RADIOACTIVITY #6
Xarxa de Ràdios Comunitàries de Barcelona (XRCB)
Through the Xarxa de Ràdios Comunitàries de Barcelona (Barcelona Community Radio Network, XRCB), which describes itself as a “radio of radios”, the Barcelona City Council’s “Cultura Viva” programme, in conjunction with the guifi.net and exo.cat communities, has designed a digital space that brings together and interconnects different ways of understanding radio in the city, including interactions between community radio, radio-outside-radio, and other possible radiophonic spillovers.
The project, which takes the form of an online map and content aggregator, presents itself as a free and open tool box and an investigation/exploration of the future of radio. It sees the plasticity of radio and the many ways of approaching the medium as a possible bridge between many different needs and practices.
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.
Efrain points out the generation gap opening up between hertzian waves and podcasting, and invites us to rethink radio as a technology for social interaction, via Vilem Flusser, and even as a means to expand our thoughts in the age of 140-280 characters.
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.
The seminal Pirate Radio scene in London
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.
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.
Radio Alice
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.