belling’s ideas before his readers. For one, the reprint of the article—as remarked on in a note from the editorial board—had a topical connection with the solo exhibition that the Berliner Nationalgalerie had just dedicated in spring 1924 to the

Exhibition committee of the Novembergruppe during reparations for the ­Große Berliner Kunstausstellung, 1924

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“Pictures from this year’s Berliner Kunstschau at the state exhibitions building.” Report in the magazine Der Deutsche Rundfunk on a radio production by Hans Siebert von Heister in the Berliner FunkStunde, 1927, cited from Der Deutsche Rundfunk 5, no. 10 (1927), p. 1376

sculptor in its Kronprinzenpalais annex.31 The collection opened in 1919 under the name of Galerie der Lebenden (Gallery of the Living) and, under the direction of Ludwig Justi, worked in line with the Prussian State’s commitment in matters of cultural policy to promote contemporary art and convey it to a broad audience.32 So what instrument could have been more suited to communicating this democratic concern for popularization than radio and the radio press still generally associated at that time with the Reichsrundfunkgesellschaft, the German National Broadcasting Corporation?

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Apart from which, there was a close temporal affiliation, as it were, between Belling’s critique and the new medium of radio: the text had after all borne the emphatic demand to replace the avant-garde program and its need for explanation with an art firmly in contact with the

mood of the times, which was thus more or less self-explanatory. “A new form,” as Belling wrote, “will not be arrived at through experimentation … It will come about of its own through a new spirituality and with that require neither scientific explanation nor any other kind of propaganda.”33 When Belling called moreover for an art that did not exhaust itself in its own artistic ends but was rooted as it were in life—the lived reality that is of an age “in which we have cars, planes and reinforced concrete buildings”34—he was appealing to the zeitgeist of New Objectivity and the pulse of a technological modernism to which radio could well be counted a part: “wireless telegraphy” was itself a sign of the era, and as such bound to the contemporaneity that Belling demanded in art. This elective affinity is shown quite overtly in the large sculptures which the sculptor Oswald Herzog, also a member of the Novembergruppe, Title page of the magazine Der Deutsche Rundfunk 6, no. 48 (1928) with a pictorial motif by Moriz Melzer, Madonna von Positano, 1924

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Rudolf Belling, Stadt, exhibited in 1924 at the ­Nationalgalerie in Berlin

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made in 1929 for the Berliner Funkausstellung (Berlin Radio Exhibition). And the Novembergruppe likewise profited here from the help afforded by the public sector, because the ­Reichsrundfunkgesellschaft regularly awarded commissions in connection with the exhibitions, in which the nature and character of radio was to be illustrated for advertising purposes in an artistic manner.35 Apart from the financial boon, public commissions of this kind were seen by the Novembergruppe as an opportunity to bring art to the people.36 Moreover, for Herzog the occasion must have seemed just right for visualizing the principle of a sculpture that “girds space.”37 His roughly three-meter-tall work, whose whereabouts are now unknown, consisted of a stepped, perhaps electrically illuminated plinth and a stylized representation of the globe done in a reflecting metallic finish, to which oversized radio masts were affixed like pointers. “Waves” made of wire were set around the construction to convey the way the new medium spans the world. This seemingly technoid sculpture amalgamated the idea of a monument to technology, as presaged by Russian Constructivism, with the goal frequently formulated by the avant-garde of the conquest of space and time. The symbolism of the “new era” and of a new technological departure fitted the “progressive” image that the heads of broadcasting were trying to communicate via the high-profile stage of the Wireless Communications Exhibitions—the image of a modern media society that saw communications as a means to international understanding.

IV. Roughly a year after Belling’s article in the radio press, the Novembergruppe was also featured on the radio with its aforementioned soirée on May 11, 1925. Sent at prime evening listening time as part of a direct transmission from the studios at Vox Haus in Berlin, the “young poets and composers,” according to the radio program, put on an approximately ninety-minute program of musical recitals and recitations.38 The broadcast began with a fundamental statement: according to the announcement for the program, this should have been no one other

than Rudolf Belling as representative of the visual arts, introducing the “origins and goals” of the Novembergruppe. A follow-up report from the printed radio reviews indicates, however, that it was not Belling but the painter Arthur Segal who ultimately assumed this role.39 It is not known how or why this came about. This radio appearance was coupled with the fact that the Novembergruppe, which originally had emerged from a fusion of visual artists and architects, had changed its membership policy in 1922. Since then the group was also open to writers and composers.40 This accorded with its self-penned wish to present itself as a special interest group for all avant-garde minded “forces” and to encourage an exchange of ideas. The musicians’ section of the Novembergruppe soon featured Cover motif of the Rundfunk Jahrbuch 1930 with an illustration of Oswald Herzog’s sculpture Der Rundfunk, 1929

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a number of prominent names. Through the mediation of the painter Karl Jacob Hirsch, the first to join the group was the composer Heinz Tiessen, one of the main representatives of Berlin’s New Music scene.41 He was followed by, among others, the composers Philipp Jarnach, Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, and Max Butting, who was head of the musicians’ section until 1925,42 and who incidentally was appointed in 1926 as a member of the newly founded Cultural Advisory Council at the Funk-Stunde radio company. Further members included the Schönberg pupil Hanns Eisler and the subsequently widely acclaimed Kurt Weill, who gave a positive write-up of the radio evening in a weekly review spot in Der Deutsche Rundfunk.43 The Novembergruppe had already organized a number of lecture evenings with musical and mixed programs since the inauguration of the musicians’ section.44 Already prior to 1925 these evenings had been mounted in various formats in the Kleines Saal at Vox House on Potsdamer Straße, where the Funk-Stunde broadcasting studio was installed in 1923.45 But not until the soirée in May 1925 were these evenings ­actually broadcast on the radio. Nils Grosch has correctly observed that this brought about “a massive reorientation in the form used for public performance.”46 Indeed, instead of addressing a hand-picked circle of tutored listeners, as had been the case until then, on this evening the Novembergruppe stepped before the widest of audiences: at that particular time, the Funk-Stunde, Germany’s largest broadcasting company, already had 150,000 registered listeners, which means that this was the first real attempt to popularize the avant-garde.

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The only details that we now have about the actual course of the evening are to be found in the radio guides. According to this source, the soirée consisted of seven items. The introduction by the painter Arthur Segal—the manuscript of which is sadly missing—was followed by alternating musical and literary contributions. These were opened by the composer Heinz Tiessen with his three “Piano Pieces” op. 31 (1923), expressionistic miniatures in which a late-Romantic mood painting dashed with dark dissonances alternated with contrasting grotesques and somewhat Dadaistic passages, while the imitation of a blackbird’s song surprised the listeners during the second movement. This musical opening was followed by a reading by Bertolt Brecht, featuring his “Ballad of Mazeppa” and the prose piece “The Polite Chinese,” both of which he had written for the occasion. The next item consisted of “Small Pieces for String Quartet” op. 26 (1923) by Max Butting, which was probably the most experimental composition in the program and had previously been performed to great acclaim at the Donaueschingen Festival.47 This was followed by another musical item featuring composer Philipp Jarnach on piano playing his “Five Songs” op. 15 (1922)— with texts by, among others, Heinrich Heine and Rainer Maria Rilke who, despite their “modern” tone, marked a clear reference to the

tradition of the Romantic art song. Finally the evening program was rounded off by two further readings by the authors Martin Kessel and Carl Zuckmayer, who read among other pieces his “Litany of the Fall,” which shortly before had been printed in Paul Westheim’s Kunstblatt.48 All things considered, compared to what had previously been offered on the radio, this selection can be seen as experimental and novel, but not as revolutionary. Not only were the musical offerings far from atonal; the literary side refrained from any provocative or politically tendentious gesture in either form or content. When Hans Siebert von Heister spoke of a “still fairly moderate program,” this was doubtless the case.49 This reserve was no doubt due not only to the fact that radio saw itself as a vehicle for middle-class consensus. It also tallied with the selfimage of the Novembergruppe, which, once the artistic revolt had abated, called not for the negation of what existed, but for the establishment of art forms that could lay claim to broad topical relevance. And when Heister saw the common denominator in the literary contributions as being their “striving for reality, closeness to life and objectified life substance,”50 which distinguished current poetics from the Expressionist pathos of redemption that arose in the postwar period, that could be applied accordingly to the endeavors of the Novembergruppe as a whole. Whether the individual pieces were linked up by announcements or by any other acoustic means can no longer be ascertained. Unlike com­parable broadcasts, such as the artistic musical revues that were launched some time later by Südwestdeutsche Rundfunk, there was no thematic framework that would have welded the contributions into an “acoustic suite.” This form of stringing together literary and musical recitals—none of the Novembergruppe’s subsequent concert evenings were to copy this—followed rather the conventional principle for light entertainment revues and variety shows. There was, as it were, a ­potpourri of possibilities that would present the listener with the broad and varied potential of the new productions, and this met with the Novembergruppe’s desire to position itself as a melting pot of modern currents outside of any set program. Even if this does not mean that one can talk of “radio art” in the closer sense of the term, the Berliner Sendeabend can nevertheless be regarded as an initial impetus for drawing the avant-garde to the medium of radio. This intention is clear not least from the fact that all of the pieces that were presented—unlike those in previous evenings by the Novembergruppe—were, in their way, brand new. In his subsequent review in Funk magazine, the music critic and radio journalist Lothar Band called categorically for the “Novembergruppe evening” to be taken as the yardstick for communicating modern art on the radio: “Shouldn’t radio in fact give the listeners the opportunity to think about the nature of the latest, forward-looking art? An evening like

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this did not serve to propagate such art; but it created the opportunity and inspired the thoughtful listener to ponder.”51 Hans Siebert von Heister likewise argued ostensibly in the name of the listeners when he stressed that the new medium of radio had now received its true purpose, of presenting the present times—even in its controversial aspects: “[T]he radio listener can demand to be informed about every kind of topical manifestation, not only about current affairs but also intellectual and cultural matters. However, only problems that have not been fully resolved retain their intellectual topicality, creations that have not yet become common property, questions which continue to engage minds in debate. When radio features these matters it induces the listener to participate directly in the life of our times …, which could become its greatest duty and its highest purpose.”52 With radio, it seemed, an instrument had been discovered to free the avant-garde from its ivory tower and enable the general public to take part in the “struggles” surrounding present-day culture. Or perhaps this assessment was a tad too optimistic? The actual response from the listeners to the Novembergruppe evening in May 1925 was occasion at least for doubt. According to Hans Siebert von Heister’s retrospective judgment, the listeners’ interest was all but positive: “The impact this evening had on the listeners was incredible—albeit in the negative sense. They were outraged, deluged the radio company with countless letters asking how dare anybody put something like that before them.”53 Lothar Band likewise reported later on that the evening “met with dissent from a large part of the listeners.”54 Did perhaps the idea of popularizing the avant-garde prove on its very first attempt to be a chimera? Or did it simply suffer from conceptual shortcomings, so that the unprepared listener who perhaps was waiting for light entertainment was introduced to the novel listening experience without any kind of didactic preparation? “Perhaps a lengthier introduction would have been sensible,” Band conjectured, no doubt correctly.55

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The fact remains that there was no successor to the soirée in May 1925. Although it was not the last evening put on by the Novembergruppe, it was the only one to be broadcast on the radio as a live event. The concert broadcast in 1930 as part of the Novembergruppe’s tenth anniversary celebrations already had a retrospective character—and took place without the involvement of any other artistic disciplines.56 As Nils Grosch has shown, this turn to the mainstream medium of radio by the artists of the musical avant-garde was accompanied by a lasting change in their self-image. Thus not a few composers showed a distance to concert practice and “a flight from the prewar aesthetic notion of the artist’s work in the direction of mass culture.”57 Composers such as Butting, Eisler, and Weill attempted, each in his own way, to combine a modern zeitgeist and avant-garde form in a broadly approachable tonal language.

From the standpoint of contemporary art critics, the reviews proved more skeptical. When Will Grohmann—who incidentally was also involved in radio early on—looked back in 1928 on the erstwhile ambitions of the Novembergruppe, a certain disillusionment could not be overheard. The desired effect on the masses had failed to materialize, Grohmann summed up, because the “unspoilt public that had been hoped for failed to respond” and “revolted” against anything new.58 But if Grohmann was also thinking of that radio evening in May 1925, one would have to contradict him. Because the example demonstrates above all that popularizing and communicating modern art cannot be achieved by simply communicating them via a “media channel.” In point of fact, trailblazing efforts were made to bring the “unspoilt” listener to the manifestations of modern art in precisely the mass medium of radio during the years up to the end of the Weimar Republic. This applies incidentally not only to the realms of music and literature, but above all to the visual arts: journalists like Hans Siebert von Heister, Paul Westheim, or the now forgotten Helmut Jaro Jaretzki, whose radio series In der Werkstatt der Lebenden (In the Workshop of the Living) was broadcast from 1927 on by the Berliner Sender, not only used didactic skill to this end but also developed popular means of communication attuned to radio—such as interviews, features, and reports—that managed to captivate the audience.59 In 1925, this level of professionalization still seemed to be a thing of the distant future.

  1 For the history of radio in the 1920s, see Konrad Dussel, Deutsche Rundfunkgeschichte: Eine Einführung, 2nd ed. (Constance: UVK-Medien, 2004); Konrad Dussel, Hörfunk in Deutschland: Politik, Programm, Publikum (1923–1960) (Potsdam: Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, 2002); Joachim-Felix Leonhard, ed., Programmgeschichte des Hörfunks in der Weimarer Republik, 2 vols. (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1997); Winfried B. Lerg, Rundfunkpolitik in der Weimarer Republik (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1980).  2 Hans Flesch, “Rundfunk heute,” Der Querschnitt 10, no. 4 (1930), pp. 245–47, esp. p. 246.  3 Bertolt Brecht, “Der Rundfunk als Kommunikationsapparat” (1932), in Gesammelte Werke, ed. Elisabeth Hauptmann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1967), pp. 127–34, esp. p. 128.   4 Early thoughts in this direction came from Kurt Weill, “Möglichkeiten absoluter Radiokunst,” Der Deutsche Rundfunk 3, no. 26 (1925), pp. 1625–628. On the problems surrounding early “radio art” in general, see Antje Vowinckel, Collagen im Hörspiel: Die Entwicklung einer radiophonen Kunst (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1995).  5 Forever mentioned is Flesch’s radio play Zauberei auf dem Sender, which was broadcast by Südwestdeutscher Rundfunk in Frankfurt on October 24, 1924. For the broader context, see Daniel Gilfillan, Pieces of Sound: German Experimental Radio (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), pp. 67–75, and most recently Solveig Ottmann, Im Anfang war das Experiment: Das Weimarer Radio bei Hans Flesch und Ernst Schoen (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2013), pp. 205ff.   6 See Theresia Wittenbrink, Schriftsteller vor dem Mikrophon: Autorenauftritte im Rundfunk der Weimarer Republik 1924–1932; Eine Dokumentation (Berlin: Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, 2006); Elmar Lindemann, “Literatur und Rundfunk in Berlin 1923–1932: Studien und Quellen zum literarischen und literarisch-musikalischen Programm der ‘Funk-Stunde’ AG Berlin in der Weimarer Republik,” 2 vols. (PhD diss., University of Göttingen, 1980).   7 See Nils Grosch, Die Musik der Neuen Sachlichkeit (Stuttgart and Weimar: J.B. Metzler, 1999).  8 For the history of the association, see Novembergruppe, exh. cat. Galerie Bodo Niemann (Berlin: Galerie Bodo Niemann, 1993) and Helga Kliemann, Die Novembergruppe (Berlin: Mann, 1969); for the larger context, see Justin Hoffmann, “Vom Sturm zur Revolution: Politik und Kunst nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Gesamtkunstwerk Expressionismus: Kunst, Film, Literatur, Theater, Tanz und Architektur 1905 bis 1925, exh. cat. Mathildenhöhe Darmstadt, ed. Ralf Beil and

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Claudia Dillmann (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2011), pp. 144–50; Tobias Hoffmann, ed., Zeitenwende: Von der Berliner Secession zur Novembergruppe, exh. cat. Bröhan Museum, Berlin (Munich: Hirmer, 2015).   9 Max Pechstein et al., Manifesto of the “Novembergruppe” (draft from December 1918), cited in Wetterleuchten: Künstler-Manifeste des 20. Jahrhunderts (Hamburg: Edition Nautilus, 2000), pp. 28–29, esp. p. 29. 10 See also Wolfgang Pehnt, Die Architektur des Expressionismus, 3rd ed. (Ostfildern-Ruit: G. Hatje, 1998), pp. 125ff. 11 Will Grohmann, “Zehn Jahre Novembergruppe,” Kunst der Zeit 3, nos. 1–3 (1928), special issue: Zehn Jahre Novembergruppe, pp. 1–9, cited here in Will Grohmann, Texte zur Kunst der Moderne, vol. 2, ed. Konstanze Rudert, exh. cat. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (Munich: Hirmer, 2013), p. 26. 12 According to the wording of a memo from the period in which it was founded, cited in Kliemann, Die Novembergruppe, p. 55. 13 See ibid., p. 74. 14 See Kristina Kratz-Kessemeier, Kunst für die Republik: Die Kunstpolitik des preußischen Kultusministeriums 1918 bis 1932 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2008), pp. 35ff. 15 Ibid., p. 39. This applied for instance to the realm of policies concerning acquisitions and commissions. 16 See Horst O. Halefeldt, “Das erste Medium für alle? Erwartungen an der Hörfunk bei seiner Einführung in Deutschland Anfang der 20er Jahre,” in Rundfunk und Fernsehen 1948–1989, ed. Hans-Bredow-Institut (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1990), pp. 45–84. 17 Hans Siebert von Heister, “Ein Abend der Novembergruppe,” Der Deutsche Rundfunk 3, no. 19 (1925), pp. 1197–199, esp. p. 1197. 18 SWR2 radio series Zeitwort (Timeword) commemorated the Novembergruppe evening on May 24, 2013. See Wolfram Wessels, May 24, 1925, Die “Novembergruppe” im Deutschen Rundfunk, available online as podcast (http://mp3-download.swr.de/swr2/zeitwort/2013/05/swr2zeitwort 240513.6444m.mp3) and as a text version (http://www.swr.de/-/id=11251048/property= download/nid=660694/1e4gaco/swr2-zeitwort-20130524.pdf) (accessed September 22, 2013). 19 Heister, “Ein Abend der Novembergruppe,” p. 1197. 20 See Hans Siebert von Heister, “Fünf Jahre deutscher Funkjournalismus” (1928), in FernsehInformationen (Gauting), 1985, pp. 326–28, 355–56, 383–84, and 413–14, esp. p. 414. 21 Heister directed the magazine until well into the Third Reich era, during which time concessions inevitably appeared to the ideological line and certain allowances were made. 22 See Hans Siebert von Heister, Ein Maler der “Novembergruppe,” exh. cat. Galerie Michael Pabst (Munich, 1985); also Kliemann, Die Novembergruppe, pp. 50–51 (participation in exhibitions and membership of the Novembergruppe, 1919–32). Heister was also artistically active in his role as editor of the magazine Der Deutsche Rundfunk: in October 1929 (vol. 7, no. 39, p. 1249) the magazine printed a watercolor in which Heister set the mood for the new WERAG radio series Irgendwo in Westdeutschland (Somewhere in West Germany). 23 Reports by Heister to this end were broadcast by the Berliner Funk-Stunde in its Sunday programs on May 30, 1926 (7.10 p.m.), May 15, 1927 (7.30 p.m.), and May 13, 1928 (7.30 p.m.). See also the corresponding program previews in Der Deutsche Rundfunk 5, no. 20 (1927) and 6, no. 20 (1928). 24 See Kratz-Kessemeier, Kunst für die Republik, pp. 146ff. 25 “10 Jahre Novembergruppe,” radio broadcast by Hans Siebert von Heister, Berliner Funk-Stunde, Tuesday, November 27, 1928, 7 p.m. (the station’s own glossy, Funk-Stunde, included a program preview with a number of illustrations in vol. 5, no. 48 [1928], p. 1567); “Gesinnung oder Qualität? Zur Ausstellung ‘Zehn Jahre November-Gruppe,’” radio broadcast by Hans Siebert von Heister, Berliner Funk-Stunde, Friday, September 20, 1929, 4 p.m. For this, see the preview in Der Deutsche Rundfunk 7, no. 37 (1929) and also the review in Die Sendung 6, no. 39 (1929). 26 This involved a number of monotypes of the eponymous painting from 1924. See Moriz Melzer, Streben nach reiner Kunst: Werke von 1907 bis 1927, exh. cat. Kunstforum Ostdeutsche Galerie (Regensburg: Kunstforum, 2008), p. 187 (cat. no. 27). 27 Rudolf Belling, “Skulptur und Raum,” Der Deutsche Rundfunk 2, no. 14 (1924), pp. 621–22. For Belling, see Winfried Nerdinger, Rudolf Belling und die Kunstströmungen in Berlin 1918–1923 (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft, 1981); for the broader context, see Anita Beloubek-Hammer, Die schönen Gestalten der besseren Zukunft: Die Bildhauerkunst des Expressionismus und ihr geistiges Umfeld, 2 vols. (Cologne: Letter-Stiftung, 2007). 28 Belling, “Skulptur und Raum,” Der Deutsche Rundfunk, p. 621. 29 Ibid., p. 622. 30 Rudolf Belling, “Skulptur und Raum,” Kunstchronik und Kunstmarkt 6 (1922), pp. 105–7. 31 The exhibition was shown in March and April 1924. See the chronicle of the exhibition in Peter-Klaus Schuster, ed., Die Nationalgalerie (Cologne: DuMont, 2001), p. 406. Also in 1924 the Nationalgalerie acquired a version of Belling’s sculpture Dreiklang (see ibid., p. 333). 32 See Kratz-Kessemeier, Kunst für die Republik, pp. 126ff., and also Timo Saalmann, Kunstpolitik der Berliner Museen 1919–1959 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), esp. pp. 41–47. 33 Belling, “Skulptur und Raum,” Der Deutsche Rundfunk, p. 622. 34 Ibid.

35 Eva Susanne Breßler, Von der Experimentierbühne zum Propagandainstrument: Die Geschichte der Funkausstellung von 1924 bis 1939 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2009), p. 63. 36 See Beloubek-Hammer, Die schönen Gestalten der besseren Zukunft, vol. 1, pp. 212ff. 37 Cited in ibid., vol. 1, p. 401. Up until then, Herzog had chiefly presented seemingly abstract-crystalline or organic formations involving intertwined forms, bearing lyrical titles like Symphony, Adagio, or Scherzo. 38 The program began at 8.30 p.m. Its exact length is not given. Afterward, the broadcast dispensed with the news and local reports, and the next broadcast followed at 10.30 p.m. 39 See the review on the program in Der Deutsche Rundfunk 5, no. 20 (1927), p. 1263. 40 See Kliemann, Die Novembergruppe, p. 34; for an in-depth look at the musicological significance of the Novembergruppe, see Grosch, Die Musik der Neuen Sachlichkeit, pp. 21–99, and also Martin Thrun, Neue Musik im deutschen Musikleben bis 1933, 2 vols. (Bonn: Verlag für systematische Musikwissenschaft, 1995), pp. 521–26. An acoustic impression is given in the recording by Matthew Rubenstein, Berlin im Licht: Klaviermusik der Novembergruppe, CD, Berlin Classics (0300196BC), 2011. 41 For more on the New Music, see Thrun, Neue Musik im deutschen Musikleben bis 1933, pp. 467ff. 42 Grosch, Die Musik der Neuen Sachlichkeit, p. 27. 43 See Nils Grosch, “Kurt Weill, die ‘Novembergruppe’ und die Probleme einer musikalischen Avantgarde in der Weimarer Republik,” in Kurt Weill: Die frühen Werke 1916–1928, ed. Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn, vols. 101–2: Musik-Konzepte (Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, 1998), pp. 64–83. 44 See the detailed list of the Novembergruppe’s concert activties in Thrun, Neue Musik im deutschen Musikleben bis 1933, pp. 606–8. 45 The Vox Schallplatten und Sprechmaschinen AG was the parent company of the Berliner FunkStunde, which was the first broadcasting company to go into operation in 1923. See the summary in Lerg, Rundfunkpolitik in der Weimarer Republik, pp. 151–55. 46 Grosch, Die Musik der Neuen Sachlichkeit, p. 42. 47 See the overview of programs for the Donaueschingen Festival since 1921, http://www.swr.de/ swr2/festivals/donaueschingen/programme/1921–1997 (accessed June 10, 2015). 48 See Das Kunstblatt 8 (1924), p. 72. For Zuckmayer’s radio work, see Theresa Wittenbrink, “Carl Zuckmayer im Rundfunk der Weimarer Republik,” in Carl Zuckmayer und die Medien: Beiträge zu einem internationalen Symposion, vol. 4: Zuckmayer Jahrbuch (St. Ingbert: Röhrig Universtätsverlag, 2001). 49 Heister, “Ein Abend der Novembergruppe,” p. 1199. 50 Ibid., p. 1198. 51 Lothar Band, “Moderne Kunst im Rundfunk: Ein Nachwort zum Abend der Novembergruppe,” Funk 2, no. 23 (1925), pp. 269–70, esp. p. 270. 52 Heister, “Ein Abend der Novembergruppe,” p. 1197. 53 Heister, “Fünf Jahre deutscher Funkjournalismus,” p. 414. 54 Band, “Moderne Kunst im Rundfunk,” p. 270. 55 Ibid. 56 See Wladimir Vogel, “Die Musiker der Novembergruppe: Zum Konzert ‘Zehn Jahre Novembergruppe,’ das der Deutschlandsender am 24. Januar aus der Philharmonie überträgt,” Der Deutsche Rundfunk 8, no. 3 (1930), p. 12. 57 Grosch, Die Musik der Neuen Sachlichkeit, p. 5. Exemplary in this context is also Ernst Krenek, the creator of the contemporary opera Jonny spielt auf (Jonny Plays, 1927), who spoke in retrospect of the search for “broader impact” and “contact with the outside world” (cited in ibid., p. 6). 58 Grohmann, “Zehn Jahre Novembergruppe,” p. 28. 59 See here Andreas Zeising, “Eine neue Qualität der Nähe: Künstlerinterviews im frühen Berliner Rundfunk,” in Das Interview: Formen und Foren des Künstlergesprächs seit Vasari, ed. Michael Diers, Lars Blunck, and Hans U. Obrist (Hamburg: Philo Fine Arts, 2013), pp. 99–128; Zeising, “Mit den Ohren sehen: Kunstgeschichte im Hörfunk der Weimarer Republik,” Kritische Berichte: Zeitschrift für Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaften 37, no. 1 (2009), pp. 112–26.

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II. RADIO ART: ARTISTIC PRODUCTION AND/OR POLITICAL PRACTICE

II. RADIO ART: ARTISTIC PRODUCTION AND/OR POLITICAL PRACTICE

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The Radio and/as Digital Productivism Philip Glahn

It is often the case that the death of a medium heralds its opposite: the medium’s rebirth in new terms, counter to the conditions that killed it. The death of radio was described in 1993 by Tetsuo Kogawa, a founding figure of the mini-radio movement—“mini” in the sense of not only tiny transmitters but also small service areas. Kogawa pondered what would become of traditional audio transmission in light of what he registered to be a period of radio’s decline as a medium of commu­ nication. Citing Martin Heidegger, Kogawa took the death of radio (that is, the end of its history) as a moment to gather “in its most extreme possibility” in the form of art.1 If it was going to survive at all, radio would have to develop its “polymorphous” and “chaotic” potential, in the face of the new digital powers of imposed order and mass ­manipulation. More than a decade later, with the free and pirate radio movements firmly established, came another moment of crisis for radio in the boom of smartphones and social media. As the Internet with its promises of unlimited convivial connectivity threatened again to kill the radio star, the members of the Berlin-based radio collective Mikro.fm reiterated the question of the ether’s fate. In defiance of globalism’s grand promises, Mikro.fm advocated a “radio of the courtyards, the block, the neighborhood” that would appropriate the possibilities of web-based Mikro.fm, Radio Forest at trans­ mediale 2008, photo courtesy of Kaspar Metz

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technology to create alternative, local networks of active and informed makers, senders, and receivers.2 In the contemporary moment, radio continues to radicalize while the discourse remains fixated on the possibilities and limitations of the Internet. Today, the related discourses around digital production and art as social practice tend to err either on the side of techno-euphoria—lauding, often uncritically, the presumably inherent qualities of new media, for instance its enabling of inclusive and democratic participation in the making of culture—or on the side of techno-phobia— lamenting the dehumanizing and reifying effects of mechanized artistic and intellectual labor, thereby reiterating rather than challenging conventional modernist binaries about the emancipatory potentials of aesthetic and technological innovation. In such a climate, Kogawa’s and Mikro.fm’s ruminations call for a more nuanced “technics of aesthetics”—the system of apparatuses and their function in the production and distribution of ideas and identities, knowledge and fantasies—or, to put it more simply, a consideration of mini- and micro-radio initiatives as a contemporary avant-garde. Today, such radio initiatives fulfill a dual role: one, they realize the medium’s historical potential to create new publics and a new kind of public (a counter-public); and, two, they serve as a critical-materialist reminder that technology’s revolutionary capacity lies with its use and its function (rather than any inherent or “natural” quality). Contemporary radio projects capitalize on the opportunities for expanded communication and shared resources offered by digital media, yet they rely on the physical radio apparatus as a tool for negotiating the realities and myths of access and inclusion, immediacy and immateri­ ality, the local and the global. They put to the practical test recurrent utopian notions like collectivity, participation, and dematerialization, ideas seemingly immanent to the rhetoric of the network. The various counter-publics created with each broadcast—that is, the network of communities that exist simultaneously, each reflecting the interests and needs of a particular public—provide a critical perspective onto the production and reproduction of social formations as sites or territories that are discursive as much as they are performative, thus relying on the specific and evolving, rather than merely symbolic, form of a politics of technology and aesthetics.

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In 1932, German playwright Bertolt Brecht famously demanded the Umfunktionierung or reappropriation of the radio apparatus, observing that “the radio is one-sided where it should be two-.”3 According to Brecht, the radio should be changed from a medium of distribution, of “mere sharing out,” to one of actual communication: he envisioned a “network of pipes” that would allow the audience to transmit as well as receive. By turning listeners into producers, such a two-way radio

would transform the dynamics of given social constellations: it would, according to Brecht, “bring [listeners] into a relationship instead of isolating [them].” Crucially, rather than creating an alternative sphere of subjectivity and communicative activity or replacing one set of subjects with another, this change in relationality aims to alter a system of individual (aesthetic) consumption to one of social production of public attitudes and perspectives. Russian theorist and Proletkult member Boris Arvatov had struck a similar tone in 1925 in an essay titled “Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing.” Arvatov advocated a new relationship to objects rather than their replacement with ostensibly “truer” or more authentic human interactions and social intimacy.4 To Arvatov, the task of the Russian avant-garde was specifically Productivist: to radically rethink the conventional object and the subject’s relation to it, and to construct what he called a “socialist object” that would function not as a commodity but rather “like a comrade.” “Portable and flexible, ready to be assembled and disassembled on short notice,” responding “formally to the newly collectivized everyday life,” the socialist object (for example, a kiosk or an orator) would actively transgress the boundaries between production and everyday life, providing agency rather than passivity, collaboration rather than individuation, solidarity rather than competition.5 The commodity object (including art), in contrast, offered merely an image, a simulation of individual, spontaneous, authentic experience as lifestyle choice, symbolically assuaging isolation and

Bertolt Brecht, rehearsal for Flight of the Lindberghs, Baden-Baden, 1929

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alienation with the semblance of progress and connectivity. For Arvatov, the radio is a socialist object when it is used as a tool of social labor, when it is a “technical system in which the productive process is realized in the work of directly connected, spontaneous activities organized by human labor. Here, for the first time, producing and consuming forms of energy are applied in the same way.”6 The radio as socialist object is a malleable, material, and active entity defined by its ability to generate collective rather than competing notions of subjectivity and ownership. Brecht’s and Arvatov’s calls for the repurposing of an already-existing apparatus of communication resounded as part of a number of postwar political movements. The Voice of Fighting Algeria began broadcasting in the mid-1950s, offering a voice different from that of the French authorities, and thereby actually giving rise to a shared anti-colonial experience of solidarity. The radio, according to the writer and revo­ lutionary Frantz Fanon, begot the very possibility of a shared perspective, a fantasy of collective participation in liberation: “Having a radio meant paying one’s taxes to the nation, buying the right of entry into the struggle of an assembled people.”7 A revolutionary consciousness was built not only through what was being said and heard over the ether but through the exercise of the public sphere, of Öffentlichkeit, as a site of active and engaged contention. The unsanctioned experiences that were aired contradicted the official narratives, but rather than simply establishing an alternative, autonomous zone of truer information and identity, they offered a counter-public consisting of the relationality between simultaneously existing, competing realities. As if to underscore the ongoing battle, the audience had to work their way along the dial to find the station, which was perpetually evading the authorities’ attempts to jam the frequency.

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Radio was also used in Europe for political change. Appearing as an integral part of the Autonomia movement in the mid-1970s, radical radio in Italy, for example, saw the widespread occupation of public frequencies as a crucial mechanism of a substantial political movement. Activist Franco Berardi of Radio Alice in Bologna recalls: “The radio stations were operated with luck and very little money, but they could cover a territorial space adequate for the organizational forms and communication needs of the emerging proletarian strata. Through this channel circulated an uninterrupted flood of music and words, a flood of transformations on symbolic, perceptive, and imaginative planes … anyone could intervene in the flow, telephoning, interrupting, adding, correcting.”8 By this point there existed a number of “free” or “pirate” radio projects, from Mexico to Denmark and the United Kingdom to Japan, that sought to wrest the airwaves from tightly regulated state and corporate control. They were exploiting legislative loopholes or illegally broadcasting on the lower end of the FM MHz spectrum from off-shore and mobile micro-transmitters, in opposition to what

was perceived as a highly selective and overtly commercial offering of information and culture. The idea of a counter-public as a changing, historically determined network of strategically connected ideas and needs in turn informed the “mini-radio” movement, which became a mass phenomenon in the 1980s, with more than one thousand mini-radio stations on the air by the middle of the decade.9 Kogawa attributes the birth of miniradio to a particular set of circumstances: the splintering of political forces following the 1960s student and civil-rights movements, the isolation of individuals in a burgeoning consumer culture, and tight airwave policies. In light of the difficulties and prohibitive costs of obtaining a license and operating a radio station, as well as the sophisticated surveillance and high fines for the illegal use of airwaves, special regulations for so-called “very weak airwaves,” such as remote controls and wireless microphones, provided the way forward. Mini-FM transmitters could be made cheaply and by hand, often operating on less than one watt, covering a radius of only one hundred to five hundred meters. Tetsuo Kogawa calls this “narrowcasting” (as opposed to “broadcasting”), satisfying the demand for a diversity of cultures on the air and defying the commodification of information. Kogawa cites Félix Guattari’s observations regarding the Italian free radio movement and its emphasis on “transmission,” “transversal,” and “molecular revolution,” suggesting that, unlike conventional radio, “free radio would not impose programs on a mass audience, whose numbers have been forecast, but would come across freely to a molecular public, in a way that would change the nature of communication between those who speak and those who listen.”10 Rather than producing and disseminating culture on an industrial level, mini-radio was designed to enable the politics of a street block or a housing complex, and, in turn, the politics of one network relating to the next, of one public connecting to another. Toshiyuki Maeda, Radio Home Run, Félix Guattari and Tetsuo Kogawa, 1983–85

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Early digital networking projects operated on a similar concept of intraand inter-local publics. Just as for the mini-radio, for Internet initiatives such as New York’s The Thing.net or Amsterdam’s De Digitale Stad (DDS), the production of limited communicative spheres was emphatically political, that is, driven by the desire to circumscribe a public as a malleable, temporary coalition of exchange according to evolving common interests and antagonisms rather than nostalgic and postmodernly defensive notions of romantic “regionalisms.” Unlike Kogawa’s mini-radio, these so-called “frameworks” and bulletin board systems (BBS), which were first built, designed, and operated in the early 1990s, depended on a notion of community that was driven less by geography than by a “unique techno-social dynamic.”11 This dynamic responded in part to the transformation of the Internet to the World Wide Web, a new browser interface that turned a mostly academic and military medium into a mass medium, allowing both greater access and increasing commercial control. These frameworks and early network projects were decentralized, self-organized, and noncommercial artistic communities, creating and self-reflectively employing structures of perception and imagination. Although projects like The Thing. net, Internationale Stadt Berlin, and De Digitale Stad were quasiautonomous homes to various works of net art, their crucial function for this inquiry is the active participation in a “technics of aesthetics,” the creation of a space where technology is employed to reflect on traditional means, and to produce new means, of perceiving the self in the world. In the DDS, for example, virtual arenas called “cafes” and “homes,” city “squares” and “libraries,” have been overlaid discursively and performatively, complementing and competing with one another as participants to navigate publics depending on association, interest, and need, determined by geographical location and thus material ties and a trans-local politics of virtual global citizenry. The problem, according to art and media historian Dieter Daniels, was that in the late 1990s critical net aesthetics split into two opposing camps, driven by the increased popularity of the Web, re-creating a conventional modernist binary of avant-garde art as either utopian facilitator of democratic access to culture or interventionist prankster and institutional critique decrying the caricature of interactivity offered by technoeuphoric relational aesthetes.12 To many, then, net art was but a repeat of failed modernist paradigms, as technological apparatuses were utilized to create substitute spaces of liberation, participation, and community offering merely symbolic respite from the recurring commercialization and monopoly ownership of productive social tools.

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As the advent of the Web’s all-encompassing digital network threatened to make analogue broadcasting obsolete, the radio movement faced a similar dilemma. While mass online culture continues to thrive on the projection of universal access and promises of a global knowledge

democracy, the problem with the Web’s myth of egalitarian connectivity and autonomous subjectivity is that the Web is highly regulated in both a commercial and an ideological sense. But the radio movement was in a position to repoliticize the limits of not only the material digital apparatus but the digital itself as a sphere of social production. The members of Berlin-based Mikro.fm, for one, voiced their concerns in 2007 regarding the increasing “digital abyss between California and Calcutta.”13 Not everyone has the necessary hardware or connection to link in. And even if everyone did, it remains a question of what is said and how it is said. The Internet retains the tendency to remain a distributor of monologues issued indiscriminately—a cacophony and multiplicity of monologues, to be sure, by monologues nonetheless. The strategy of mini- and micro-radio projects thus has been twofold: it has aimed to create what the Berliner hacker and Freifunk pioneer Elektra calls a “wireless Internet for all” and a relationality of public spheres based on agency and utility.14 Like a number of other radio projects, including reboot.fm and juniradio, Mikro.fm encourages the purchase of commercially (if not always legally) available mini-transmitters, and holds workshops and gives presentations. It circulates ideas and instructions via airwaves and the Internet, advocating the fabrication and use of cheap transmitters so that anyone can produce, receive, and pass on the stories and news, fantasies and perspectives, excluded from the mainstream media (fig. 4). Some transmitters can be plugged into a computer, using radio frequencies to broadcast and rebroadcast webstreams and other programs from neighbor to neighbor and block to block, while others can be used independently. The use of so-called radio forests encourages mass participation in a communication relay and, crucially, creates an awareness of content and reach, of different publics and forms of subjectivity and relationality, activating a conscious difference between producer and audience, but a perme­ ability between the two.

Mikro.fm, Trans­ mitter Soldering Workshop, held at the Chaos Communication Camp in Finow Airport, near Berlin, 2007

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The mini- and micro-radio is a socialist object in Arvatov’s sense when it is mobile in a material and ideological sense, when it is used for social labor and, hence, the collaborative making of ideas and world views, whether these concern the upheavals in Turkey,15 feminist protests in Italy, regional debates about alternative energies, or neighborhood discussions about repurposing an empty lot. Perspectives are political rather than principled, as these views and imaginaries are historically specific, hence malleable, yet determined in relation to the context and subjects that inform them and that are, in turn, informed and transformed by them. Radio appropriates the possibilities of digital global technology while consistently putting that technology into action and to the test. Radio is a contemporary avant-garde where it productively applies and critically reflects on the possibilities and limits of communication technologies, forming and re-forming counterpublics as sites of discursive and performative agency. As Brecht put it in “The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication”: “It is not at all our job to renovate ideological institutions on the basis of the existing social order by means of innovation. Instead, our innovations must force them to surrender that basis. So: For innovations, against renovation!”16

 1 Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper Collins, 1972), p. 57, cited in Tetsuo Kogawa, “Toward Polymorphous Radio,” http://anarchy.translocal.jp/ non-japanese/radiorethink.html (accessed April 14, 2014).  2 Heiko Thierl and IG Wilms, “AAC+, Apparaturen und Abidjan,” scheinschlag 03 (2007), http://www.scheinschlag.de/archiv/2007/03_2007/texte/15.html (accessed May 15, 2014).   3 Bertolt Brecht, “The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication,” in Brecht on Theatre, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), p. 52.  4 Boris Arvatov, “Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing,” October 81 (Summer 1997), pp. 119–28.   5 Christina Kiaer, “Boris Arvatov’s Socialist Objects,” October 81 (Summer 1997), pp. 113–14.   6 Arvatov, “Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing,” p. 128.  7 Frantz Fanon, “This is the Voice of Algeria,” in A Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 84.   8 Cited in Kogawa, “Toward Polymorphous Radio.”   9 Angeliki Gazi, Guy Starkey, and Stanislaw Jedrzejewski, eds., Radio Content in the Digital Age: The Evolution of a Sound Medium (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2011), p. 74. 10 Cited in Kogawa, “Toward Polymorphous Radio.” 11 Dieter Daniels, “Reverse Engineering Modernism with the Last Avant-Garde,” in Net Pioneers 1.0: Contextualizing Early Net-Based Art, ed. Dieter Daniels and Gunther Reisinger (Berlin and New York: Sternberg Press, 2010), p. 24. 12 Ibid., p. 40. 13 Thierl and Wilms, “AAC+, Apparaturen und Abidjan.” 14 Ibid. 15 See Franziska Rauh, “Radio Art in the ‘… Everyday Hand-to-Hand Struggle with Apparatuses?’,” in this volume. 16 Brecht, “The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication,” p. 53.

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Everyone a Listener, Everyone a Producer! A Collective Journey toward Another Sound of Radio Claudia Wegener

With the art of listening and the art of storytelling at hand, we can begin …!1 Making radio won’t be far away …2 In the absence of “free air” for ordinary people and daily life “in the peripheries,” how can we create, nonetheless, here and now, entry points for radio to happen, with and among the people, and begin to “radiate” among communities of listeners across a “global village”…? The DURBAN SINGS rough radio mix is one way of telling the story of the DURBAN SINGS project based on the online audio archives of its producer collectives. The piece wants to air how the project’s “vision” of radio correspondence between producer/listeners might sound, and to multitrack in sound, voice, and music what had just been growing over nine months in a thousand little steps, and many hours of local recordings in the South African province. DURBAN SINGS audio media and oral history is a pilot project initiated with the Centre for Civil Society (CCS) at the University of KwaZuluNatal (UKZN) in 2008. It was developed together with fifty young people from activist youth organizations in former township communities around Durban. The project included skills training for the youths in audio media, oral history, and the creative use of information and communications technology. It resulted in online audio archives by multiple producers, shared under Creative Commons licenses, networked via blogs, websites, and platforms. Collectives of young people learned how to edit, archive, and distribute media content of and for their communities, their organizations, and ongoing activities.3 “Remixing African Oral History for a global audience” was the proj­ ect’s call-for response (fig. 1). Resulting contributions from global listeners joined the project’s audio collections on the Internet Archive (archive.org). DURBAN SINGS rough radio is just one response to the call.4 As the soundtrack of a silenced, low-fi “road movie” of an EastWest continental crossing, the rough radio mix broadcasts via YouTube … I had intended to use some of my multimedia articles on the Creative Africa Network (CAN) for my presentation at the Radio as Art

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DURBAN SINGS project, Remixing African Oral History, call for contributions; poster/cover design, graphics: Terry Humphrey, 2009

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ARTISTS, MUSICIANS, DESIGNERS, PHOTOGRAPHERS, FILMMAKERS! YOUR CREATIVE DONATION WILL SUPPORT THE ON-GOING WORK OF THE DURBAN SINGS COLLECTIVES IN AFRICA, A NETWORK OF YOUNG CULTURAL ACTIVISTS ORIGINATING FROM THE TOWNSHIPS AROUND DURBAN. COLLECTIVES OF CULTURAL ACTIVISTS AROUND THE WORLD! YOUR CREATIVE DONATIONS CAN BE THE START OF AN ON-GOING CORRESPONDENCE AND PRODUCTIVE EXCHANGE WITH LIKE-MINDED ORGANISATIONS IN SOUTHERN AFRICA. WRITERS, RESEARCHERS, POETS, SCHOLARS! DONATING YOUR CREATIVE AND ANALYTICAL SKILLS TO THE WORK OF THE YOUNG CULTURAL ACTIVISTS IN DURBAN CAN SUPPORT THEM IN THEIR EFFORTS AND ENLIGHTEN THE AWARENESS ABOUT CULTURAL ACTIVISM ACROSS THE BORDERS OF A DIVIDED WORLD.

conference. This platform is, or was, until recently a dedicated online site for artists from Africa and the diasporas. I contributed many multimedia pages to the platform from various projects. I did so in support of the site, its users, and especially the initiative and acknowledged need for resources from Africa produced by Africans. On May 27, 2014, I uploaded an event page about the Radio as Art conference on CAN. A day or two later, the site was down; without any prior notice to users, nor any current notice on the site about what was going on. I brought this event—or apparent non-event—to the attention of this symposium, since the occasion could spark debate from more than one perspective, not least in terms of a need for collecting online artists’ publications today … In my presentation, I referenced a PDF of the online article “Remixing African Oral History,” which I still had on my hard drive, and used the past tense while referring to the online site and the CAN initiative.5

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The multimedia article “Remixing African Oral History” on CAN was meant as a kind of community portal and online interface, which would be opening the toolbox of the project and of the “rough radio mix” as a composition for radio. The article was an attempt at mapping the

multiply authored sources of the radio piece in a “remix tree” for online listening, a kind of switchboard of links to its archived sources. The page offered to serve as a guide for multitrack hearing: How to listen to the radio composition as a mobile archive of the project’s many sources, related producers, and networks, against the baseline of its vision and findings. The radio mix and its multimedia online interface were meant to amplify the sonic invitation to continue exploring the DURBAN SINGS project’s recordings and concepts, and to become active in making a different sound of radio heard—be it on air, online, or on the pavement. With and for the young people in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN), radio happened close to the ground: while roaming around with microphone and headset among the residents of their communities, or among the students on the university campus—a place they wouldn’t have dreamed of entering as learners themselves. Radio happened in our regular community lectures and events, where we would play clips of new recordings, hand out free CDs of playlists, share recordings of a broadcast on SAfm,6 or of a SkypeCast with young people in the inner city of Johannesburg, or a copy of a broadcast by Cjam in Canada. Cjam FM, for example, would be streaming our KZN productions from the Internet Archive in live on-air remixes—thus returning them to us, via the stations’ online archives, recharged with soundscapes and music from Windsor and Detroit.7 Such on-air outings of the DURBAN SINGS project would again join our online archive; and later, clips of the broadcasts entered my radio composition as on-air snapshots. Multitrack mixes like DURBAN SINGS rough radio would have only puzzled the youths before the project. Now, having become producers themselves, their listening could welcome the other and the strange; in fact, they enthusiastically shared the radio mix with friends and family, via their cell phones, or gathered around home DVD players. From here, they could now approach the task of remixing their own voices and stories, with the histories and traditions they hear from the community elders, and the all too many foreign stories of the “global information age.”8 The roots of the DURBAN SINGS project can be traced back to online listening between two earlier radio projects: Rasa FM, a hugely successful, and thus short-lived, community “pirate” radio in Soweto RSA, where my fellow project facilitator had been involved;9 and the No-GoZones audio radio project in South London, which we ran in 2007 and 2008 with artist and DJ Terry Humphrey, art students from the black communities at Camberwell College of Arts, and a group of youth offenders.10 The project included six weeks of drop-in studio workshops at Camberwell College, weekly live broadcasts on Resonance FM, and an online call for contributions.11

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w The following text introduces Influence 100 - the DVD, and the projects and processes that lead to it. The words on this page are meant to accompany the map on the reverse of this poster and an audio introduction on: http://www.archive.org/details/no-go-zo nes_203. The story summarized here unfolds in 100 variations while listening to the tracks of the DVD. Coinciding with the launch of the DVD, 'influence100' will be aired as a continuous stream on radio1001. http://www.radio1001.org/

It is not easy to write a summary or report about the NO-GO-ZONES audio radio project. It’s difficult to ‘sum up’ a project that is very much on-going, growing, developing and demanding attention at all ends of the new branches that seem to be sprouting up all the time. This difficulty – actually a difficulty to own and over-see the project as if it were an architectural structure - is also reassuring evidence that we are treading 'live' and fertile ground with our efforts. With the NO-GO-ZONES project, we were and are asking, if and how and how far a work could 'run itself' and everyone engaging with it could have the chance to actively shape it and take pride in it - as much as this can be true of a shared moment or a platform of encounters.

Radio communities = audio correspondence between listeners by means of composed transmissions of sound, rhythms , music and words as creative inter-action and the document and archive of inter-action.

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Influence100, the DVD (or 'station') received its audio contributions and 'findings' from near and far, via local groups, global networks and intercontinental correspondences, from the 'workbenches' of individual listeners, chance encounters on street corners and tables of 'audio-active' gatherings.

Influence100 is an invitation to copy, continue, re-cycle and re-mix all the findings the project presents, be it by sourcing the audio of the DVD collection or the no-go-zones archive for compositions, or by copying the processes used here as a road-map, or re-cycling the procedures of radio inter-action as a tool-box for 'radio community making' where ever you are.

It is one of the aims of the NO-GO-ZONES audio radio project to test and make use of public service, open source ways of publication and broadcasting. Its on-line presence is as 'rhizomatic' as the circles and networks of participating audience groups it touched and linked up with.

One of our main interests is to develop productive exchange with other 'audio and radio active' groups, whether they are established stations or artists and any kind of collective of people beginning to hear their own hunger for another kind of listening and a different sound of media.

Influence100 gives a name to these processes and to the DVD as receiver/ transmitter of 'slow broadcasting'. its launch is a transmission back into channels from where 'audio donations' arrived earlier; and from there the journey will continue…

Everyone we encountered in and through the NO-GO-ZONES project - on the street, on-air or on-line, or in the stream of 121-'broadcasts' (e-mail) - seems to contribute and take away something else and important for him-or herself. We called this process of 'wildly' sprouting media which we found while engaging with people through the no-go-zones work: 'radio communities'.

Influence100 presents the collection of 100 in form of an audio player and playful browsing tool: the red squares on the DVD screen are access points to audio tracks and players. From this field of audio allotments, listeners can assemble play-lists for their own use, taste, or mood; or enjoy spontaneous 'play-listing' and mixing (with the help of a projector, the interactive screen could also function for a collective use in presentations or workshops).

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Sound as a means to engage… with historical understandings,with past civilizations, with readings, books, ideas, with mountains and flat lands, and forests and rock-walls, and seasons, with images, and future, and to-day, and to-night, with someone across the table, or on the other side of the street, or on the other end of the line, or behind an other screen…

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The DVD Influence100 was dreamt up and produced as a means of transport for the findings gathered in all the branches of the NO-GO-ZONES audio radio project; as a 'radio' vehicle showcasing a collection of 100 influences and findings within and across local and global listening and broadcasting scenes, within and across super-local or inter-continental radio communities.

Influence100 is a temporary result (a station) from an on-going search for 'the sound of radio' tuned particularly to radio's conversational processes and procedures. The journey to this 'station' has been a hands-on, ear-in-the-street, and shared research into broadcasting and listening. The DVD compiles findings from a joint search, again, in a conversational way that may 'sound like radio'.

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Influence100 is a product of on-going audio correspondence between listeners. It maps a collection of 100 influences on NO-GO-ZONES, a public audio radio project, which began its journey with workshops for students and teenagers in South London, drop-in studio sessions, and live broadcasts on Resonance fm in spring 2007. From there, a growing on-line archive and listening exchange developed: the no-go-zones audio archive. http://nogozones.wordpress.co m/category/the-audio-archive/ The 'influence100' DVD is one station in an on-going journey whose past and future movement movements can be tracked on-line;

The project blog on wordpress.com is linked to a 'myspace' account as introduction and 'window-display' for the project, a space that comes with its own audience, rituals, customs and users. The audio clips are actually stored at the public online site archive.org, which again, brings a different public to the work, entering the project form various directions via keyword search. Participants and contributors were asked to add their work via archve.org thus expanding and linking into an open network of shared listening...

Influence100 is published under the creative commons license allowing non-commercial use. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nc/3.0/

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influence100 is the publication of the No-Go-Zones audio radio project. The poster edition accompanies an interactive listening interface presenting one hundred contributions and responses from global listeners. The contributed remixes of the project’s online archive are mapped out as a playful remixing tool. We wanted the interactive audio DVD to work like the project’s mobile radio station, which would be “animated” by its users/listeners wherever the DVD was traveling. At the time, the DVD traveled via snail mail into the intercontinental network of its producer/listeners and, through them, often spread its wings in live broadcasts.12 The DVD’s audio interface was programmed in flash by the artist Claire Morales, who was also an active member of our production team during the project. The DVD has one interactive screen, representing a map (resembling the London Tube map), with just one web link in the center. Each of the one hundred audio pieces has its own mini-player— fade-in, fade-out, pause, and stop—so that live remixing of potentially all the one hundred “influences” becomes possible. The central web link to the No-Go-Zones online audio archive can take listeners back to the project’s original recordings and/or can ensure that users/ listeners will be able to reach the latest news or audio uploads of the project.

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So far, the DVD interface has not been part of the project’s online ­archive, but recently Claire picked up work on an online presentation

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ALAN DUNN nomadawontsayowt 02:33 NWW 027. CYRIL LEPETIT yes no go zones 05;37 SSW 053. JEAN-PHILIPPE ROUX acting dark morph 03:26 SSE ALISON WONG shark-man-story 01:09 SSW 028. DANIEL DUBIAR MSAI no call track 03:11 N 054. JEM MACKEY swarmtv 03:55 NNE ANA LAURA LOPEZ you shouldn't be there 00:34 SSE 029. DAVID MEDALLA & GUY BRETT chinese peasant painting 03.04 N 055. JOACHIM MONTESSUIS ridiculous 02:55 SSW ANDREW ESIEBO rene 02:20 SSW 030. DAVID MEDALLA money's always a component 02:53 SSW 056. JOE FRAWLEY black swan (no orange) 02:14 SSW ANDREW KENNEDY, EMILY PAVLI & LUCAS SUGHRUE 031. DAVID PALAZON sound bites from a no-go-zone movie 00:34 N 057. KARON FRANCES cut out 01:51 NWW these other kids 04:31 SSE 058. LAILA MUSHAHWAR keisha's vase 01:05 SSW ANGELA HAUSHEER & LEO BACHMANN no-go-zone movie 02:15 N 032. DEBBIE GOLT interview with iraqi artist rashad selim 05:59 NNW 033. DINAH BIRD black and blue 01:46 SSE 059. LASSE-MARC RIEK dan on air 02:44 SSW ANGELO MADONNA kroniko(ngz) 03:35 NNE 034. ENTELECHY AMBIENT JAM turn it off! 02:40 SSE 060. LINDSEY SOL bordercity 01;59 SSW ANNE KHAZAM editing pain 02:49 SSW 035. EULA THOMAS & KARON FRANCES intriguing 02.09 SSE 061. LOTTIE CHILD on top 00:36 SSE AQUARIUM JAM RECORDS leaving coldharbour 02:51 NWW 036. FOREIGN INVESTMENT op.3 (theparadiseproject) 02:43 N 062. MABEL ENCINAS woman 00:56 N AQUARIUM JAM RECORDS rita keegan on poetry 02:17 SSW 037. found object MARIA MOREIRA guyana voices_archive sample A 01:38 SSE 063. MARIEL BROWN english men 02:22 SSE AQUARIUM JAM RECORDS dustcart heroes 02:51 SSE 038. FRAN LANDESMAN white nightmare 01.36 NWW 064. MARK MCGOWAN artist on fire 00:37 SSE ARWINDER BAWA for paali 00:33 SSW 039. FRANCIS THORBURN free rides 00:32 NWW 065. MARY-ANN PEREIRA call your mama 02:52 NNE AYMERIC DE TAPOL voice behind a camera 02:01 SSE 040. FRANK SCHUURMANS sound bites animation 00:26 NNE 066. MATTHEW LOVE AKA yung chase 03:06 NWW BEN OWEN 8131-6 02:50 SSE 041. GAEL SEGALEN empty cab 03:04 SSW 067. MICHAEL CURRAN dandelion 01:43 SSE BEN world view 00:53 SSW 042. GARTH RENNIE bobby orr n railton road 06:27 N 068. MOLEFI NDLOVU rasa fm speaking loudly 03:19 SSE BERANGERE MAXIMIN my nogozones 03:10 NNE 043. GEORGE SHIRE no place like home 03:07 SSW 069. MOVEZ on air 05:16 SSE BILL RYLEY special delivery 02:46 SSE 044. GIACOMO PICCA jalmax 02:46 NNE 070. MRS GREGORY SINGS pretty as a picture 01:24 SSW BRANDON WRIGHT & ALEX COSTARIS no go tomato 04:51 SSE 045. GORAN VEJVODA influence mix 01:25 SSE 071. NINA BARNETT immigrantbox 02:05 SSE CAROLINE BERGVALL summer tale 02:52 SSW 046. GUY BRETT itinerant note taker - note 1 01:19 SSW 072. OCEAN VIVA SILVER no babies zone 00:40 SSE CAROLINE KRAABEL taking a life for a walk 04:41 NWW 047. HENRI GAO BI african drumming 02:44 NWW 073. OPEN AIR A sound of no go zones 07:45 SSW CHANTAL PARE blackout 01:45 N 048. ILLEBOC-R the fixed position potentiometer 00:54 NNE 074. OPEN AIR B sound of no go zones 04:58 SSW CHARLES HAYWARD the same thing forever 03:42 NNW 049. ISA SUAREZ an answer now 01:16 NWW 075. OREET ASHERY golani varanasi 06:45 SSE CHRIS JEEP religion i'd say 01:12 NNE 050. ISMAIL FAROUK metro cop interview 2007 01:45 NWW 076. OTTO SANTALA barbermachinemadness 03:04 SSW CHRISTIAN WEIS life in zones 02:53 NWW 051. JAMES BECKETT tailor. cut-up 03:50 SWW 077. PATRICIA & YAA PEOPLE fire system 00:48 NNE CLAIRE MORALES iono 01:53 NWW 052. JAQUELINE JACOBS windsor pride 00:49 SSE 078. PETER CUSACK londonbridgestation19.4.07 02:00 SSW CLEON KING rap for life 01:26 SSE

079. 080. 081. 082. 083. 084. 085. 086. 087. 088. 089. 090. 091. 092. 093. 094. 095. 096. 097. 098. 099. 100.

PHILL NIBLOCK grind 16:01 SSW RACHEL ANDERSON reclaim the night 02:02 NNE RADIO CONTINENTAL DRIFT good story 1:20 NWW RADIO CONTINENTAL DRIFT my house is beautiful 02:44 NWW RADIO CONTINENTAL DRIFT pitso's car wash watch 02:06 NWW RODOLPHE ALEXIS shino b 01:46 NWW ROMANO metaprogram 04:15 NWW SHAWN HOLMAN & SABRINA ODDI multi culturalism and immigration in canada 03:14 SSW SIMONE & CORAL MICHELIN mangueira 02:37 NNE SIRPA JOKINEN you can't think differently 01:06 NNE SUSAN WISHARTHALAWI creative things 01:00 NWW TETINE disritimia 03:00 SSE THALES interviews Paulo 02:58 NWW TIM LAMBERT same thing over and over 02:34 N TINA KEANE mai ghoussob 03:10 NWW TISCHLER & WOOD civilisation 01:19 NWW TODD MERRELL coldharbour lane 03:00 SSE TOM JAMES original fish 02:58 SSW TUTU BENSON bananas 00:26 SSW WEEDWORKS & TRUNKSTORE the old man and the sea (sound for sea-soup movie) 05:58 SSE WILLIAM FURLONG & DECLAN MCGONAGLE derry10:09 NWW WILLIAM KENTRIDGE african artist 02:13 N

The process of curating and publishing the influence 100 DVD intends making the no-go-zones work translatable across territories and transportable in different circles and networks.

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for influence100. So, it is due to become available for download from the webpage of Claire Morales.13 Radio as hardcover production has a history on the African continent.14 Community radio regulations have been in existence in Zimbabwe, for example, since 2000, but no on-air community licenses have been granted since. Online streams require the same license. The so-called “community radio initiatives” continue to air their radio shows via CD distribution to the communities, often involving the local combi-taxis for broadcasting to their passengers en route.15 Apart from broadcasting into the country from the outside, satellite television is a possibility. Since July 2013, some of the community radio initiatives have been broadcasting via satellite television as Channel Zim.16

NO-GO-ZONES radio project, influence100 interactive DVD publication, accompanying poster, p. 2; graphics: Terry Humphrey, 2008

Online archiving and distribution of audiovisual content remains an avenue yet to be explored and exploited.17 So far, for many different reasons, that has not happened. For one, we may consider, that African users of the Internet encounter a global knowledge pool which, for more than 90 percent, does not originate from their continent; and that, in cultures deeply rooted in oral traditions, the place of the archive is—traditionally—shared recital in communal ceremonies, storytelling, dramatic seasonal festivals, and the like. In 2012, I traveled across the Zambezi … I had on my mind that I wanted to work with women in the future. My listening resulted in

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NO-GO-ZONES radio project, influence100, interactive DVD publi­ cation, screenshot of DVD interface for one hundred global remixes; design: Claire Morales, 2008

more than seventy interviews with women in Zambia and Zimbabwe, women who like myself are working in arts, culture, and media; some of them well-known artists, writers, musicians, and poets. They are telling their stories as creative women in their societies. I also asked them about their own media practice, online or otherwise.

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The project called THE WOMEN SING AT BOTH SIDES OF THE ZAMBEZI wants to share and circulate these audio resources via an online archive and multimedia blog.18 In my presentation I played some sample clips from the blog featuring the writer Virginia Phiri, the late Mbira-Star Chiwoniso, and the eighty-five-year-old veteran broadcaster Mavis Moyo,19 who is known as the mother of Development Through Radio (DTR). This project ran during the 1980s and 1990s and was facilitated by the Federation of African Media Women Zimbabwe (FAMWZ) and

some of the Radio 4 broadcasters at ZBC (the state broadcaster), with Mai Moyo as the project leader. When the project folded in the late 1990s due to the political situation in Zimbabwe, Mai Moyo continued to spread the concept of DTR across the entire Southern African region.20 DTR stands as a template of participatory radio and media literacy on a grant scale; an achievement grown entirely from the wisdom, creativity, and determination of African women. However, achievements like these have hardly any presence in the “global information age”; this applies to Mai Moyo and DTR, as much as to most of the women I’ve interviewed. To get a ball rolling, so to say, I launched a page for Mavis Moyo and DTR on Wikipedia. I regularly circulate the link to this page with a call for editors and writers to help update and “Wiki-fy” my start-up article.21 The DTR project entailed training the members of rural womens’ clubs to record their regular meetings on cassette-tape radios. The tapes were collected by ZBC technical personal and produced as weekly radio shows in the local languages. Broadcasters would add interviews with experts from farming or local government in response to some of the women’s questions or requests. Today, neither Mavis nor, of course, the rural women have any recordings at hand; if at all, they might be somewhere in the ZBC archives.22 With today’s digital technology, we can add to the foundations that DTR has built: even if not online yet, the women could learn to edit their own recordings; they could author their productions, own and keep their archives of footage and radio programs locally, and continue producing from there. THE WOMEN SING AT BOTH SIDES OF THE ZAMBEZI, “Celebrating Women’s Creativity and ­Resilience,” online playlist for Inter­national Women’s Day, March 8, 2014

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Another woman I met and interviewed in 2012 was the filmmaker Priscilla Sithole from the Zimbabwean city of Bulawayo. Since 2010, she has been training young women in film production using whatever little means are at hand.23 In partnership with Priscilla’s Bulawayo-based organization Ibhayisikopo Film Project, we have embarked on the journey of a creative media project that sets out to train women in arts, culture, and media organizations in Zimbabwe. While the creative industries are a male-dominated terrain, the task we have set for our program is to increase skilled multimedia production and online practice among the women. We want to see women’s expertise at work in advancing the in-house multimedia capacity of organizations. We want the voices and perspectives of African women and creative producers to be heard when it comes to connecting the African continent to “the global information society”—and, vice versa! While our project is awaiting its go-ahead on the ground, our activities can gain air and listeners via cyberspace … thus paving the way for what is still to come. Once our women workshop participants have gone through training and the production period, they will already find an informed and interested audience online via the infrastructure we have established in the meantime.24 So far, about one-third of the interviews are already archived online, shared via the blog, a Facebook group, and various public, art, and community platforms. For the time being, the task is to explore the means of playing, citing, and performing the archive, acting out possibilities for sharing, compiling, and presenting, creating teasers All Africa Sound Map, screenshot of project map on radio aporee, November 2014

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All Africa Sound Map, screenshot of project map on radio aporee, Zambezi Region, November 2014

and precursors of what can and could happen when we talk of “slow broadcast” or online audio archiving and distribution involving African women producers. The All Africa Sound Map hosted on the radio aporee project is becoming one of the radio flywheels in our project’s online infrastructure. “Place African Art and Culture on the Global Map!” is its callout to all listeners for audio correspondence with local recordings across the global map.25 With a fellow audio-activist in the UK, Felicity Ford, we shared conversations about the need to amplify in cyberspace how female knowledge is heard and distributed across cultures, and how to enhance women’s storytelling with creative media tools today, such as the sound maps on aporee. Our conversation became a multimedia article in Felicity’s online journal “The Domestic Soundscape.”26 Here, I’m giving an example of listeners’ correspondence which can already be traced on the All Africa Sound Map. I had played some recordings from Janet Mwiindi in Binga to the Zambian artist Agness Buya Yombwe, and one in particular captured her imagination: it’s the image and tradition among the BaTonga, in which women place red beads on the bed at the time of their menstrual cycle. Agness mentions this in her recording on the All Africa Sound Map.27 The task for us, women at the Zambezi, will be to translate, adapt, and customize digital media tools and concepts like those offered on aporee in and for the local situation at hand, with and for our participant groups of women in the creative industries. Meanwhile, we will carefully tackle the contested terrain of media, arts, and culture on the ground in Zimbabwe. Together, as a local task force of experienced multimedia

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women, we hope to approach the task of creating entry points for radio to happen among the people. … so, stay tuned! Join us on the FB group, or better even, correspond with us by sharing your local recordings on the All Africa Sound Map.28

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 1 My presentation at the conference Radio as Art showcased examples from my practice as radio continental drift, exploring what “slow broadcast” means and entails. To this end, I took my audience on a journey across online sites, archives, and platforms. For the publication, I have placed the links to the related online sites and audiovisual content in the footnotes. “Slow broadcast” basically means the systematic online archiving of audio content within a given collective radio project and the creative methods by means of which the audio content is brought into circulation for listening, remixes, and on-air broadcast.  2 Here, I played an excerpt from the movie DURBAN SINGS rough radio, YouTube video, 13:45, posted by “AnEarOnTheGround,” February 5, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=qtU5t2kUM8g. The soundtrack is also shared for free download on the Gruenrekorder label in the “Playing with Words” compilation, LCC/Crisap, 2010, http://www.gruenrekorder.de/ ?page_id=1821 (all URLs accessed in March 2015).  3 See “Oral History Workshop,” http://durbansings.wordpress.com/audio-media-andoral-historyworkshop/.   4 See “letters & remixes,” http://durbansings.wordpress.com/letters-remixes/.   5 Please find the PDF of the former multimedia article on CAN, “Remixing African Oral History,” here: https://radiocontinentaldrift.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/creative-africa-networkremixing-african-oral-history.pdf.   6 Find the SAfm broadcast here: http://www.archive.org/details/DurbanSings_163.   7 For Cjam’s broadcasts, see/hear for example Garth Rennie’s (Cjam) remix of a recording with Similo Gobingca in a Durban downtown bar, as noted in the PDF on page 5. Playlist: http://www.archive.org/details/DurbanSings_972; listen here: https://ia700504.us.archive. org/19/items/DurbanSings_972/02-cjam-090610-similo-remix.mp3.­  8 For an online follow-up of the DURBAN SINGS project, which was initiated by the Durban Editorial Collectives themselves, see “Quasha!” at http://qwasha.org.za.  9 I first came across RASAfm at Pambazuka News Podcast: http://www.pambazuka.net/en/ broadcasts/podcasts_2007.php. Veteran media activist Deedee Halek puts the story into perspective here: Mpumi Magwaza, “The Struggle for Freedom of Expression in South Africa,” July 11, 2007, http://deepdishwavesofchange.blogspot.com/2007/07/struggle-for-expressionin-south-africa.html. 10 The story told here is remixed in the rough radio mix, and links to the archived recordings are listed in the PDF on page 6. See the project blog of NO-GO-ZONES: http://nogozones. wordpress.com/radio-communities-rasa-fm/. The recordings of an initial telephone conversation are found here: http://www.archive.org/details/no-go-zones_623. 11 Our call for contributions was circulated via https://archive.org/details/call_for_influence100. We also posted a movie version on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjsRtXigeSM& feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL. As you can see in the movie, the NO-GO-ZONES project’s online callout was accompanied by a limited edition hardcover CD invite, which we handed out to “audio activists” in London and Paris at the time (2007). 12 At the top of page two of the poster, you’ll see the list of countries from where the remixes or “influences” reached us in London, and to which the DVD “mobile radio station” would then travel by mail in return. For a broadcast, which was featuring influence100 and which was initiated by one of the contributors, sound artist Sirpa Jokinem, see/hear: http://www.archive. org/details/No-go-zonesOnAirInFinland (YLE radio 1). 13 Website of Claire Morales: http://www.clairemorales.com. 14 One of the most well-known and possibly oldest examples of “hardcover radio” is provided by Bush Radio, the “mother” of community radio in South Africa, which already “broadcast” via secret cassette-tape distribution during apartheid times. Figure 5 shows a recent example by radio continental drift: The online playlist “Celebrating Women’s Creativity and Resilience” was initially circulated online for International Women’s Day 2014; I had brought a number of CD copies with me to the conference and handed them out as an example of “hardcover radio.” 15 “Radio Dialogue” has been pursuing this practice since about 2000. In this case, the local taxi drivers who want to participate sign up as members of the radio station and then pick up their new broadcasts every two weeks or so. This way, station and taxi drivers remain within the law and are less likely to be prosecuted. 16 See http://channelzim.net. If you check under “Podcast,” you’ll find that nothing is archived here.

17 There are only a few, quite recent, cutting-edge examples of online archiving and distribution in Zimbabwe, with audience range and accessibility still likely to be limited. Examples are the online magazine Her Zimbabwe (mainly text-image based) or Chat263 (multimedia archived on YouTube and SoundCloud). SW Radio Africa has a beautifully maintained, rich podcast archive, though this station is based in London and broadcasts into the country on shortwave, every day between 7 and 9 p.m. 18 Here you will find the project blog and portal to the online audio archive based on archive. org: http://both-sides-of-the-zambezi.tumblr.com/. Scrolling down, you’ll find the blog posts related to the women cited in the audio clips: Virgina Phiri, http://ia601704.us.archive. org/9/items/Voices_from_Harare_782/VirginiaPhiri-TraditionalCulture21.mp3; Chiwoniso Maraire, http://ia601902.us.archive.org/11/items/Voices_from_Harare_289/Chiwoniso-Getting ItOutOfTheSystem.mp3; and Mavis Moyo, https://ia601206.us.archive.org/34/items/Voices_ from_Harare_260/14MavisMoyo-RunningDtr.mp3. 19 Mavis is also commonly known as “Mai Moyo,” which would be the proper African way of addressing an elder, with “Mai” meaning mother in Shona. 20 Find the blog post for Mavis Moyo here: http://both-sides-of-the-zambezi.tumblr.com/post/ 72893741388/mavis-moyo. The audio is archived here: http://archive.org/details/Voices_ from_Harare_838. I also set up a page for Mai Moyo and DTR on CAN, which is of course lost now, too. 21 Wikipedia article on Mavis Moyo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mavis_Moyo. 22 One of my interviewees, Joyce Jenje Makwenda, made a film about Mavis Moyo, which I have not yet been able to view. To date, it has only been available in Joyce’s personal archive, though in May 2014 Joyce began setting up an online home for her multimedia archive: http:// www.joycejenjearchives.co.zw/archive/interviews/. 23 Find Priscilla Sithole on the project blog: http://both-sides-of-the-zambezi.tumblr.com/post/ 48872534088/priscilla-sithole. Priscilla’s website: http://ibhayisikopo.wordpress.com. Again, the pages I had set up for Priscilla and Ibhayisikopo on CAN are lost. In my presentation, I played the following clip from Priscilla’s interview: http://ia601702.us.archive.org/15/items/ Voices_from_Bulawayo_859/PriscillaSithole_Filmmaking4women.mp3. 24 In addition to the links I already mentioned above, there’s also a Facebook group for the “slow broadcast” circulation of AV content und correspondences: http://www.facebook.com/groups/ 506668076047173/. Also see the network of radio continental drift with this blog as its “switchboard”: http://radiocontinentaldrift.wordpress.com. 25 Our project map on radio aporee can be found at: http://aporee.org/maps/projects/all-africasound-map. 26 The multimedia article can be accessed here: http://thedomesticsoundscape.com/wordpress/ ?p=5422. 27 The story I’m sharing here can also be found in the article on “The Domestic Soundscape” (see previous note). Here are the links to the All Africa Sound Map: for Janet in Binga, http:// aporee.org/maps/work/?loc=18737; and for Agness in Livingstone, http://aporee.org/maps/ work/?loc=18953; or a direct clip on Agness’s response here: http://ia600903.us.archive. org/11/items/Voices_from_Livingstone/AgnessYombwe-PicturesInMyHead.mp3. 28 One direct outcome of the conference was a conversation on Mobile Radio between Knut Aufermann, Sarah Washington, and myself. Aufermann and Washington provided the radio stream for Radio as Art and also broadcast short interviews with some of the presenters in the conference intervals. Uploaded on Mobile Radio’s SoundCloud site, the interview circulated well across “slow broadcast” networks: https://soundcloud.com/mobile-radio/radio-as-artconference-in-conversation-with-claudia-wegener-of-radio-continental-drift?in=mobile-radio/ sets/radio-as-art-conference. Another outcome and follow-up of Radio as Art was a call for contributions extended to all conference participants, an idea that developed in conversation with Sarah Washington. The call was for short audio remixes in response to the recordings of the “Zambezi Women” circulated via Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/notes/continentaldrift/a-letter-of-invitation-to-the-conference-participants-of-radio-as-art-in-bremen/ 723102397754561. More recently, I’ve taken a second version of the idea and callout with me to the Sound::Gender::Feminism::Activism at London College of Communication (LCC): http://radiocontinentaldrift.wordpress.com/2014/10/14/women-artists-from-zambia-andzimbabwe-raising-their-voices/.

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Radio Art in the “… Everyday Hand-to-Hand Struggle with Apparatuses?” Franziska Rauh

In the title selected for this paper, I am quoting the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben in his 2006 essay “What Is an Apparatus?”1 Posed here is the question as to which strategies should be employed in responding to the apparatus, or dispositif in French, which he considers “literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings.”2 In my text I will explore the extent to which radio can represent such a strategy in the artwork of the Istanbul-based artist collective Oda Projesi. In order to lend tangibility to this potential and its efficacy, I will cite concepts of (counter-) publics—in terms of a production of alternative spaces of thought and agency—as a template for artistic activity. My decision to select this example in particular for such an investigation was made based mostly on the special role that proximity and everyday elements play in the work of Oda Projesi—since the group is interested in the creation and reformulation of spatial situations and human relationships. My interest in this form of radio art lies in its potential as an activist means of everyday hand-to-hand struggle, in allusion to Agamben. My conception of “hand-to-hand struggle” includes strategies that I will briefly mention now and explain more fully later on: the “erection of a stages of dissent”3 as an essential facet of politics, as per Jacques Rancière; political and mediatic self-organization; and the act of interfering with the broadcasting regulatory system. I conceive of such hand-tohand struggle as an exploration of competing parties, which can evolve in both violent and playful ways.

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But let us now return to the example that I will be examining as to its hand-to-hand struggle qualities. Oda Projesi is a collective of female artists who have been collaborating under this name since the year 2000. The artists participating in Oda Projesi are Özge Açıkkol, Günes¸ Savas¸, and Seçil Yersel. The basis of their artistic radio work was their activity in Istanbul’s Galata district. In 1997, they rented an attic apartment there to use as a joint working space and started realizing projects that predominately factored in the immediate neighborhood. In the year 2000, they moved into a three-room apartment one building down and thus positioned themselves at the center of an inner courtyard sur-

Oda Projesi courtyard during the Searching for a clay language project by Libia de siles de Castro and Olafur Arni Olafsson, March 2003

rounded by four adjacent buildings. Over the course of the next five years, this ground-level unit with direct access to the courtyard ­became the point of departure for over sixty projects initiated by Oda Projesi or fellow artists. Serving as audience, and as substantially involved individuals, were therefore their direct neighbors—especially women and children. The main interest areas pursued by Oda Projesi have led the artists to carry out projects that generally deal with questions related to urban and housing space, as well as to the changes taking place in Istanbul, particularly in the Galata neighborhood.

Lina Faller, Thomas Stussi, Marcel ­Mieth, and Marian Burchardt, FAIL# BETTER, June 2004

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Reinstalled door, upper entrance to the courtyard, April 2014

Galata in 2000 is a run-down district in the middle of Istanbul, near the very well-known Taksim Square and a lively shopping street called Istiklal. The residents tend to be economically disadvantaged families originating from the eastern part of Turkey, who found affordable housing in Galata after their arrival in Istanbul. The men provide for their families by working odd jobs during the day, while the women stay at home with their children. As in other metropolitan areas worldwide, a process of gentrification set in during this period, or started to become more clearly evident. Due to the valorization of what were once inexpensive residential districts, the housing and business structures have changed. Apartments and houses are fully refurbished and change ownership. New commercial facilities allow for the emergence of stylish cafés, restaurants, boutiques, hotels, and galleries. Previous residents often end up having to leave their apartments since they can no longer afford the rising rent. In the courtyard in Galata mentioned earlier, the first conflicts among old and new residents arise: related to the clotheslines spanning across the courtyard or the old iron doors which were installed once again in the courtyard passageways that had previously been open and now are only accessible with a key.4

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Oda Projesi has also been impacted by these processes of marginal­ ization, specifically when a new owner canceled the lease on their rental apartment. During the process of figuring out a new place to work, the artists met the French artist Mathieu Prat, who helped them to build a little radio station in their apartment. The centrally ­located room with a French window opening up to the courtyard became the studio, with the antenna situated in the courtyard itself. The

Oda Projesi Radio­ studio as part of the 101.7 Efem radio project in collaboration with Bookstr/ Mathieu Prat, February–March 2005

transmission range reaches only the adjacent buildings. Those who wish to listen can do so with small radio devices from their apartments or the courtyard. During the last month before the move, Oda Projesi was broadcasting from their courtyard-apartment on the 101.7 FM frequency and thus testing the possibilities presented by radio space as a new home for Oda Projesi. The program of 101.7 Efem is diverse: discussions, music, concerts, cooking shows, neighborhood news, karaoke, weather, advertising, et cetera. Each week of the month has a central theme: gentrification, gossip, neighborhood, the construction of so-called “gecekondulars,” which are informal houses built overnight. The program is announced on posters in the direct vicinity. Oda Projesi Radioshow as part of the 101.7 Efem radio project, participants Oda Projesi, Barıs¸ s¸en, Feyyaz I˙lban, and Ug˘ur Ergin

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As with previous projects, the neighbors are strongly involved in the process. They significantly contribute to programmatic decisions as both target audience and producers. Furthermore, outside guests are also invited to participate. While Oda Projesi focuses on the narrative dimension, Mathieu Prat is more interested—also probably due to the language problem—in the notion of archiving (vanishing) sounds in order to build a common sound of the neighborhood. Agamben, in his essay, initially takes a genealogical approach to the concept of the apparatus, mentioning theological oeconomi, Heidegger’s Gestell, and Michel Foucault. Agamben’s view of the apparatus is closely aligned to the Foucauldian approach, as the Italian philosopher notes in the following: a. It is a heterogeneous set that includes virtually anything, linguistic and nonlinguistic, under the same heading: discourses, institutions, buildings, laws, police measures, philosophical propositions, and so on. The apparatus itself is the network that is established between these elements. b. The apparatus always has a concrete strategic function and is always located in a power relation. c. As such, it appears at the intersection of power relations and relations of knowledge.5 Another central point is found in the processes of subjectification likewise taking place. Apparatuses create their own subjects in order to become established as governing machines.6 Intervening in the apparatuses also implies intervening in the processes of subjectification. However, Agamben is not only interested in the formation and effect of apparatuses. He first and foremost fields the question as to how people can protect against the regimentation and drilling caused by them.7 My current research has initially dealt with tracing the network surrounding Oda Projesi, the connections between the individual discursive and non-discursive elements. This step of defining relations allows me to determine who is playing which role within the power relations.8 Elements of dispositive structure related to Oda Projesi are, for example, the inner courtyard, the studio, the antenna, the microphone, the landlord, Oda itself, the neighbors, posters, the (political) debate about the urban transformation of Istanbul, Turkish broadcasting policy, et cetera.

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My thesis is that this artistic production opens up apparatus structures, generates counter-images, and thus intervenes in prevailing discourses,

practices, and processes of subjectification. These interventions lead to shifts and also to new links within the network of power relations. The strategy adopted by Oda Projesi—founding a pirate radio station to archive and broadcast the sounds vanishing due to urban change— counters the strategy of the public apparatus in effect there. Amid the established media public in Istanbul, Oda Projesi’s radio project functions as a form of (counter-)public. However, the term “counter” is not to be understood as something completely delimitative, but rather as a “counter” that is always also a part of the whole.9 Be that as it may, I would like to emphasize that here we are dealing with a public that represents an alternative to the prevailing public on various levels, calling it into question. The points on which I have based my assertions will be introduced in the following. I am interested in working out how the artists, as carriers of this counter-public in the sense of counter-thematization through production, function as an alternative media public. In addition to the siting of other content, an alternative or counter-public also implies alternative production conditions. Accordingly, what a counter-public amounts to is not only an increase in information and deliberation, but also political and mediatic self-organization—which goes to show that Oda Projesi’s radio project functions as a counter-public and therefore enlivens the network of the apparatus. First of all, the use of radio opens a stage of dissent. The dissent taking form on this stage is deployed as a multilayered critique of the changes taking place in Galata and the way this impacts the residents—ranging from the conflict about clotheslines to self-reflection on the role of the artists as “fuel” for gentrification. The relevance of this produced stage must be evaluated in the context of the Turkish media landscape. An initial analysis shows that the restructuring of entire districts is mediatically thematized, if at all, in the framework of a positively connoted discourse on progressiveness. It is positioned as signifying the revival of the Turkish economy and the state as a whole. What is missing are positions critical toward this “neoliberal version of capitalist urbanization,”10 as well as related statements from district residents that have been suppressed. This is not surprising since the ruling party AKP controls almost the whole media landscape, and the segments of the population living in districts like Galata lack access to their own media-related possibilities of production and dissemination. Oda Projesi, with their project, occupies this gap in the public apparatus. The radio station becomes a stage for opinions and people that cannot be found in the media public conforming to the current regime; its very existence already challenges this given dominance that is presumed to be natural. Part of my further research will be to more closely differentiate and to analyze the roles of the actors and the fabric of the Turkish media land-

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scape surrounding them. In the case of Oda Projesi’s radio project, however, it is also important to carefully distinguish the roles of the neighbors, the artists themselves, and their guests. The conditions for participants vary strongly according to their social status, which is ascribed to them by the dominant culture of knowledge—East Anatolian housewives play a different role than the artists coming from an academic background. Further, the circumstance that the artists and the participating neighbors are almost all women and children warrants special consideration. In pursuing this trail further, Nancy Fraser’s approach to counter-publics may prove seminal. In contrast to more dated concepts of the public (Jürgen Habermas, etc.), Fraser focuses on subaltern counter-publics in the sense of marginalized publics and thus frees up space for questions of “gender” and “class.”11 What is more, Oda Projesi’s project is also an act of structurally interfering in the broadcasting domain and its regimes. The mere fact that Oda Projesi is operating its own radio station represents an infringement of the broadcasting regulatory system. Radio is subject to state control in Turkey as well; pirate stations are illegal and are prosecuted. In this case, however, it may be considered less of a breach, because, due to the ban, Turkish broadcasting policy is actually already engaging in the conceptual process of acknowledging the existence of pirate stations, which in turn includes them in the broadcasting system. Instead the following question arises: To what extent is an attack on the regime already expected and absorbed? Furthermore, the do-it-yourself principles and the collective structures of working and decision-making in Oda Projesi’s work do not correlate with professional broadcasting structures and practices. The artists are more concerned with joint action and development than with technical perfection. Yet there is an emancipatory potential for the participants in these experiences of political and media-related self-organization. Nevertheless, it would be important to assess the points at which pretense and reality meet, that is, to examine how precisely the decision-making processes run, who influences the radio program, and which hierarchies are operative among the artists, neighbors, and guests. In addition to these classic aspects of alternative media practice, Oda Projesi’s radio project particularly involves reflection on space, media, and one’s own everyday life. Action provokes and plays a part in negotiating questions of spatial use, spatial demands, housing and urban space, the relationship between private and public, urban policy, monitoring, gender roles, media usage, and one’s own everyday life.

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This allows us to determine that Oda Projesi has not fostered a great movement, nor have the artists tried to—instead, they appear to be involved in engendering consciousness on a micro level. The radio

project by Oda Projesi has been adapted to the everyday life of the participants and thus corresponds to the idea of counter-publicness as a form of practice conveyed through media and culture—one that is embedded in social practice and geared to an individual lifestyle, thus opening up counter-cultural living spaces.12 Oda Projesi provides a place for exchange between groups that would not usually encounter one another. The insight gained on other mindsets and lifestyles in the process raises awareness about the knowledge and power relations in which one’s own life is embedded, but also about the related processes of inclusion and exclusion. And spaces of potentiality are also opened, making room for alternatives, especially for different living concepts for women in Turkish society. Yet on a macro level there are relevant reference values to be found. In the context of the Gezi Park conflicts in the summer of 2013, the gentrification of Istanbul moved to the center of mainstream discourse. In the process, the Gezi Park protests have integrated artistic and political practices in which people of varying social backgrounds engage; it has developed into a countrywide protest movement. Much more is ultimately at stake here than preserving public green space. Despite some differences, this issue is an important point of reference for the radio work of Oda Projesi. It shifts the concept of close combat from a playful, aesthetic level to a violent one—where the government exercises full control over the media in the form of Internet blocks and one-sided news coverage, even taking numerous fatalities into account as the price for staying in power. One of the Galata neighbors of Oda Projesi told me that she had opened the iron doors to the inner courtyard to harbor demonstrators from the police and tear gas. I am not suggesting that this support by the neighbor, who might otherwise endorse Erdog˘an, should be directly associated with Oda Projesi. But perhaps their shared experiences did serve to facilitate solidarity with the demonstrators and their concerns. In any case, an exciting reference point is provided by the so-called “open forums” spawned by the protest movement. District residents meet regularly in parks to discuss how they might best utilize and defend “their” urban space. It remains to be seen as to whether this form of bottom-up urban (district) politics can be sustained or whether it is merely a temporary formation of the myth of social blending within new cities.13 The same goes for the dissemination of critical positions on the Internet and the use of social networks for organizational purposes as a form of counter-publics. However, the drastic reactions to the government may indeed be a hint that these interventions into the public apparatus have thoroughly rocked the power relations. 125

  1 “What Is an Apparatus?” was originally published in Italian in 2006 under the titel Che cos’è un dispositivo? (Rom: Edizioni nottetempo). German translation: Giorgio Agamben, Was ist ein Dispositiv? (Zurich and Berlin: diaphanes, 2008). English translation: Giorgio Agamben, “What Is an Apparatus?,” in “What Is an Apparatus?” and Other Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 1–24. In order to remain consistent, in the following I am using the term “apparatus” from the English translation “What Is an Apparatus?” However, I actually prefer the French term dispositif or the German term Dispositiv in order to emphasize the content-based character of the term as used by Michel Foucault, who references Agamben. In this sense, I am also isolating the term from the more technical-spatial or (state-based) institutional concepts of the apparatus. For more on the content-related critique of the English translation and the related terminological distinction, see Jeffrey Bussolini, “What is a Dispositive?,” Foucault Studies 10 (2010), pp. 85–107.   2 Agamben, “What Is an Apparatus?,” p. 14.  3 Jacques Rancière, Moments politiques: Interventionen 1977–2009 (Zurich: diaphanes, 2011), pp. 8–9. On dissent as the essential facet of politics, also see: Jacques Rancière, 10 Thesen des Politischen (Zurich and Berlin: diaphanes, 2008), especially These 8, pp. 33–38.   4 From a recording of the conversation between Anne Thurmann-Jajes and Seçil Yersel by Oda Projesi on November 15, 2012, in Istanbul.   5 Agamben, “What Is an Apparatus?,” pp. 2–3.   6 See ibid., pp. 11 and 19.   7 See ibid., p. 15.  8 Here, it is neither possible to fully determine apparatuses, nor to clearly delineate them. “The Dispositiv cannot be described in its totality, nor can it be outlined in its topicality. It exists fragmentarily in individual areas and on different levels.” Translated from Elke Bippus, Jörg Huber, and Roberto Nigro, eds., Ästhetik x Dispositiv (Zurich: Edition Voldemeer, 2012), p. 9.  9 On the concept of the (counter-)public, see Jeffrey Wimmer (Gegen-)Öffentlichkeit in der Mediengesellschaft: Analyse eines medialen Spannungsverhältnisses (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2007). 10 Andrej Holm, Wir bleiben alle! Gentrifizierung–Städtische Konflikte um Aufwertung und Verdrängung (Münster: Unrast Verlag, 2010), back cover. 11 See Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text 25–26 (1992), pp. 56–80, and Nancy Fraser, Die halbierte Gerechtigkeit: Schlüsselbegriffe des postindustriellen Sozialstaates (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001). 12 On the social dimension of (counter-)publics, see Jeffrey Wimmer, (Gegen-)Öffentlichkeit in der Mediengesellschaft, esp. pp. 161ff. 13 See Holm, Wir bleiben alle!, pp. 53ff.

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Radio as a “Minor” Art Practice Ursula Frohne



Only the minor is great and revolutionary. Deleuze and Guattari1

Two inconspicuous objects—nothing more than a couple of red bricks, marked with traces of yellow sulfur paint—were prominently displayed at documenta 13 (2012) in Kassel. The striking simplicity of this sculptural statement presented under the title Czechoslovak Radio 1968 (1969) was displayed inside the so-called “brain,” the Rotunda of the Museum Fridericianum, where a selection of heterogeneous works highlighted the focal points of the curatorial concept. The here ­assembled pictures, objects, and moving image documentation shaped a network of discursive relationships, addressing political conflicts and transformations of totalitarian regimes as well as humanitarian and ecological challenges of the Anthropocene. The two bricks included in this ensemble had played a significant role when the Warsaw Pact army invaded Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1968. During this confrontation between peaceful protesters for a more open socialist system and the opposing armed forces, people were forbidden by a decree of

Tamás St. Turba, Czechoslovak Radio 1968, 2012

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the state to listen to the radio. This tense situation crystallized in those fake radio objects that protesters carried while walking in the streets as an act of resistance against a repressive regime that had prohibited the flow of information during the so-called Prague Spring. Tamás St. Turba’s artistic appropriation and sculptural reenactment of those dissident “usages” of “brick radios,” similar to those exhibited at documenta 13, referenced the charged political situation of the Prague Spring. Placed inside the central gallery space of the Museum Fridericianum, the historical resonance of these objects was closely interlinked with photographs and video documentations by artists and activists who had witnessed and recorded more recent incidents of state violence against dissident movements in a variety of contexts, for example during the events of the short period of the Arab Spring. Within this discursive frame, the brick radios recalled how simple objects from the everyday context can be transformed to symbols of dissent when displayed collectively and in public. In 1968, people in Prague used simple bricks wrapped in newspapers to mimic radio sets, while others complemented them with painted-on control buttons or with wires to simulate antennae as receivers of information. Although completely “non-functional … as communication device,” these objects provoked vigorous crackdowns by the state authority. Since people were pretending to listen to their imaginary broadcasts, those bricks were “continuously confiscated by The Russian army,” as Tamás St. Turba explains in a short text that was printed next to his remade radio fakes installed at the gallery wall of the Rotunda: When a military decree prohibited the people from listening to the radio, a recipe was invented, and since it did not request talent, skill, knowledge, mastership, virtuosity, etc., anybody could make it in the sense of fluxus, many people realized it: “listen to a newspaper-covered brick on the street!” So, the soldiers confiscated thousands of this non-art-art pieces all around the country.2

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The recount of this historical background and the activist impulse to engage in a parody of the forbidden practice reveals not only how artifacts of everyday usage are able to acquire a new and possibly minatory meaning by public enactment within precarious political processes.3 Also, their symbolic meaning, despite their non-functional deployment, sufficed to provoke interventions by the military forces, because even the mimicking gestures of listening to silent bricks demonstrated apparently a forbidden media practice that had to be prevented. Apart from the discourse of art’s political dimensions at documenta 13, these objects also strikingly revealed the transgressive potential of the radio medium as a potentially uncontrollable communication device. As emphasized by Tamás St. Turba’s comment, the

public display of the ostentatiously nonsensical purport of those listening gestures conveyed the experimental spirit of Dada and Fluxus art and their demonstrative misappropriations of objects or the stammering of language as a kind of deterritorialization of the ruling conditions of modern society. Such dissonant practices refuse to represent the established and accepted modes of aesthetic orders by disruption of dominant forms. Also, the humor implied in such methods of misuse may “operate as a strategy of dissent—but also of affirmation. In fact we might see humor as a form of affirmative violence: violence against typical signifying formations,” as Simon O’Sullivan explains in his analysis of Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s concept of minor art practice.4 Although the materiality of the bricks could well be associated with the throwing of stones by protesters at public uprisings, the intervention by the military forces were hardly motivated by their potential usage as weapons. It was rather directed at the symbolic meaning, paradoxically brought to the fore by an ostentatious misusage of the bricks. Their potential conversion into projectiles gave less reason to confiscate them as dangerous objects than the contrary, their harmless usage within a performative setting, which caused however a shift in signification and transformed the innocuous objets trouvés into conceptual markers of civic resistance. The herein revealed interrelation between the radio medium and cultural practices emerging from spheres of political suppression and dissent will set the focus for the following considerations. Embedded in the processes of the everyday, the communicative conditions of radio make it applicable for creative means that can be linked to Deleuze’s and Guattari’s theory of “minor literature.”5 Their philosophical discourse on “minor” art practices was originally associated with Franz Kafka’s writings, but its main argument can be expanded to a critical and subversive notion of art in renunciation of canonized forms while dedicated to emancipation and immediacy. In contrast to “major literature”— which can here be extrapolated into major art forms—in minor literature, every incident is, according to Deleuze and Guattari, politically connoted. All individual affairs gain importance within the microperspective of the “minor,” because it reflects the macro-perspective. According to the Deleuze-Guattarian definition of “minor,” a major language can be used by minorities, which is a prolific model to map the creative and affective usages of radio. The notion of the “minor” challenges established norms of so-called “major” art forms and offers a useful perspective to frame aesthetic practices at the margins of the institutionalized spheres of art, as they are shaking the existing orders and dominant discourses, as well as one’s own position. Against this backdrop, the aforementioned example of the brick radio’s display in the public sphere during the Prague Spring—with its claim of free access to information across the boundaries of the controlled

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Czech soldier holding a radio in Prague, Czechoslovakia, August 27, 1968, listening to speeches and announcements after Czech leaders returned from nego­tiations at the Kremlin with Soviet leaders. The Soviet Union and four Warsaw Pact allies invaded the country on August 20, 1968

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sphere of the Soviet military regime—can be seen as a creative practice with collective value in the way that it thwarts the established system from below by a dissonant application of the “major language.” The demand for reform measures by the protagonists of the Prague Spring envisioned reforms of the socialist system. These hopes were overpowered by restricting measures.6 Retrospectively, it seems astonishing, that a playful enactment of fake radios could have such an impact on the macro-level of the political climate. Apparently, the public display of such disassembled objects rendered the repressive policy of the regime in power even more visible.7 The bricks’ potentiality to serve as weapons of a rebellious mass strangely cross-faded under the conditions of political suppression with the—albeit inoperable— symbolic meaning of a “minor practice” that “pushes up against the edges of representation; it bends it, forcing it to the limits and often to a certain kind of absurdity.”8 After all, local radio and TV stations had been shut down in consent with the four Warsaw Pact allies since the invasion of the Soviet Union. Any semblance of interactions with communication media was hence considered a political statement that provoked enforcement of the military.9 As contemporary witnesses recall, the methods of civic resistance were multifaceted and caused strategic disorientation of the occupying forces by falsification of street signs and guideposts in Prague to create opportunities for the Czech people to assemble at public locations without being spotted by the military forces. Similar activities were already envisioned by the Situationist International in the late 1950s and theorized as dérive, a set of activities that were conceived to create ruptures in the established orders and to disturb the habitual processes in urban space. Similar effects were achieved during the Prague Spring by groups of people gathering around bricks, bending over and pretending to listen to voices that were allegedly transmitted by fake radios. Although those deceptive actions triggered the least severe reactions of the military aggression, “the Soviets arrested hundreds of such stones.”10

The fake radio enactments of the Prague Spring underscore the impact of radio as a creative medium that continues to be a forceful influence on the present.11 Wireless broadcasting reaches across borders and can be received with comparably simple technical equipment. Hence radio waves transport information across great distances and can reach wide audiences without being fully controllable. Its low-threshold transmission technology accounts for a scope that has shaped radio’s historical significance as much in the service of totalitarian regimes as for dissident objectives which can be recapitulated in view of the structural entanglements of communication politics throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Significantly, radio technology has also been utilized as a manipulative device of aggressive propaganda by the National Socialists. As an inexpensive medium, it served the systematic infiltration of the public: after 1933, the Volksempfänger (people’s radio) was installed in virtually every German household. Many of Edward Kienholz’s suggestive environments pick up on this key role of radio technology as the major Nazi propaganda instrument. Various installations of authentic historical radio sets in Kienholz’s oeuvre bring to mind how the masses were systematically impinged by the broadcasts of Hitler’s and Goebbels’s thumping speeches via these Volksempfänger.12 Paradoxically, radio technology was also applied by a few brave individuals of the antifascist resistance in their attempts to access broadcasts from abroad in order to receive information about the actual military situation and to find out about the advancing of the allied troops apart from the German propaganda machinery. A stirring example of these efforts to subvert the Nazi terror is reported by survivors from the Buchenwald concentration camp. In spite of extreme surveillance and increasing sadistic harassment by the Nazi henchmen, courageous “political detainees” skillfully built a simple

Edward Kienholz, Volksempfängers, 1975–77

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radio receiver with rudimentary devices. In contact with the international broadcasting of Radio London and Radio Moscow, they managed to obtain a realistic assessment of the military situation and to subvert their total isolation.13 Using a self-constructed shortwave receiver made from a piece of wire and added to two tubes, which were complemented by other pieces that they had branched off from the spare parts storage, their crude construction—that was successfully hidden inside a bucket with shoe polish—served as a functional device to overcome the deadly ban on listening to foreign radio stations. Eventually it even enabled the detainees to send out SOS calls in English, Russian, and German to the approaching allied troops shortly before the end of the Second World War.14 Within this trajectory of radio’s multifaceted history of an as much experimental and subversive as politically charged instrument, the mechanisms of its public effects and its affective scope seem comprehensible. A medium understood as a practical communication tool always bears the potential to give voice to emancipatory movements inasmuch as it can be turned into a manipulative tool. Already in 1964, Marshall McLuhan referred to this ambiguity of a medium’s operative side with reference to the light bulb: it can be “used for brain surgery or night baseball,” as he states. In his influential book Understanding Media: The Extension of Men, McLuhan underscores the fundamental “indifference” as characteristic for a medium. It is by definition predestined to be applied to controversial means and in diverse contexts.15 Moreover, “the content or uses of such media are as diverse as they are ineffectual in shaping the form of human association,” as McLuhan further explains concerning the medium’s intrinsic blindness for its content. This specific “understanding” of the means of media has found a condensed articulation in the emblematic formula “the medium is the message” because it is the “medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.”16 Whereas McLuhan’s interest was not so much on the mediated content, but more focused on the powers of the medium itself and the way it affects the audience, the diverse of radio usages, particularly in the field of art, fathom this potentially transgressive character of the medium and bring to the fore the contextual power constellations that have shaped the ambiguous history of the mass media.

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The transgressive role of the radio medium is hence deeply related to the degree of creative applications that may be directed in opposition to its surrounding political, social, and media culture by which it is produced. Thanks to its centrifugal and proliferating dynamic, radio broadcasting works on a molecular level. The psychoacoustic effects of radio define its specific relevance also for the formation of collectives and for the “becoming political” of minority groups.17 Within activist circles as much as in the field of art, experimental radio practices have

been involved in the realization of new social or political organizations. As the enacted listening to fake radios during the Prague Spring has revealed, the experimental and even mimicking usage of the medium may have “the power, not to represent the world or located subjects, but to imagine, create and vary affects that are not already given.”18 These utopian qualities, which Deleuze and Guattari have identified as characteristic for a “minor literature,” are also shared by radiophonic transmissions and their creative usages.19 It is important for this discourse, however, to keep in mind that the term “minor” is not necessarily an indication of something that happens “apart from” or “outside” the major constellations of media and art practices. On the contrary, when radio is in the following referred to as a “minor” form—in media and art practices likewise—it is implied that it operates from within the “dominant systems of signification and representation,” using the same communication apparatus, but with different methods and means than the mass media.20 Within this framework, Deleuze and Guattari identify three characteristics of minor literature:

Radio receiver (“bucket receiver”) built by detainees of the concentration camp Buchenwald, replica constructed by pupils of the Martin AndersenNexö School in Dresden, 1968

… the deterritorialization of the language, the connection of the individual and the political, the collective arrangement of utterance. Which amounts to this: that “minor” no longer characterizes certain literatures, but describes the revolutionary conditions of any literature within what we call the great (or established).21 133

Unconventional practices apparently minorize the major language or form of which they are a part while stressing their dissidence. Experimentation allows for the unpredictable to emerge and comes in as an alternative to the incorporation of the status quo. Expression is valued higher in minor practices than the effort of finding a unifying form. The migration of sounds via radio transmission to a diversity of contexts hence fosters the emergence of multiple and transversal connections which signifies the “minor use” of an established language or form. Its disruptive impact on the existing orders emphasizes and subverts the political impasse of mainstream representations. It seems productive to situate radio art practices within this discourse and to explore its non-reducible publicness as a form of “becoming minor.” Here lies the relevance of the radio, particularly in times of electronic communication and social media, which is even more evident in view of contemporary artworks that give voice not only to minority concerns “within a major society,” but also enable alternative subjectivities to take shape in processes of becoming political.22

Radio-Active Futures … the difference between minorities and majorities isn’t their size. A minority may be bigger than a majority. What defines majority is a model you have to conform to … A minority, on the other hand, has no model, it’s a becoming, a process. Gilles Deleuze23

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The publicness of radio transmission associated with its expansive communication radius found an early and emphatically futuristic manifestation in the Moscow Shukhov radio tower.24 Designed and erected by the engineer Vladimir Shukhov between 1920 and 1922, its monumental yet transparent and gracile scaffold structure still conveys a sense of the utopian optimism and unbridled hopes for progress promoted by the Russian Revolution. As an expression and a pathos formula of the enthusiasm of the modern times, the Shukhov radio tower embodies the spirit of technological innovation in perfect match with the Soviet avant-garde’s own revolutionary impetus.25 Walter Benjamin refers in his Moscow Diary to this “enormous … radio transmitter” that he perceived as an exemplary visualization of the innovative process initiated by the Soviet revolution.26 The energetic features of its architecture survive as a relic of Lenin’s 1920s campaign for electrification of the whole country that was supposed to link the Soviet project to progress and modernity.27 Shukhov, himself a member of the State Commission for the Electrification of Russia, developed his plan for the radio tower with this concept in mind. Its silhouette reflects its function, the wireless transmission of radio waves that

Left: Vladimir Shukhov, The Shukhov Radio Tower, Moscow, ca. 1928

Right: Aleksandr ­Rodchenko, Guard at the Shukhov Radio Tower, Moscow, 1929

metaphorically conjure the dynamic and expansion of the revolutionary movement. This idealized perception of the radio tower crystallizes in the famous photograph by Aleksandr Rodchenko that dramatically enhances its expressive architecture. The guard, placed at the center of the constructive network of lines that echo the shape of his pointed bayonet, conveys metaphorically the radiant force of the socialist idea(l) that immerses the figure at the center.28 Professionally trained as a radio engineer, Rodchenko was evidently fascinated by the spectacular features of this modern radio architecture.29 He pictured the Shukhov radio tower in a sequence of photographs that concentrate on its energetic structure by graphic emphasis of its metal stirrups. They appear as visual equivalents to the non-visible radiant electromagnetic waves of the radio technology. The central role of new communication media to function as a powerful tool for the revolutionary process found multiple realizations in Constructivist media displays. Among these are facilities with surfaces for the placarding of posters or newsprints, as well as screens for the projection of filmic material or constructions with loudspeakers for audio transmissions into public space. The Latvian artist Gustav Klucis elaborated on a series of drafts for mobile radio-orators that document the promise of broadcasting for the proliferation of the political programmatic, but also for educational means. After his graduation from the State Academy of Moscow, Klucis became an emphatic member of the Constructivist movement who advocated “production art” in contrast to the classical art forms. In this context, he began to experiment with the construction of media displays and agitprop kiosks with integrated speakers for radio transmission for installation in the streets. 135

Gustav Klucis, Untitled (Screen Radio Orator No. 5), 1922, Moscow

Two such structures were constructed for the Fourth Congress of the Comintern in November 1922 and subsequently enjoyed great popularity as their plans were published and models exhibited. Through these constructions Klucis developed his own individual method of combining slogans and functional structures built around simple geometrical figures—this method would later lie at the core of his works on paper as well.30

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With this great series of propaganda stands, which were dedicated to the fifth anniversary of the October Revolution and the Fourth Comintern Conference, Klucis had his first public appearance as a promoter of agitation art: loudspeaker stands, displays for projection screens, kiosks, and illuminated advertising facilities with rotatable informational

devices gave shape to the claim that abstract solutions had to be abandoned in favor of practical applications of art in the service of a new functional aesthetic.31 The integration of new media technologies in visual art and architecture was a consequence of this Constructivist programmatic. Creative liaisons between classical and new media were embraced and new solutions for implementation of these modern technologies in urban environments aspired to. Klucis’s inventions of dismountable and dynamic stands, including loudspeakers and rotating projection screens, with rostrums mounted on blocks and foldable steps or walls that could be transformed into display windows for books, journals, or magazines, were designed to be part of everyday processes and to engage in material interactions with the common experience. Instead of reproducing reality mimetically, the goal of Production Art was aesthetic creation with simplicity, economy, expediency, and usefulness to result in radically new montages of the real.32 Klucis’s invention of mobile displays for radiophonic and filmic content emerged from this impetus. They also aspired to a logic of gathering that provided the conceptual scaffolding for “the collectivization of subjectivity and the calling forth of new kinds of community that this implies.”33 Those experimental settings not only contributed to an extension of the radio sphere but also redefined the public (sculptural) space by inclusion of sonic effects. The Constructivist attempt to make aesthetic concepts productive for radical reforms of the living conditions produced an expansion of accessible radio environments. These efforts coincided in the late 1920s with the emergence of new broadcasting formats directed at new and increasingly more differentiated radio audiences.34 Benjamin, for example, produced more than eighty contributions to German radio that were broadcast by Radio Berlin and Radio Frankfurt during the years between 1927 and 1933.35 Although much less well-known than his writings on photography or film, these works are paradigmatic for the era of early public radio that fathomed the expressive and experimental scope of the still young medium. Among the convolute of Benjamin’s radio productions are programs for children and pieces that he wrote and delivered to broader audiences, covering a wide terrain of themes and genres, including narratives about robber dynasties, science fiction about surveillance apparatuses under the control of “moon beings,” or catastrophic events across the globe. These radio contributions are exemplary for the collective value of “minor” art forms and the herein engrained political relevance that Theodor W. Adorno captured with the suggestive term “radioactive” when he referred to the “explosive appeal of Walter Benjamin’s writings” in general.36 The double meaning of Adorno’s metaphorical reference to Benjamin’s work as an author is spelled out by Lecia Rosenthal, who comments on the denser semantic meaning of the German word, implying “a different register of boundary crossing,” since it

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Cildo Meireles, Babel, 2008

… shares with Rundfunk, or radio, a connotation of atmospheric spreading, dispersal, and uncontrolled movement across and within borders and lines of containment; the airwaves, like the air or the atmosphere, represent a quasi-invisible scene or medium of transmission. While the German does not directly imply the coincidence of these two (roughly contemporary) modes of radiality, the notion of Benjamin’s gaze, and from there his work, effecting a radioactive transformation suggests the potentially dangerous, if also exciting and new, power of radio and its power to broadcast.37

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As Rosenthal underscores, the proliferation of radio broadcasts ­sustained the political efficacy of the young mass medium which continued to gain momentum prior to the outbreak of fascism. Its

growing reception and popularity was welcomed, but rapidly perverted upon the Nazi’s seizure of power. A comment on this ambiguous historicity of radio as a cultural practice seems to be addressed also by Cildo Meireles’s sculptural assemblage of several hundreds of second-hand radio sets. Piled up in a circular structure, the multiplicity of radio apparatuses—all turned on and tuned to minimum volume—takes the shape of a sculptural tower. The arrangement of mass-produced radio sets, antique ones as well as more recent models, results in a vast and monumental structure that correlates with the audible cacophony of information, music, and human voices that reference the biblical story of the Tower of Babel as the work’s title suggests. Cildo Meireles, coming from Rio de Janeiro, concentrates in his accumulation of radio sets “the voices of all kinds of people speaking a single word in many languages.”38 He describes it as a “tower of incomprehension,” an installation that speaks in multiple tongues, while all meanings of the uttered words disappear in a choir of inaccessible expressions, merged to a sound of abstract and steady humming.39 A magic blue light enhances the atmospheric intensity of the installation and contributes to the immersive effect of a scenario that conveys a physical experience of the human inability to communicate with each other, in spite of the technological devices and informational sources ubiquitously available to the hypermodern subject:

Vladimir Tatlin, Monument for the 3rd International, 1919

A global humming is transmitted in Babel. … It allows room for inquiring why some people see in globalization the chance for a new world and others see the risk of an unprecedented oppression. Will the global world be uniform? Or will it be inventive and diverse, creating new identities, imagining new mestizages?40 Reminiscent of Vladimir Tatlin’s model for the Monument for the 3rd International, whose construction also served as a transmitter for new communication media—a gigantic projection screen placed on the top level displayed the news from cultural

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and political life with a globally communicating technology to demonstrate the international orientation of the socialist movement—Meireles’s radio tower conceptually reflects the narratives of the human hubris from ancient times through modernism and to the digital age.41 In contrast to Tatlin’s utopian model, Meireles’s installation quite literally cites the narrative of the Tower of Babel with a more skeptical perspective on the informational age and globalization, drawing an analogy to the hypertrophic project of a tower tall enough to reach the heavens, which offended God and caused confusion and conflict among all people, leaving them divided and scattered across the earth. His … tower of transmissions reminds us that since the thwarting of Babel and the scattering of peoples, a single universal language that “would allow for pursuing one common project” is impossible. Embracing that multiplicity, Meireles resists the impending disappearance of half the existing languages in the world.42 With these effects of globalization in mind, Meireles challenges the notion of an ideological implementation that ultimately “serves to benefit large capital and acts within an ‘inertial situation.’”43 On the other hand, his installation could also be seen in relation to the narrative of The Library of Babel, originally published in 1941 by the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges, in which the author describes “a universe in the form of a vast or conceptually complete library that has its centre everywhere and its limits nowhere.”44 This idea of an inexhaustible source of stories transmitted by a universal medium—here embodied by the worldwide proliferation of radio waves—“corresponds to Meireles’s interest in expanded notions of space and of infinity, in an excess of perceivable information and the processes of cognition.”45 Meireles’s Babel, though, casts a skeptical perspective on “globalitarianism,” which seems to him more of a hegemonic force than a democratic promise that revives potentially totalitarian patterns of the past and may, at its best, be “situated between the all-encompassing sign of Aleph and the all-encompassing desire in Borges’s Library of Babel, between the essential and the excessive.”46

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Whereas Klucis, Tatlin, and Meireles aspire to the transmitter function of radio with its diverse and even dialectical means in the political landscapes, the German sculptor Isa Genzken emphasizes its receiving qualities with a “readymade, multiband radio” placed on a plinth (1982). Followed by a series of similar works, Genzken described these minimalistic objects with sticking out antennae as powerful “stand-ins” for the subject of the artist herself.47 As suggested by the joint title Weltempfänger (World Receiver), those seemingly hermetic

plaster blocks are connected to an inaccessible interior that receives ideas, thoughts, and impulses from the outside universe. In this case, the radio receiver serves as a sculptural metaphor for the intensely interactive relation between the artist’s mind and a world sending out signals that are condensed and eventually take shape in the work of art.

Isa Genzken, Weltempfänger (World Receiver), 1986–91

Transgressive Radio

Millions and millions of Alices to power. Félix Guattari48

A key modality of the “minor” in the Deleuze-Guattarian sense is its close connection with the wider social milieu. A multitude of interlinkages with the vernacular languages of its specific space and time allow a “minor” cultural practice to relate to the outside world and to keep up a permeability for experimental impulses which is the basis of the micropolitical relevance, also of multiple radio projects emerging in the aftermath of the 1968 movement. A pertinent example of the independent broadcasting that positioned itself outside the state monopoly of public radio in Bologna, Italy, is Radio Alice, founded by Maurizio Torrealta, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, and the writer Enrico Palandri. It flourished during the short period of political upswing, after the constitutional court had declared on February 26, 1976, that the monopoly of the state over the public media was unconstitutional. More than one hundred new independent radio stations arose

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within a very short time in Italy with noncommercial, democratic, and critical broadcasts that turned the media landscape into a “social laboratory” and a vibrant microcosmos of public discourse and debate.49 Citing Lewis Carroll’s famous narrative of Alice in Wonderland, the name for Radio Alice was programmatically chosen to suggest a poetic, unconventional approach to broadcasting that was determined to stand up for social change and a transgression of political boundaries. With its claim for civic participation, Radio Alice “can be considered the first experiment of deterritorializing the telecommunication system and of attack against the centralized media system.”50 Berardi retrospectively describes the project as a collective enunciation directed against the hegemony of the established communication and information system that was destined also to counteract the “cultural conformism and the political dictatorship of the Communist and Catholic Party.”51 One of the main concerns for the protagonists of Radio Alice was to work against the strict separation between transmission and reception, which Bertolt Brecht had already addressed as an order that did not originate in the logic of radio technology, but was imposed and naturalized by those who were in power and cementing the established monopolies over the media.52 Radio Alice freed broadcasting with its radical transformation of the conventional sender and receiver paradigm, transforming radio from a distribution apparatus to a communication device granting access for everyone in both directions: the audience was encouraged to get actively involved instead of merely listening to and receiving the delivered information. People were invited to call in via telephone or to come to the broadcasting studio and engage in the production of content with instant contributions.53 Since live calls and comments were transmitted directly without being filtered, also verbal invectives against the radio editors and hosts of course went on air, giving as much of a voice to adversary positions as to explicit affirmations of the free radio practice. The conviction that social practice and language are not separated, but closely connected and amalgamated with the modes of communication, was considered a basic orientation for Radio Alice’s general openness to affect and spontaneity, without restrictions concerning “contamination between different styles and cultures.”54 This commitment to impurity also “expressed a Dadaist, schizo impulse” that Guattari thought of “as a rehearsal for the emergence of … social creativity.”55 The involvement of the marginal, often also associated with the vernacular, is a key element of minor practices that essentially contributed to the experimentation with new methods of enunciation that “precisely stammer and stutter the commodity form, disassembling those already existing forms of capital, and indeed moving beyond the latter’s very logic.”56 Working under these conditions, Radio Alice stood for a radical implementation of publicness and was a counterpart to the statedominated communication of the 1970s. After this brief intermission of collective experimentation and independent telecommunication

practices, this model has now been replaced by the monopoly of corporate media companies that define the current media landscape. When Berardi was accused of being one of the spokesmen of the insurrection in Italy in 1977, the end of Radio Alice was sealed. Aggressive repression from the power regime gave way to a wave of colonization of the communication sphere, dominated in Italy by Silvio Berlusconi’s globally expanding corporate media imperium. Berardi was only saved from imprisonment by escape to Paris, where he stayed with his friend Guattari, who summarized in the introduction to Radio Alice Radio Libre that in retrospect it “was not an instrument of information, but a device for destructuring the media system, the trigger for a destructuring of the social nervous system that continued in the following decades, with liberating but also catastrophic and panic-inducing results.”57 The temporary creation of autonomous zones for collective initiatives such as Radio Alice proved that the idea of producer-oriented broadcasting was not only technologically an operative possibility, but also a socially and politically feasible one. Its rhizomatic structure anticipated in fact a principle that today is ubiquitously accessible via the Internet. Rather than by radio transmission, the current public environment is globally and moreover economically defined by the World Wide Web. While on the one hand, the technology of video camera and audio recording enable virtually everyone today to become a producer and to proliferate content into the mediascape, the once imagined public sphere of the Internet has in the meantime been narrowed by corporate interests and is increasingly defined, if not controlled, by commercial means. Long before wireless Internet transmission emerged, the Slovenian artist Marko Peljhan extensively experimented with autonomous and globally operating high-frequency radio network structures that he made accessible for emancipatory projects and for people residing in dislocated areas such as the Arctic

Radio Alice poster, February 1976

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region, also mapping the command and control of communications networks during the Srebrenica genocide. Peljhan’s early work was inspired by the easy accessibility of radio technology, enabling virtually everyone to produce and contribute to a widely connected community, while at the same time the need to escape surveillance by state control becomes more urgent. As a teenager in former Yugoslavia during the 1980s, Peljhan had been a member of a radio club whose participants chatted with people all over the world via a shortwave transmitter.58 This early hands-on radio experience provided basic knowledge for the development of the autonomous communication system INSULAR Technologies (International Networking System for Universal Longdistance Advanced Radio) that Peljhan realized in 1999. It was conceived as a worldwide, publicly accessible and decentralized radio network, which also transfers data, text, and language, alongside using customary communication structures. First and foremost, it should ensure dependable communication practices between independent cultural-, media-, and social initiatives, and between non-governmental organizations and individuals whose situations in remote areas and regions cause them to operate with a limited connectivity.59

Marko Peljhan, Makrolab, 1997–2007

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Peljhan’s enlightenment radio practices underscore the interrelation of various contexts and spaces as well as the range of environments that broadcasting projects are able to connect. His famous Makrolab was also based on his research and practical experience. Introduced to the public at documenta X (1997) in Kassel, this ongoing project took the Russian MIR station as a model and was designed as a laboratory that expanded the concept of radio transmission by tapping “communications data streams emanating from anything from police radio to satellite telephones.”60 It was designed for the interception of three subject areas of global concern: the first was telecommunication, the second addressed the weather in connection with electromagnetic systems, and the third was dedicated to migration and navigation— all three aspects of high political and ethical significance. Although the intention of Makrolab was to tap into satellite communication

systems that are mainly used by agents in economic or political power positions—for example when linked with each other for UN telephone conferences—the means of this project “were strictly legal, thus providing further evidence of the vulnerability of allegedly impregnable telecommunications networks. In view of permanent data mining revealed by the publications regarding the US Echelon System,” Peljhan’s concept raised public consciousness for the relevance of those topics long before they were identified as acute and pressing within the broader political discourse.61

(Re-)Enactment of Radio Histories what we see is determined to a large extent by what we hear.

William S. Burroughs62

But it’s hard to imagine that you’re talking to 10,000 people … It’s just hard to conceive of. You HAVE their attention.

Paul McCarthy63

Conceptual artworks have envisioned the potential of broadcasting to serve as a tool for counter-protocological practices in multiple ways. Since the 1970s radio transmission has been addressed in exemplary positions as a source for orientation within local contexts as well as in a global scope during times of political precariousness and in revolutionary processes. An installational reconstruction of Dan Michalitanu’s Bucharest studio from the time when he was living and working in Romania refers to radio coverage as a corrective measure around the dramatic downthrow of Nicolae Ceaus¸escu’s regime in December 1989. Mihaltianu’s work consists of a room where all dimensions correspond with the actual size of the former studio, containing a loft bed and a projection of video footage recorded in realtime through the actual window of his Bucharest studio displayed on the wall, where it was originally located. While the video image recalls the micropolitical perspective on the events in the way they effected the immediate neighborhood, a turned-on radio set, placed on the artist’s desk, simultaneously transmitted audio coverage of the revolution in progress: The deceptive calm conveyed by the footage of unruffled day-to-day indoor and outdoor life contrasts with the edgy news broadcasts, and makes visible the boundaries of visual

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Dan Mihaltianu, Window, 1989–90

information … In Mihaltianu’s studio, media are a vehicle conveying a cut-out of the past, of the optical surface telling only half the story—that of everyday life in Bucharest, that is—while omitting the political events. The confrontation of the recorded radio babble and silent projections underscore the fictional, illusory character of video images, exposes them as the limited, incomplete account of the bygone reality.64 Mihaltianu’s installation allowed visitors to physically enter his provisionary studio space and to experience the atmosphere of uncertainty that the artist lived through during the time, when the outcome of the people’s uprising against the totalitarian regime was still unforeseeable. The continuous sound of the broadcasting referenced the macroconstellations of the historical situation and underscored the essential function of radio broadcasting under conditions of political instability. Thanks to its deterritorializing effect, radio secured him a connection to the outside world and spared him as historical subject from exposure to the immediate violence of the dramatic moment in a transitional phase that finally ended the continuous state of violence in the Ceaus¸escu regime.65

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Since the 1970s, a wide range of contemporary art approaches have referenced radio as a medium of critique that may also have an impact on the formation of collectives. According to Deleuze and Guattari, it is characteristic for minor art practices that they conjure resistance to the present and generate—similar to the modes of philosophy—a sense for “a new earth, a new people.”66 Following the logic of a becom-

ing (political), also the notion of minor art is intimately linked to the imaginary, directed at the “invention of new modes of existence” and involved in the unclosing of alternative spaces for communication.67 As an exemplary initiative in this vein, the formation of Close Radio deserves to be addressed as a weekly program that emerged as a collaborative project of artists in and beyond Los Angeles. Since art magazines, galleries, and museums were reaching only a limited number of people, the idea arose to use mass media as a strategy of expanding the radius of the art audience.68 It was hosted by the local radio station KPFK between 1976 and 1979 and served as an open platform for presentations of sound and art projects via radio broadcast. Founded by artists John Duncan and Neil Goldstein, the program was primarily organized by Duncan and Paul McCarthy, with Nancy Buchanan and Linda Frye Burnham also participating as organizers at various points in the program’s history. Over the course of more than 100 broadcasts by more than 90 artists, Close Radio challenged nearly every conceivable industry standard of radio broadcast, and collectively its projects present an encyclopedic array of strategies used by artists to present performative art works using only sound.69 McCarthy, coproducer of and contributor to this collaborative radio project, presented a photograph that he had shot in 1978 as an illustration of an article on this initiative that he published in the art journal High Performance. The image opens the view to an American West Coast landscape riddled with transmission towers. According to the artist’s own comment, he chose this as “a picture of Close Radio’s ‘space.’”70 His metaphorical reference to a public sphere that emerged from the new creative radio program also suggests the idea of a new Close Radio, broadcasting studio, John Duncan and engineer Steve Tyler on the air

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Paul McCarthy A picture of Close Radio’s “space,” 1978

community of listeners that connect to the weekly broadcasts with provocative and sometimes cryptic content. McCarthy’s image reveals hardly more than a few scattered broadcast poles in the midst of an anonymous bleak terrain, but its unspecific appearance signifies even more convincingly the space of airwave communication defined by its dislocated participants. As cofounder John Duncan also explains, audio space is the one that most visual artists don’t use very often. I was interested in developing that sense. I knew there had to be more than a handful of artists interested because of the numbers of people working in performance, which relies on both, visual and auditory senses.71

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Close Radio was a pioneering initiative that connected the spheres of broadcasting with the new Public Art genre by an overlapping concept of activism, educational ethos, and theory in experimental formats that made information about politically or socially suppressed content accessible and democratized user conditions for public media. A pertinent example of its alternative media practice and agency was Suzanne Lacy’s project Three Weeks in May which started on Mother’s Day, May 8, 1977, shortly after the press declared Los Angeles to be the designated “Rape Capitol of the Nation.” Lacy, a feminist and critical artist, responded to this headline with research, collecting statistical surveys and compiling news coverage on rape cases to relate them to the affected individuals and the concrete locations where sexual ­violence had occurred in the greater urban context of Los Angeles.72 Apart from the broadcasting, her concept for Three Weeks in May combined diverse components, including performances, lectures, press conferences, self-defense courses, workshops for affected women,

and a large yellow map of Greater Los Angeles in which the authentic locations of sexual violence cases were marked by red stamps reading “RAPE.” The map was located at a shopping center close to the City Hall of Los Angeles and was continuously updated according to the incoming police records and complemented by red stamps for each new case.73 Displayed in public space, the mapping campaign was complemented by Lacy’s contribution to Close Radio in which she read out the facts of authentic criminal offenses, including the exact time and location where the crime occurred; also, the age of victims was mentioned in each case.74 Broadcast as Readings from the Map, Lacy recited the information in a quiet voice from the police files, narrating the details about the rape cases in a neutral tone to mirror the factual language of documentation, also specifying the effects of the violent attacks and the physical injuries. Lacy used the opportunity to reach a large audience via Close Radio to break the silence about an omnipresent yet persistently suppressed issue of public concern. The broadcasting confronted a taboo of a shocking reality of American life and broke the silence about an issue generally associated with a minority, brought to the fore as an issue of every woman’s concern. Citing empirical but socially denied facts, Lacy used the radio medium with an un­prece­dented affective intensity for the proliferation of knowledge about the actual degree of sexual violence against women. With this strategic implementation of the “minor”—concerning Lacy’s project as much as Close Radio that served as its conceptual frame— into the broader media landscape, the constructed differences between minorities and majorities were effectively blurred. Three Weeks in May used radio transmission of precarious information to push art “against

Suzanne Lacy, Three Weeks in May, 1977

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the edges of representation.”75 And once again in reference to Deleuze and Guattari, a minor art “stops being representative in order to now move towards its extremities or its limits.”76 Contemporary art practice means, in many cases, a process of “becoming minor in the sense of producing movement from ‘within’ the major” … to generate new forms of thought and agency “… through a manipulation of those already in place.”77 Its utopian dimension takes shape by the enactment of other subjectivities by identification or with empathy across the boundaries of gender or social identity. “Both feminist and post-colonial art practices and art histories might be seen as minor in this sense, involving as they do a kind of deterritorialization or stammering … ,” which explores the potential “… collectivization of subjectivity and the calling forth of new kinds of community that this implies.”78 Such a utopian spirit, albeit in a retrospective view, characterizes Men on the Line: Men Committed to Feminism, KPFK, 1972 (2012), a performance by Andrea Fraser, based on a live radio broadcast from 1972 in which four men discussed in breadth and with intimate details the implications of feminism for their own identity. It was first presented at the Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival in Los Angeles, which was organized and sponsored by the Getty Museum and LA>