Son[i]a #305
Anton Kats

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.

We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with Reni Hofmüller that we were unable to include the first time around.

Norwegian artist Maia Urstad talks about nostalgia, radio pips, AM, FM and DAB, about the importance of ska, about arches and obelisks, sounds in the fjord, and time capsules, about program 81, freq_out, and foghorns, and about local radio stations and lost tapes.

We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Maia Urstad that we were unable to include the first time around.

In these outtakes, Anton Kats talks about the transition from MAKU to MÆKUR, about slowing down and opening up listening spaces, and about contextual and emotional infrastructure in art practice.

Janna Graham talks about critical and radical pedagogy, about the educational turn, and about how pedagogical practices interact with cultural practices and social struggles. She discusses her experiences at different institutions, reflecting on the risk of the museification of activism in the midst of the neoliberal mélange, and talks about "parasitic" processes in the redistribution of cultural resources into social justice projects, and about the challenge of actively integrating the voices and demands of the marginalised groups that the museum works with.

Nora Sternfeld problematises the educational turn and talks about the crisis of the museum model, radical pedagogy, emancipatory practices and alliances, para-institutions, unlearning strategies and collective knowledge projected into the future.

We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Irit Rogoff that we were unable to include the first time around.

Irit Rogoff talks about ways of creating participatory, creative, and cognitive alliances that allow us to critically inhabit contemporaneity. She also calls for the need to devise processes of unlearning, inside and outside the academy, that will pave the way to new and unexpected kinds of knowledge.

This show, curated by Wave Farm, presents an international look at works that explore the sonics of the shortwave radio spectrum (2-30 mHz), and the experience of long distance listening. It features works by Patrick Harrop, Ed Osborn, Javier Suarez Quiros, Mark Vernon, William Basinski, Nicholas Knouf, Edward Ruchalski, Sally Ann Mcintyre, Stephen Bradley, Pietro Bonanno, Linda Dusman & Alan Wonneberger, Jeff Gburek, Jed Miner, Amanda Dawn Christie and Lee Rosevere.