Waves

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.

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.

Introduction