art/radio: a peculiar specificity
by Rupert Howe
Radio is one of technology’s great survivors. Reborn in the age of the internet – say hello to net.radio! –its presumed obsolesence now seems further off than ever. Relative to television, it’s cheap to produce and easy to receive. Who doesn’t have, somewhere, a small plastic box with a chrome aerial sticking out the top – whether it has batteries in it or not?
Radio is immersive, too. It fills the air. Listeners don’t even have to be tuned in to experience it. While film and video tend to enforce immobility – “Impassive, mute, still the viewer sits” as Robert Smithson put it – radio can happen on the move. In the introductory essay to her recent STAR Radio project Jennie Savage confesses that she often has the radio on in the background, while “tidying the house or washing up” and acknowledges its subliminal effect: “the radio punctuates and frames my thoughts or directs my wandering mind.”
Even though access to the radio spectrum is in theory tightly regulated by government, there’s something about radio which seems as impossible to control as the air itself. So it’s perhaps no surprise that radio today is flourishing at the margins, whether it’s the chaotic energy of urban pirate stations transmitting from tower block antennas, the elusive web of net.radio which now makes up an alternative broadcasting network or artist-run experiments which subvert the conventions of traditional broadcast media.
So while radio has many official presences, as represented by the BBC or local commercial stations, there’s increasing interest in radio as an alternative space. Sometimes that space retains the feel of a white-walled institution, like New York “art radio” station WPS1, a subsidiary of PS1 Contemporary Art Center and the Museum Of Modern Art. Sometimes even the word space itself seems too restrictive. Resonance FM in London has a manifesto which makes explicit its free sprit: “A radio station that makes public those artworks that have no place in traditional broadcasting.”
Run by members of the London Musicians’ Collective, and broadcasting 24 hours a day, 7 days a week since 2002, Resonance was originally set up under a government-funded community radio initiative. Yet it has also assisted in devolving control of its airspace to the community which provides its content, whether artists, musicians or cyclists.
Dan Graham once commented: “Television as a medium established the independent producer as creative force.” Jennie Savage’s STAR Radio project in Cardiff went further, attempting to establish the listener as creative force. Inspired in part by a personal feeling of displacement and a desire to make connections within an urban environment, she sought to use the model of local radio as a catalyst for “analysis and reflection”, with the week of actual broadcasts in October 2005 forming a “snapshot” of the six months the project ran in total.
Even STAR’s name was derived from the place it sought engagement with: the Cardiff areas of Splott, Tremorfa, Adamsdown and Roath. Savage invited artists from outside the area to make work for broadcast, but also encouraged local people to produce their own programming. “Come in and find out how to take part”, read a sign on the window of the former shop where the station was based. An invitation which was “met with a mixture of concern, interest, suspicion and excitement.”
Material from the STAR archive was later reconfigured for a gallery installation at the National Museum in Cardiff. It’s equally possible, though, for the gallery space to become a radio space. Rikrit Tiravanija constructed a working studio inside the Serpentine Gallery in London as part of his 2005 show A Retrospective (Tomorrow Is Another Day). Each day a play was performed and broadcast on Resonance FM, with members of the visiting public invited to take on roles from the script.
Here radio exists as technology and cultural artefact. For John Strutton’s Radio Radio installation at International 3 in Manchester (2003) a radio station was created within the gallery but with the schedule itself made a curated space. As if hallucinated from the pages of Radio Times, many works created for Radio Radio made use of existing programme formats, including advertisements (Liam Gillick’s Music For A Canadian Toyota Advert), interviews (Jessica Voorsanger’s unusual meeting with former Partridge Family star David Cassidy) and light entertainment (a Stars In Their Eyes pastiche featuring cover versions of songs by David Bowie).
In his introductory essay, Strutton refers to “the peculiar specificity of the medium of radio”. Radio also has a peculiar mallebility and sense of possibility. It can be at once localised and immeasurably diffuse. Radio Astronomy, a project by roaming New Zealand duo Radioqualia, broadcasts “celestial frequencies” collected from outer space.
Such conceptual experiments present a distorting mirror to the conventions of commercial broadcasting, engage with sound itself as material and test the limits of our senses –the 12GHz frequencies gathered for Radioqualia’s Solar Radio project are inaudible until “downsampled” to a level compatible with human hearing.
Tacita Dean’s Berlin Project, broadcast on Radio 3 in May 2002, likewise uses the hiss of radio “silence” as a backdrop against which sounds and voices seem to move in and out of focus. At one point the balancing act between what is audible and what is not is made explicit: “The tick of a watch at 20 feet under quiet conditions is the just knowable difference for sound. It is the absolute threshold of hearing.”
Berlin Project was conceived – and realised – as a one-off. Most recent broadcast art experiments are, by contrast, conceived – and realised – as ongoing projects. Some, like Radio Radio, have been deliberately archived in such a way that they might be re-activated complete, perhaps to surprise some future generation with the sound of Strutton’s 40-piece guitar/kazoo orchestra The Band Of Nod.
Still others question the very terms on which broadcast media operates: experimental Berlin station reboot.fm is actively seeking to promote internet radio as an open access medium, developing open source broadcasting software and creating content to be shared amongst other free radio projects. While the London-based Open Music Archive, set up by Eileen Simpson and Ben White and recently featured as part of the Artradio event in Manchester, popularises out-of-copyright recordings – for example, a scratchy 1892 version of Joseph Tabrar’s Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me A Bow Wow.
Spinning the dial on an old tuner, sounds appear from the background static apparently at random: fragments of music, strange languages, bursts of pure noise. The airwaves glow with an aura of mystery – enhanced, perhaps, by nostalgia – which no longer accessible via internet radio has re-surfaced in art: Steven Paige demonstrating the magic of unpowered crystal radio sets in Cornwall; or Zoe Walker and Neil Bromwich’s Celestial Radio project which broadcasts musings on humanity's place in the universe from a small mirrored yacht sailing just off the British coast.
In an experience at once aesthetic and electromagnetic, evocative of 1960s offshore pirate radio stations like Radio Caroline and ocean-going conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader, listeners walk along the shore holding transistor radios, finally guided toward a sight of the Celeste out at sea, glittering amongst the waves – a symbolic evocation of radio’s ongoing “quest to make audible the invisible.”
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RH 2007
Notes
Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, edited by Jack Flam (University of California Press, 1996)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_radio#The_Access_Radio_Pilot
Two-Way Mirror Power, Dan Graham (MIT Press, 1999)
Star: A Psycho-Topography Of Place, Jennie Savage (CBAT, 2006)
Berlin Project, broadcast on Radio 3, 12/01/2002
Press release for Celestial Radio 107.5 FM, March 2006