Son[i]a #317
Reni Hofmüller
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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. It was a way of bringing new sounds to listeners while at the same time reclaiming the radio waves trapped in a state monopoly. Since then, Reni Hofmüller’s artistic practice has continued to move between the mundane and the structural. Her work focuses on technology and new media, and their influence on our everyday lives. But she also questions infrastructures and sophisticated systems – from water treatment to the internet – that affect entire communities.
As an artist, activist, and director of the esc media art lab, also based in Graz, Reni akes a an exploded DIY approach to her practice: she’s just as happy to take gadgets apart as to dismantle complex and/or invisible infrastructures in order to better understand their inner workings and imagine new uses. Her practice and activism, often embodied collectively, have led her to experiment with assembling antennas and nanosatellites, to explore phytoextraction, and to find out what buildings sound like. “No one killed my curiosity when I was little,” she cheerfully admits.
In this podcast, Reni Hofmüller shares 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 radio and bicycles.
Playlist
00:01:06 ‘Der bogen‘, solo performance, October 2007
00:21:44 ‘heute-hoy-today’, performance at Oír es Ver (Rhizom), 2000
00:39:59 ‘Erzherzog-Johann-Jodler’ (dub version), 1996
00:52:51 ‘Notorious Noise Brigade’, sound improvisation with Eva Ursprung at Liquid Music, Judenburg, 2007
01:02:20 ‘NOAA-18’, satellite fishing, 2015
01:07:06 Nanosatellite project (unfinished) with Jogi Hofmüller, 2012-ongoing
01:18:23 ‘Weg von daheim ins atelier’, home to studio bike ride, 2016
01:23:01 ‘Playing the building’, solo performance at Hangar, Barcelona, 2008
Music by Reni Hofmüller. This podcast is part of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union. Produced in collaboration with Elevate Festival.
Open-weather
In this two-voice podcast, researcher-designer Sophie Dyer and creative geographer Sasha Engelmann weave speculative storytelling through glitchy weather satellite transmissions in a dialogue tinged with the feminist meta-practices that run deep beneath their collective operations. Together, they talk about NOAA satellites, about building alliances and about weather literacy, occasionally interviewing each other as friends and guiding us through the generous network of feminist thinkers that informs their practice.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with Reni Hofmüller that we were unable to include the first time around.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with political geographer and sound artist Anja Kanngieser that we were unable to include the first time around.
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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.
Deleted scenes
Hank Bull takes the idea of boredom as a springboard to fire off some interesting ideas about entertainment and archives.