June/July 2006

Experiments in Radio Topographies

Community Radio Radio and Art Radio in Exile Radio in War

Examples of artists using radio in public spaces:

neuroTransmitter neuroTransmitter came together in 2001 as a collaborative whose work fuses conceptual practices with transmission, sound production, and mobile broadcast design. Their work re-articulates radio in multiple environments and contexts public, exhibition, over the airwaves considering new forms and possibilities for radio transmission. neuroTransmitter's public performances connect FM radio technology and the body - negotiating, performing, and sonically mapping the invisible and physical spaces of the city. As radio-sonic installation, further work references the politics, history, and technology of the medium.

free103point9 A nonprofit art organization focused on establishing and cultivating the genre Transmission Arts by promoting artists who explore ideas around transmission as a medium for creative expression.

LIGNA, HH Ole Frahm, Michael Hüners, Torsten Michaelsen Based on a precise analysis of the interrelationships between the radio broadcasting format and different urban spaces, Ligna develops playful interventions which at all times result from and are situated within the context of social movements. Ligna, a Hamburg-based radio group pursuing a participatory radio format on the free radio station FSK (Freies Sender Kombinat), has been expanding the collective frame of its work since last year to interventions in public and semi-public spaces with the aim of questioning and subverting the dominant bans and exclusion mechanisms in force there. The meanwhile legendary intervention at Hamburg¹s main station in May 2002, ²Ligna¹s Radio Ballet², choreographed the re-introduction of forbidden gestures over the FSK frequency. Dispersed across the entire area of the railway station, several hundred participants followed the instructions transmitted via headphones.