radio techniques, the space, terratorality

Shifts in technology bring with them new configurations of embodiment, and in addition resituate how voicing comes to make incarnate a sense of self.

La Belle Raw Orality: Sound Poetry and Live Bodies 146

There we find the radio contortionists- artists intent on finding ways of making the airwaves carry more than just signals of ideas, communications, questions or announcements.

The arrangement and rearrangement of voices, allowed by radiophony and telephony has encouraged a self awareness that could not be known before the possibilities of doubling and fragmentation that these technologies introduced.

My idea is to investigate these possibilities further, as a collective of producers. i met with 4 women friends to discuss and explore radio. Rather than the acceptance of stultifying media formats and conversational mores, we might assume and attempt these technologies for a project in which voice, and therefore embodiment and person hood/ particularly womanhood might be reconsidered. (which voice? OUR VOICES).

Listeners are invited to not only hear the cacophony as a sound event, but to enjoy the strange sensation of gabbling gaggling giggling women talking private politics and personal passions on the public airwaves- and so to imagine both feminine art and radios' possibilities afresh- a site for collaborative projects, open, dialogic, a broadcast of a narrow cast, highly involved but very everyday.

Anna Fritz, in her essay Transmission Arts in the Present Tense, writes Transmission artists consistently engage in processes of cultural transception and feedback in their works. She states that a constant theme within transition arts is that of displacing one-way (mainstream) communications with a polyvalent transception- a appreciation of the elasticity of the mediums and their diverse uses within social groups. Conjoining sending and receiving, a transceptive approach to transmission is not only a statement (“I am”), but also an orientation towards active, engaged listening. Cultural transception -sharing- learning ourselves and learning others- occurs naturally in the confirmation of human relationships and communicational practices.
This perceiving production and reception as a interaction is a continuation of the thought of the- feed back loop-a sonic occurrence- is also found in talking/chatter- conversation that is self referential, recursive, a returning and adding to themes and ideas, a kind of sedimentary processes- allowing for many inputs and points of view...

I hear a resonance between the radioart techniques listed below by radio artist Alejandra Perez Nunez, which she calls bending strategies, and the way women chat together:

retransmission

cut-up

overflow

persistent use of discontinuity

silence

recursion

recycling

(p242 elpueblodechina a.k.a. Alejandra Perez Nunez. Bending Informational Circuits)

These techniques open up a subject to the listener, make it approachable: begin a discourse- share interpretations, turn it over and over, expose it to sounding from all possible angles so that rather than regularity ( expected forgettable?) there is a acceptance and delight in the complexity and 'strangeness' of the material. She writes of these techniques creating a listening experience which can operate as a 'interface to play with structures of the collective imaginary'.
Nunez describes the pattern of broadcast she develops in her work as recursive, 'looking at itself over and over'. She writes 'such strategy was understood to undermine the tendency toward production enacted by mainstream media, a vapid fanaticism toward the production of content, a kind of anxiety for and with production'. We were happy to experiment with form, and chatted over many ideas, using story-telling, testimony, supposing and references, woven through with odd tangents and sudden thoughts- each of us relaxed enough in the company to speak naturally- in effect- the chatting about the work actually makes up 50% of the sound material used...

Radio art encourages 'flux' (“the serendipity of the production process- occurring when one improvises in the studio or collaborates with friends.”) and rumour (noise [. . . ] talk-back, participation radio, pirate radio”) (Dyson according to Ellen Waterman, 123.) This ambiguity is what I love to be part of, craft, this is where I write and feel a creative force: radio and productive activities as polymorphous- multi levelled, open ended, and welcoming should you choose to hear the invitation.

A theme of this project has been to introduce these friends to the possibility of using the local community radio for themselves. The station sitting on the hill runs a open door policy- its approach to broadcasting is one of strong commitment to diversity and inclusion... yet still, there is a prevalent attitude that radio is a 'product' one has, rather than something that could be used in myriad ways...

Neil Strauss in his introduction to Radiotext(e), emphasises the recently introduced but now firmly entrenched unapproachablility of corporate mainstream radio. He illustrates this point by noting the difference between a normal 'radio reciever'- a back box, the object, the commodity and its mainstream accepted use of the bandwidth, contrasted with 'radio', unavoidable and unstoppable radio waves, as a concept, a playground : radio was originally a interactive technology, not dependant on the record industry and tied to the pop culture machine but a material for hands and mouths as well as ears to explore. Strauss calls radio a 'model built of putty', and 'a parallax- changing depending on how it is viewed'.

The distinction between listener and producer is contentious. I engaged with this work as a form of community mobilization, agreeing with Kathy Kennedy 128 The radio is generally used as a extension of the body... a bridge form one body to another.

However enthusiastic an artist is about the potential of radio, it seems unavoidable that radio is a politicized medium. Regulation of Content, political and conceptual, has introduced expectations : broadcast quality, balanced programming, congruent appeal, enforced programmatic assumptions, market research, the trained voice, restrictions to access, uniform time allocations, technical specifications, licencing regulations, to name but a few (Kahn,D Radiocastings: Musings on radio and art).

Bertolt Brecht writing in 1932 Radio as an Apparatus of Communication, suggested radio has a function beyond 'pretifying public life' and suggests, radio should step out of the supply business, and organize its listeners into suppliers. Any attempt by radio to give a truly public character to public occasions is a step in the right direction.

Brecht is calling for a radio that mobilizes its audience, and one which is both continuously open and approachable- a pedagogic experience that could counteract the mock-pluralism of free-market media-  the increasing concentration of mechanical means and the increasingly specialized training. . .  call for a kind of resistance by the listener, and for his mobilization and redrafting as a producer. Tetsuo Kogawa brings this early radio imagining into a modern reality reflecting on the MiniFM boom he helped organize in Japan in the 80's and 90's:

Even if one overlooks the dramatic effect on society, one must admit that mini-FM has a powerful therapeutic function:an isolated person who sought companionship through radio happened to hear us and visited the mini-FM station;a shy person started to speak into the microphone;people who never used to be able to share ideas and values found a place for dialogue;an intimate couple discovered otherwise unknown fundamental misunderstandings.
Radio can touch us in many areas of life...