Waves

Only 10 years later, in 1980, the post-hippie rock industry had become one of the repressive aspects of capitalism's media machine. The democratic 'spectacle' had been enhanced by modern subconscious manipulation techniques derived from advertisement, the rise of 'telegenic' politicians such as Reagan to power and new techniques of opinion polling. In the early 1980ies centrist German political parties had reached a compromise over the liberalisation of democratic media. The deal foresaw the running of privately owned radio and TV in post-war West Germany for the first time.

In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere Jürgen Habermas (1962/1990) gives a historic account of the formation of the public sphere and its decline. There he argues that in the feudal system, while public events did happen, they were merely of a representational character. Everybody was present, but in a representational capacity only, there was no public discourse, no difference of opinion was allowed and all actual power was centralized in the institution of the souvereign/monarch. The events of public life followed a strict ceremonial protocol.

With an accute sense of urgency the leftwing playwright Bertolt Brecht and the media theorist Walter Benjamin tried to formulate an emancipatory and anti-fascist artistic theory and practice. When fascism, according to Benjamin, amounted to an aestheticisation of politics, revolutionary communism was engaged in the politicisation of the arts.1 Brecht and Benjamin (and also some of the Russian Futurists) mark the starting point of a participative paradigm in art which aims at using technical media in an emancipatory way.

• 1. Ibid, p. 44, my translation.

The excesses of speed and the emergence of a mass consumer society with its corresponding mediascape were overshadowed by the rise of fascism in Japan and Europe. The gravest challenge of the early 20th century was the "increasing proletarisation of the people and the formation of masses, which are two sides of the same process."1

• 1. cf.

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.

After Hertz found out how to make and receive waves it would still take a long time for radio to find its 'form'. With form I mean the predominant type of social usage of radio waves combined with a specific technological appearance or, in German die apparative Form (apparatic form). Radio, as any mass medium, exists on two different layers, as an imaginary social signification and in its distinct appearance as a 'thing'. I use the term social imaginary significations as closely as possible in the way Cornelius Castoriadis proposes it.

Although the dominant mode of technoscientific 'invention' at the turn to the 20th century was based on rationalism it also brought about its flipside of electromagnetic esotericism. Telegraphy and radio triggered a new age of spiritism.1

• 1. Even now, images of Tesla in his laboratory evoke associations with alchemism (Image of Tesla in his laboratory); regarding the connection between electromagnetism and spiritualism, cf.

As the political philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis pointed out, the concepts of history that exist are amazingly poor 1. There are those historians who focus on big events, big personalities, tyrants, revolutions and intermediate periods of peace. In their accounts there is no logic, no structure. History consists of a series of more or less random events in which identifiable individuals play an important role. This is illustrated best by Bertolt Brecht's short poem where he wrote: "Caesar beat the Gauls.

• 1. Castoriadis C. 
  1997.  Gesellschaft als imaginäre Institution. Gesellschaft als imaginäre Institution. :285-363.

My earliest radio memories go back to my grandmother's living room/kitchen. In this two bed room flat in a social housing estate in Graz in the 1960ies radio was the dominant medium. Every day during lunchtime the whole family would listen to an hour long news programme on Austrian state radio ORF. Austrian politics as well as world affairs broke into the domestic reality of our kitchen through this apparatus: The Cuban crisis, the assassinations of the Kennedy's, the Vietnam war, the war in Palestine, the political awakening of Muhammed Ali and the student's revolt.

Radio Art Histories Remixed, Maxi Single Version