RADIOACTIVITY

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.

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.

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.

In this podcast, we talk with Edwin van der Heide about using radio as a way into the public, outside world, and about radio as a highly regulated space that sometimes resists experimentation. We discuss his early interest in short and medium wave radio and how it came to be expressed in these immersive, awe-inspiring installations, and we speculate about the production of meaning inherent in each of them.