RADIOACTIVITY #5
The seminal Pirate Radio scene in London
Some thirty years after the first pirate radio broadcasts in the United Kingdom by radio stations like Radio London and Radio Caroline, illegal radio enjoyed a second golden age in the nineties. At the height of rave culture, these clandestine stations emerged as the ideal communication tool for party organisers, record labels, DJs, artists, and, of course, listeners. Gone were the marine adventures of the radio pirates of the sixties, who broadcast on medium wave from ships anchored near the coast, taking advantage of a legal loophole to circumvent their total illegality. In the nineties, the movement became strictly urban. An amateur, affordable, and sufficiently slippery method for the daily dissemination of new tracks, information, and dates and locations of upcoming raves.
Media studies expert Matthew Fuller talks about the origins and legacy of pirate radio culture in London, focusing on this fertile period of DIY resurgence, when radio resumed a prominent role in a scene hungry for alternative channels before the arrival of the internet.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Efraín Foglia about the Xarxa de Ràdios Comunitàries de Barcelona (XRCB) that we were unable to include the first time around.
Xarxa de Ràdios Comunitàries de Barcelona (XRCB)
We talk to Efraín Foglia, founding member of guifi.net and researcher, teacher, and designer of physical and digital interaction platforms, about the challenges of the XRCB project and about how radio is spilling over into the digital world. And we do so from the perspective of our context, honing in on specific instances of radio activism and experimentation: from the struggles for telecommunication infrastructure, free radio, and FM advocacy to community radio stations in Latin America, by way of digital communities and the internet radio boom.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Matthew Fuller that we were unable to include the first time around.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Mats Lindström that we were unable to include the first time around.
Elektronmusikstudion (EMS)
In 1953, after attending the first Swedish Radio and Fylkingen Society electronic music concert with Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer, Swedish artist Öyvind Fahlström wrote a manifesto for concrete poetry. More than a decade later, the Swedish Radio broadcasted his pioneer radio piece “Fåglar I Sverige (Birds in Sweden)”. In the decades that followed, the complexity and broad spectrum of productions coming out of the Elektronmusikstudion (EMS), founded by Karl Birger in 1964, made it a hub for artists. But while the text-sound scene was in and out of the Sound Workshop, Knut Wiggen, the first director of the EMS, channelled his energy into the futuristic dream of creating a world-class computer music studio for experts and scholars.
Matthew Fuller
Matthew Fuller talks about sleep, procedural imperialism, big data, post-humanity, and what he calls “denial of service attacks on people’s brains”.
Lizzie Borden and "Born in Flames"
Pirate radio became one of the protagonists and main motifs of the narrative thread of Lizzie Borden's 'Born in Flames'. In this short excerpt, the cult and self-taught filmmaker Lizzie Borden shares the various reasons that led her to take an interest in the phenomenon of European free radio, and how it helped her to connect the various agendas of this cult film.
Radio Tomate
RADIOACTIVITY looks into two seminal free radio stations – Radio Alice in Bologna and Radio Tomate in Paris – as singular case studies in which self-management, decentralised organisation and DIY coincide. The mini-series is an introduction to the free radio movement that sprung up in several countries in the seventies as a way of giving voice to actors who were outside the media establishment: an alternative to the dominant narrative that can also be seen as precursor of the horizontal rhizome structure of digital networks.