Archeological Exploration - A short trip in the history of radio-oriented art - In their introduction to Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-Garde (MIT Press Cambridge, 1992), Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead emphasize that there is no history of the development of sound art and radio art, that no linear continuity exists, no biographical plots in their development and, as an object of history, their volume therefore cannot provide any chronicle for the general history of art.

Certain salient points are nevertheless confirmed by most sources. These are, without question, important figures such as Walter Ruttmann, Velemír Khlebnikov, F. T. Marinetti, Pino Masnata, Bertolt Brecht, Antonin Artaud (To Have Done With The Judgement of God), John Cage, William S. Burroughs, Marshall McLuhan, and Peter Weibel. These personalities formed the fundamental background and drew attention to radio as an instrument of artistic projects. Since the 1970s, a large number of projects have been running parallel in Canada, the United States, and Australia especially because radio there is a genuine part of everyday life not merely in being passively received but also in active broadcast that helps listeners overcome large geographical distances. For instance, in Australia regular classroom instruction may happen by way of radio transmission; this later led to the utilization of the medium in concerts. Concerts that were broadcast simultaneously from various parts of the Australian continent or in connection with Europe began to appear in projects by Warren Burt, Jon Rose, Ross Bolleter and others. The situation in Austria has been different, as Vienna has had strong ties to the concept tradition, and therefore conditions for the creation of conceptual projects in media (video, industrial television, television broadcast, and finally also radio, today often in conjunction with the Internet) are open in state institutions as much as in Peter Weibel’s Ars Electronica festival in Linz.

Let us first return to the beginning of the century when the poet Velemír Khlebnikov, in presenting his work, emphasizes “the expression by consonant sounds more than by conventional semantics, thus forming a universal language based on similarly sounding original foundations” (the manifesto Declaration of the Word As Such, 1913 together with Mayakovsky and David Birliuk. This Russian futuristic painter and poet, after arriving in New York in 1927, proclaimed himself to be a radio artist, radio futurist, a member of the Universal Camp of radio modernists, and a founder of the radio movement; he was the one to declare, “The radio epoch and radio style is our present age.”). Khlebnikov’s programmatic statements found themselves at odds with the development of the radio as a form of communication, a secret weapon of military industry and espionage; in 1921, this led the poet to write the manifesto The Radio of the Future. Khlebnikov understands radio as “the basic tree of knowledge – such that will establish new paths to limitless empowerment and that will unify mankind”. Translated from the language of the 1920s Soviet Russia, this formulates the task to realize the power of the radio as “The Big Magician” and “spiritual sun of a nation”, its utilization in hypnotic suggestion and the subjugation of the consciousness of new, unified masses. In his manifesto, Khlebnikov mentions the possibility of misuse of the new radio technology for brainwashing in agit-prop projects by futuristic artists that aim at the creation of unified masses of working people by navigating them ideologically; the ever-present loudspeaker becomes a threat, but also a symbol of the direct, almost personal contact with the leader. Vladimír Tatlin planned to place a radio station into the proposed cylindric spiral of the Monument of the 3rd Internationale, and Stalin talked about the radio and film as means for eliminating alcoholism in Russia. Radio was similarly misused and appropriated as a strategic weapon ten years later in Germany.

In the period between the wars, artists in Western Europe were dealing with problems of a different class, tackling acoustic determinancies of words (phonic poetry) that had their early origins in the work of Scheerbart (Kikakoku, a phonic poem – poetry of reduced sounds, 1897, Berlin) and Morgenstern (Galgenlieder, 1905). In Italian futurism, important influences were Luigi Russolo’s proclamation Art of Noise (1913) and his manifesto Destruction of Syntax, Imagination without Strings, Words-in-freedom (1914). Developing these impulses, F. T. Marinetti and P. Masnata in the manifesto La Radia (1933) suggested an acoustic solution to the artistic experience, stressing “wireless imagination” and the “simple organism of radiophonic sensation”; in the same year they performed the first radio broadcast of phonic art at Radio Milano. Sonic absurdities were utilized by Kurt Schwitters in “Anna Blume” (1919), and his Spate, in Urlaten was broadcast by the Süd-Deutscher Rundfunk station in 1927. Later artists engaged in phonetic experiments – among them Proposition 22 (Jakobson, Karchevsky) in 1928 – that also gave rise to a new philological and semiotic discipline, phonology, that scientifically examined sounds produced by humans; further innovations included phonovisual poems (H. Arp, V. Kandinsky), Onomolingua, o verbalizzazione astratta by Fortunato Depero (in which sounds of moving cars and trains were verbally reproduced), and Arturo Petronio’s verbophonies. An example in the opposite direction is provided by the composer Edgar Varese who began with ambitious, unperformable and, in their nature, radiophonic symphonies Space, The Red Symphony, Symphony of Revolution, and finally The Astronomer whose subject matter was a collision of the Earth with Sirius in the year 2000. Collaborators in his projects were Alejo Carpentier, André Malraux, and Antonin Artaud (There is No More Firmament for The Astronomer, 1932). As early as in 1932, Varese envisioned a simultaneous performance of works by means of radio transmitters whereby (for instance) each voice might with mathematical precision be transmitted from a different radio station located anywhere in the world. Radio may well be said to have accomplished Erik Satie’s idea of music as furniture, as a sound component of the environment. From 1946 onwards, Antonin Artaud concentrated his attention on his vision of a “body without organs”, on the necessity of a study of the body for the need of actors; as a proof of his concept of theater he prepared the text of the performance Pour en finir avec le Jugement du Dieu (Let Us Do Away With the Judgement of God), the first genuine presentation of the theatre of cruelty, performed in a factory hall and broadcast by radio. The unique one-hour acoustic project never actually made it on-air due to censorship.
Futurists probably influenced the history of the 20th century art the most and they anticipated future developments, but their collaboration with the political establishment and a censorship of futuristic ideas that followed as a rule brought disrespect to innovators. Their political involvement and a symbiosis with the ruling political power resulted in their being pushed to the margin for 50 years, stigmatizing them as being “quaint” at best, an epithet they certainly did not deserve. Let us state the manifesto La Radia as an example, where in article 17 authors point out “the interference between radio stations and the emerging and disappearing sound”. The prophetic idea was not only taken up 20 years later by John Cage who used the radio in his compositions Credo in Use (1942), Imaginary Landscape 4 (1951), Water Music (1952), Speech (1955), and Radio Music (1956), but also by conceptual authors of the 1970s and noise artists of the 1990s who consider noise produced by sound waves to be another dimension of information about a given space; today one may already refer to a special category of “Japanese noise artists” who thanks to a miniaturization of state-of-the-art radio technology (compatible with personal computers) create interactive environmental “noise” settings that visually fit into the suburban cyberspace reality. The resulting sound is, as envisioned, a mesh of radio interferences switched on and off – by no means is it a collage of spoken words and music that a listener might tune in to. This example demonstrates the far-reaching impact of Italian futurists.

In Germany, it was only a year after radio broadcast started that Hörspiel (radio play) originated and achieved great popularity. Many authors including Alfred Döblin, Walter Benjamin, and Bertolt Brecht wrote special articles that employed the possibilities of the radio and the spoken language. (In between 1933 and 1945 the production of Hörspiel takes a back seat to the machinery of Nazi propaganda; but between 1947 and 1960, in its golden age and “comeback”, it forms the character of the post-war epoch in Germany.) Jörg Mager published the volume New Epoch Thanks To the Radio (1924) and Bertolt Brecht, in 1926, wrote the text Radio as an Apparatus for Communication, in which his theory of radio broadcast counted on the participation of the audience – not distribution but communication. Listeners themselves, accompanied by the radio, were supposed to sing Lindbergh’s part (or at least to hum the tune). During the performance of Lindbergh’s Flight (Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill and Paul Hindemith) that saw its opening night during the Baden-Baden festival of chamber music in 1929 it wasn’t, unfortunately, the radio that was used but, contrary to original plans, sections of the play were being transmitted to the theatre hall via telephones. A parallel with today’s Internet connections is noteworthy: these, too, largely depend on telephone lines. Brecht also noticed the possibilities of the utilization of radio as part of family life and a possible subsequent misuse of radio in state propaganda. As Marshall McLuhan wrote, Hitler managed to rise to power primarily “not with the help of radio but rather in defiance of radio, because at that time the radio was controlled by his enemies” and, at the beginning, there was a noticeable absence of the presentation of Hitler’s opinions in the media. Later, though, after entrenching his power, Hitler must have attributed his continued “political existence to the radio and the system of public loudspeakers”. Whereas the German geographic space had its nationalistic interests, radio in America gained equal importance while addressing listeners as “potential customers”; it mediates in selling, analyzes the market, manipulates the consumer, and creates demand. Radio transforms into an instrument of advertising for the unified consumer who is being born. The influence of the radio was shown and confirmed by Orson Welles in his famous program about the invasion from Mars that created such an immaculate and enthralling radio sound picture of imaginary proceedings that mass panic and commotion resulted for which Welles had to issue a public apology the following day. A further predictable misuse of the radio occurred after World War II, in pre-television era, in the Communist block countries; by contrast, in the West of the 1950s the role of a centrally controlled flow of information and public opinion had already been taken over by television. Radio becomes gradually decentralized, enabling programmers to cater to individual needs of smaller sections of the audience with alternative, more narrowly specialized productions that find listeners who are unique in terms of their geography, nationality, age, and profession.