Horizontal radio must be seen as a continuation of earlier simultaneous telematic projects from the early 1990s that were especially significant in their own context, such as Chipradio (1992), Realtime (1993), and State Transmission (94); all of them were produced by ORF-KUNSTRADIO. These projects, as their starting point, were unifying a net of simultaneous live performances, utilizing various forms of communication (radio, television, telephone, databases) with the intention to stress the communicative potential of the mass media. Horizontal radio explicitly cites pioneers of telecommunication art (in Austria this was the period of 1979–86), as is evidenced by the participation of Adrian X (Vienna) or the circle of the Art Pool gallery (Budapest) who years earlier had participated in the first ever telecommunication project uniting artists from Eastern and Western Europe (Telefonmusic, 1983). 22 radio stations from Africa, Canada, Australia, the US, and Europe took part in the Horizontal Radio project to create a hyper-media network with various technological possibilities arising out of interactivity and a telepresentation enabling authors to be meeting round the clock. The project was shaping the process of confrontation of social and artistic implications of new technologies on a global level, while individual radio stations were still afforded the freedom of creativity in their own radio-art concepts (singing birds in London, metropolitan noise and conversations from Moscow, an archaic solo singer’s performance in Beograd, or electronically processed sounds captured near the edifice of the Stockholm radio, a Stockholm park or street).

The SOUND DRIFTING project involved 12 loudspeakers placed in city architecture, each of whom was reproducing a sound from a different part of the world (Austria, Australia, the US, and Britain) permanently on-line on the Internet and on-side (it was at any time possible to tune in or out, surfing the stations and the spaces between them). Each of the participating parties was allowed to create their own versions of the sound installation, and although the resulting “sound” contained “music”, the project did not aim at presenting a work as a “musical product”. Its primary goal, once again, was networking – the exploration of one’s own network, communication and cooperation, coordination and collaboration between artists, users, and machines; the intent was to let things work out, to listen to the world instead of actively trying to embellish it. One of the Beograd participants of the Subtolerance project, transmitting sounds of post-war Beograd round-the-clock thanks to an on-line microphone, employed a technique previously used by Serbian artists who during the war brought home the sounds of bombardment to the whole world via the Internet. Another approach to the radio installation was afforded by the Canadian project Public Piano that was retroactively sending back sounds of the piano to the audio space that were created by surfers on the Internet and processed through a connected electronic piano with a midi interface. The SOUND DRIFTING project was part of the larger radio art project WIENCOUVER that brought together the two most dominant radio stations that have excelled in furthering radio art, ORF Wien and CITR Vancouver; another dimension of it were Jon Rose’s projects Relativ Violin (1990) and Arts Birthday (2000). In 1996, the extensive Rivers & Bridges project created radio bridges between more than twenty radio stations; one of the participants was Slovak public broadcast radio (radio station Devín). The focus of the venture was the live broadcast of concerts that were performed in open air at the place where the rivers Danube and Morava meet under the Devín castle near the Slovak capital Bratislava.

A further analysis of projects that were part of the Ars Electronica festival would be inappropriate, as they were all too connected with the technological possibilities of the age in which they originated. An “archeological exploration” will show us that the R.A.M.S. ATTACK – Automatic Radio project was contemplating possibilities that in 1993 were merely on the horizon of the attainable, but today have become a commonplace reality: the transition from electronic to digital broadcasting (via the Internet) was predicted to make broadcasting cheaper, quicker, and more effective. Thus a project that originated only eight years ago introduced ideas that today are regarded as a matter of course. It announced the understanding of the new radio as a means of communication and artistic utilization in the age of new technological improvements. 1996 saw the premiere of SOS Radio TNC (A Media Fiction – by Beusch/Cassani) who were among the first to launch their own radio station. Visions of the future were being fulfilled at a fast rate and at the time of the media craze concerning cloning (1997), TNC RADIO started the Clone the Party project that made use of the direct connection of several radio stations via the Internet, creating a space for communication that afforded freedom to the participants by providing them with a private on-line partyfloor (a way of sub-networking); all of this was facilitated by DJs and, needless to say, transmitted via the radio and the Internet.

Some artists who today devote themselves to radio art have since the 1970s been among the pioneers of telecommunications art in international networking projects that went all the way from mail-art through telephones, industrial (slow scan) TV, and fax, to computer communication of the early 1990s. Their work transcends individual traditional disciplines, allowing authors to recontextualize contents into new hybrids. Their work reflects socio-cultural complexities and contradictions of life at the end of the 20th century seen from the vantage point of the problems of art as communication of ideas in an environment that is dominated by the media.

The radio, thanks to its technological non-complexity and the status of a “first-born” in the field of media culture, helped to pre-form McLuhan’s “global village” that was later developed by television and computer networks, with the truly global Internet bringing the process to the point where we observe it today. In the early 1980s, visual artists and performers, composers, interprets, and writers-performers appropriated the radio as an alternative artistic space, an arena for presenting their artistic creativity, as a distribution system or “public art forum” for “their own” public. In this sense radio art of the 1980s and early 90s provided them with an alternative space similar to the space conceptual artists and performers were searching for since the early 70s. Radio becomes a space for presenting alternative art. By using it as such, both generations manage to elude the marketing intentions of galleries and get pushed outside of the “arts domain”, remaining merely a mental alternative but not a new alternative art business. Their activities are sustained not by the selling of their art but by the constantly falling price of steadily more accessible high-quality new (even if second-hand) technologies. Many audio and radio artists use sonic space as a space for performances, similarly as they would use a room or the stage. The most important characteristic of their work is its dimensionality, the compositional and architectonic utilization of acoustic space. Behind verbal language there is the language of sound as a place. The sound becomes an object, a visual; the voice becomes corporeal. The sound creates a temporary stage for the action of the text, for its “functioning”. The sound determines and describes physical space in time and space. Formal aspects of visual art and performance are represented in language which, in equal measure, applies them to aural representation but often is more incisive than mere music or literature. Radio art is interdisciplinary performance in several areas of perception.

Pic.1 - Horizontal Radio, internetový rádioartový projekt