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Open Gate - What Is Radio Seen From Another Vantage Point? - Scientific progress has been so dynamic that illusions proffered to us by the new media several years ago must seem archaic to the youngest generation. This does not only concern the 1970s that, after man’s landing on the Moon, allowed people to delve in futuristic dreams and visions of spaceships as they would abound in the year 2000. It is equally true of computer animations of the mid-1990s that are firmly anchored in history so that their “archeological placement” is simple. One of the reasons is that the year 1995 meant a breakthrough in terms of accessibility of computers for broad circles of a young, computer-oriented generation that cheerfully accepted “Pentium inside” as a means of self-expression.

The development of new technologies influenced ordinary lives of consumers, but also artistic endeavours. Following the first ventures in experimental movie-making in the 1920s and their revival in the 1960s, as well as multimedia performances, op-art and kinetic visualisations, the 1970s saw the rise of video art that, on the one hand, followed the example of experimental film, and on the other hand that of conceptual art; conceptual art later, especially in the 1980s, experienced a smooth transition into the narrational. New technologies also influence the development of music: the late 1950s, and the entire 1960s, brought the golden age of a new experience in sound. Experimental and electroacoustic music at that time accelerated certain streams and concepts almost a decade ahead of their time and helped to shape visual arts progressively.* On the artistic scene, besides video and television, radio, too, is gaining attention as a mean of communication: its first exploitations go back to the 1920s.

If we think of the way we have been kept up to date concerning the development of personal computers in the last fifteen years, we might perceive what it must have felt like back in the times when, almost 100 years ago, radio set out on its journey. Similarly to the invention of book-printing in its own days, this ephemeral, elusive medium once again advanced interpersonal communication a step forward. In the first half of the 20th century it slowly consolidated as a massmedia manipulator, to initiate towards the end of the century an individualization that culminates in the postmodern age as one of the creators of interdisciplinary art that utilizes the mass media. An architecture of sonic space, a theatre of ideas, a space for uncensored provocation, but also defence of minority rights and a resistance against mass-distributed culture function as a stimulus: the artistic form that utilizes common radio waves initiates and jumpstarts brain waves that force the mind to think and adopt an attitude. Radio is a flight of the mind, of dreams without a concrete tangible body – it is an anti-corporeal concept of the transfer of ideas. Radio is mythologically different from simply listening to “noise” at midnight. It is a postmodern alchemy of “sounds and noise”, making clouds habitable, allowing you with the help of a minuscule device to grasp ideas that freely float between heaven and earth, and to place them in your own pocket.

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New technologies – and radio is to be counted one of them – as part of the development of art open the door from the static to the dynamic, from the material to the immaterial, from the “timeless-eternal” to time-bound art, art whose existence flows in time. Radio, in its products, similarly to a videoclip, even admits the possibility of integrating levels of information and art. From the point of view of technological development radio may be described as a “creative anachronism”, as it only enters the life of art half a century after it became accessible to the masses. Evidently a tendency contrary to that of “noise music” may be observed here, if we realize that rap music only becomes part of common culture 80 years after Russolo’s “noisophones”, 50 years after Cage’s concerts and 35 years after Fluxus concerts and objects that featured gramophone records. Only when gramophone records literally become useless trash do we find a way to recycle them in the form of rap or techno – which thus allows them to return “from the dump” into our acoustic space. That is similar to the radio, since artists only came to discover it for their work in the final twenty years of the previous century; such a late discovery seems to bear out Heidegger’s assertion that “extreme possibilities may only be explored at the end of something”. Not only are objects created that, similarly to those assembled from trashy television sets (N. J. Paik), consist of radio devices (for instance Jean Tinguely: Radio Sculptures, 1964, Gordon Monahan), but similarly to the way acoustic material is being handled in sound recordings, we see the treatment of an overload in radio signals, a treatment helped by new technologies beginning with pocket radios, radio walkmans and micro-loudspeakers, and ending with Internet radio broadcast and computer-oriented radio.

In today’s day and age that has swamped humans in acoustic material and acoustic experience, oversatiating them with permanent and empty acoustic bombardment, people on the one hand feel a greater need for silence, but on the other, a need for a selective, creative, inventive listening of worthwhile material that has become accumulated in the database during the long history of the medium. A single person in its activity may overstep the boundary, participating in the creation of space: that is the highest potential of new technologies, that is one of the ways for the new radio, one that today makes radio different from how we traditionally used to regard it.

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Note:
* Such ideas also find their way to Slovakia and were embraced by various institutions such as Slovak public broadcast radio and television, and computer-equipped research institutes. Following the lead of the Warsaw Experimental Studio, Slovak public broadcast radio, too, accepted new trends so that in 1965 a Slovak Experimental Studio (Experimentálne štúdio Slovenského rozhlasu) was founded. One of its aims was to further New Art – electroacoustic and computer music, experiments in spoken word, or the production of demanding experimental radio programs and multimedia projects.

Pic.1 - Jean Tinguely: Séria: Radio - skulptúry, Radio B, 1964
Pic.2 - Michael Berger: Rádio, objekt, Harlekin Art, 1986, foto: Michal Murín