Son[i]a #317. Reni Hofmüller Deleted scenes

In the 1990s, twenty minutes was all it took for local authorities in the Austrian city of Graz to detect and neutralise any illegal radio transmitter. Back then, Reni Hofmüller was part of a group of activists who took over the airwaves with pirate broadcasts every Sunday from the mountains surrounding the city. After short 18-minute sessions, the Radio Dauerwelle team would pack up its equipment and clear out, moments before the authorities arrived. In this podcast, Hofmüller shares her early commitment with radio, as well as her obsession with dismantling the invisible in order to understand and question it. A trip through time that takes us from the 1980s to the present, through her personal involvement in feminist discussions from the perspective of new media. Our conversation is riddled with references to her commitment to open source, to doing things together, to the uninhibited mixing of disciplines, and to her passion for the electromagnetic sphere and bicycles.

Political geographer and sound artist AM Kanngieser works in the coordinates between space and sound. This merging of disciplines that seems completely normal to her tends to be more perplexing to the compartmentalised world of science and academia than to the undisciplined field of artistic practice. In this podcast, we become the listeners as AM Kanngieser reflects on expanded listening, on the inaudible, and on our anthropocentrism. They talk about their long-standing interest in sound governance and dissect the many tensions that built up in the project “Climates of Listening”, which was originally based on the intention of amplifying campaigns for self-determination and self-representation in the Pacific.

Process, liminality, mediation, transmission, radio, resonance, orality, archive, and abundance. In our coinciding and crossing of paths with Ukrainian artist, mediator, educator, and musician Anton Kats, “the stars aligned” to put prior learning and formats to the test. Three remote encounters, six hours of recording, and several red-hot scissors have produced this exquisite corpse in which we explore a discourse and practice that tend to spill over and exceed boundaries in both nuance and detail. In this podcast, we talk about the Europe of integration, about memory, dementia, and different ways of not knowing, about artistic research and art that defies representation, about site-specific projects and mobile, ephemeral devices, about narrowcasts and radio as a means of creating common public spaces.