Mobilisations

The prohibitions and regulations kicking in at WWI which should in a way never be lifted afterwards, only strengthened, would stop artists from making their own signals and therefore take away a great deal of autonomy from what 'radio artists' could do. The importance of making one's own signal is underpinned by the work of the Japanese artist Tetsuo Kogawa who, in the 1980ies, was the founder of a MiniFM movement of people building their own transceivers from cheap electronic parts. For the MiniFM activist the act of transmitting his or her own signal was a very intimate artistic expression where participants were communicating in a very direct way via the exchange of waves carrying energy. Those experiments took part in Tokyo in a highly controlled area where any commercial piracy was strictly impossible.1 The Austrian Artist Franz Xaver has been demanding a band of the spectrum for artists on shortwave radio for years now, so that artists could make global transmissions of their own without being in conflict with the commercial world.http://send.ung.at/)." href="#footnote2_dzcjut6">2 The Slovenian artist Marko Peljhan wants to launch his own communication satellite as part of a bigger project of creating artistic/scientific exploration centres on both poles of the earth.3 Both Peljhan's and Xaver's works make connections between radio and a concept of environmental and cultural/artistic sustainability and autonomy. In summary, I would like to propose that radio artists should be able to make their own transmissions if they wish to do so.4

In the years following WWI radio as we know it now found its form. How that exactly has happened, and which causalities existed, if any, which led to radio 'locking' in and "at a certain but arbitrary point of its development being wrested from the tranquility of the laboratory and turned into a public matter," remains rather mysterious (Ernst Schoen quoted by Walter Benjamin, p. 389). We can only say for sure that despite big differences in the way radio was socially organised in different countries, it settled to become a one-way communication medium whereby radio programmes were transmitted from the centre to the listeners. During the 'hot' peace of the 1920ies radio became the medium of mass mobilisation. Mobilisation can take on very different meanings in this context. In Paul Virilio's interpretation, radio is one among a number of media which all have a mobilizing effect on individuals as well as society as a whole. Modernity is a process of accelleration, societies become hooked on speed and with this process modes of perception change, which has a profound effect on culture on all levels, including the individual mental and psychological faculties.5 In the 1920ies radio mobileses by disseminating jazz and causing the ensuing mobility of humans on the dancefloor. The 'roaring twenties' in the US bring a mobilisation of the masses through the introduction of the assembly line by Henry Ford and the mass production of affordable cars. And, last not least, radio shows its potential for political mobilisation and as a tactical tool of coordination in, for example, urban civil unrest. In the newly mobile societies of the 1920ies radio waves travelling with the speed of light made it the ultimate medium for the new mobile culture. As capitalism had segregated village communities and driven them into the cities where everybody became part of a faceless proletarian mass, radio had an important function in maintaining a cultural life and proliferating a degree of social cohesion. Radio became a 'systemic' force without which a motorised and highly mobile society would probably have faced cultural implosion.6

• 1. for an expanded introduction to the concept and history of MiniFM cf. Kogawa 2007. http://anarchy.k2.tku.ac.jp/
• 2. He still pursues this goal as part of a larger concept of creating an 'autonomous unit', a mixture of boat and art/science buoy which would have its own energy source and communication system and be completely independent; cf. Kunstlabor 2007 (http://send.ung.at/).
• 3. cf. I-TASC -- the Interpolar Transnational Art Science Constellation, http://www.interpolar.org/
• 4. I would like to avoid giving the impression to fetishise the making of transmissions. Valuable forms of radio art which do not involve the artists making their own transmissions do also exist.
• 5. Virilio compares the mechanical precision of Muybridge's movement studies with a Rodin statue of an athlete whereby Rodin catches the movement in a static expression which is, on close inspection, not realistic at all, yet better suited to express motion than the realistic picture would be; unfortunately Virilio deals primarily with the image; his line of thought sometimes resembles the McLuhanite tendency of a quasi totalitarian media determinism insofar as there is no space for human agency. cf Virilio 1993
• 6. by 'systemic' I mean a component of a system which is constituitive and not accidental to it; a component which is a structuring force within a socio-technical assemblage but which is also itself structured by the whole. cf The Social Shaping of Technology, Mackenzie and Wajcman (1985).