Mikropolyphonie - The Online Contemporary Music Journal, Volume 7, 2001


Radio: The Art of Sonorous Space [*]

Janete El Haouli
Universidade Estadual de Londrina (UEL)
Arts Department
<janete@sercomtel.com.br>

Abstract

Antonin Artaud, Samuel Beckett, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, John Cage, Glen Gould, Pierre Schaeffer, Raymond Murray Schafer, Dylan Thomas and Orson Wells have all explored the artistic possibilities of radio, which, late in the 20th century, started being taken to public spaces and made to interfere with the urban environment. In the 1990s, the Ars Acustica group challenged the dichotomy between emitter and receiver and the idea that a physical broadcasting space was required. Since then, radio has joined forces with satellite technology and the Internet. Seeking to define an aesthetic framework for the new radio art, the French aesthete Réné Farabet borrows Foucault' s concept of heterotopia, a space which, like a utopia, is connected by contradiction to all other spaces but, unlike a utopia, has a real existence in society itself, just like gardens, hospitals, asylums, cemeteries, penal colonies and transatlantic liners do.

Keywords: radio art, acoustic art, sound space, soundscape, heterotopia.

In the present article I shall highlight, among the most recent approaches to radio, some I deem apt for engendering fruitful discussions and interesting artistic practices. The ideas expounded herein originate from a number of projects I have been pursuing: the study of acoustic ecology; creation and production of New Music: Radio for Thinking Ears, a weekly broadcast by UEL radio station; a master's thesis on listening to Demerio Strato's voice-music; the listening to and creation of soundscapes; research and musical creation conducted at the Nucleus for Studies in Music and Contemporaneousness (NMC-UEL); and, last but not least, the doctoral thesis "RadioPaisagem" (RadioScape), tackling what, in the 1970s, was termed acoustic art on radio by the German playwright Klaus Schöning, director of the Akustische Kunst Studio of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk, in Cologne.
        It is unsettling to think about music and discuss trends, perspectives and paradigms at the dawn of the 21st century, when communication society proposes -- imposes? -- the definitive abolition of distances in space/time. Since radio has recently joined forces with satellite technology and the Internet, thus having its power to broadcast information enhanced, it is important to reconsider it anew. Radio needs to recover its artistic and educational function, to recapture its calling as a space of freedom, of experimentation. After all, such seminal figures of 20th century art as Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Pierre Schaeffer, John Cage, Murray Schafer, Orson Welles, Dylan Thomas, Samuel Beckett and Glenn Gould, to mention but a few, have used the aesthetic capabilities of radio as a means for acoustic creation and dissemination of ideas.
        At the turn of the millennium, acoustic art, which, from its inception in the 1920s and 1930s, had been closely related to radio, becomes the interdisciplinary art par excellence. As a media art form, it has known advances, miscegenation and new possibilities, thus evincing its unfathomable nature, which follows from the dynamics of the technological world and of the world of radiophonic creation. In the words of the German playwright Klaus Schöning:

Quite early on, writers, composers, sound poets, cinéastes recognized the creative challenge presented by the idea of linking their advanced artistic activities with the novel possibilities of electroacoustics. This led to the emergence of an art form which I have referred to as Acoustic Art and as Ars Acustica since the 1970s. A new media art, whose development can be likened to a path between the arts and institutions, a path with many alternate routes inside and outside the realm of radio. (Schöning 1997: 12)
In the last decades of the 20th century, trends toward taking radio beyond its traditional limits began to emerge, taking it to public places and making it interfere with the urban environment in the form of sound sculptures, or building sound bridges between natural and urban environments, establishing relationships between them, live, with the help of telephone lines or communication satellites. More precisely, during the 1990s, the Ars Acustica group, an EBU (European Broadcasting Union) supported international forum for investigation, production and diffusion of acoustic art, decided to change its initial strategy. Rather than occupying public spaces, it launched the aesthetic occupation of planetary communication and information networks, particularly the Internet. In this manner, with the emergence of new information and telecommunication technologies, radio and acoustic art started to respond to the impact of new information concepts, in a world that, increasingly, lives in real time, "live", in simultaneity.
        Numerous radio projects began to employ new technologies in an artistic way; for instance, Horizontal Radio, a telematic radio network event organized by EBU in 1995. Fourteen state-owned radio broadcasting companies participated in this simultaneous telebroadcast, which involved EBU, Ars Acustica, ten independent broadcasting companies and countless pirate radio stations, using VHF, medium waves, short waves, Internet servers and a real time audio server, all based in Linz. Over 200 artists, including composers and writers, contributed works under the general heading of "migrations".
        As a transversal, interdisciplinary, intersectional mode of play, Horizontal Radio allowed several users to get together, making them into message producers and recipients. This was a decisive structural aspect of the experience. Another relevant point has been the demonstration that it is not necessary to think of physical spaces as broadcast sources, since, through a digital telephone in the ISDN, users can connect up and participate in an intense soundscape, which is both alive and ever-changing. This strategy of annihilating the vertical hierarchy with its full load of surveillance and control entailed the creation of a horizontal radio, another space. As indicated by Heidi Grundmann and Gerfried Stocker (1995), "the basic intention was to allow the unfolding of a media structure as heterogeneous as possible -- as opposed to the unifying and standardized pressures of 'communications' by the big broadcasting institutions and entertainment conglomerates."
        Among the questions posed by these recent advances, I am particularly interested in those highlighted by the French aesthete Réné Farabet, creator and director of the Atélier de Création Radiophonique (established in Radio France in 1969), who, in an exciting way, brings together radio, art, acoustics and Michel Foucault's ideas on space.
        Searching for new definitions in the realm of acoustic art or, more precisely, for a distinction between artistic and non-artistic radio practices, Farabet applies concepts propounded by Foucault in a lecture at the Centre d'Études Architeturales de Paris in 1967. This lecture was published, two years later, in the Italian magazine L'Architetura, under the title "Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias" (in French). For Foucault, the space we are immersed in is not, and cannot be, neutral, since we do not live in a material, cultural and conceptual vacuum. Speaking to architects in particular, Foucault anticipates discussions on free radio waves, which would emerge years later, and foresees debates on virtual spaces, which would arise at the end of the century. The French historian and philosopher talks about the relational nature of this external space that surrounds us in our contemporaneousness:
We do not live inside a void that takes on colours, sometimes one hue, sometimes another; we live inside a set of relationships defining places that are irreducible to one another and utterly capable of superimposition. [...] Among all these places, those that matter are some having the curious property of being in a relationship with all places, but in such a way as to eliminate, neutralize or invert the set of relationships they define, reflect or mirror. (Foucault 1984: 16)
In his view, such places, connected to all the others and yet contradicting all of them, are divided into two groups:
First, we have utopias. Utopias are places without a real space. They are the places that maintain, with the real space of society, a general relationship of direct or inverted analogy. It is society itself perfected, or else the opposite of society but, in any case, such utopias are fundamentally and essentially unreal spaces. (Id., ibid.)
Paradoxically located in space, there would be for Foucault a distinct kind of utopia, which he called heterotopia:
We also have, probably in all cultures and civilizations, real places, affective places, places that are delineated inside the institutions of society itself and are a kind of counter-place, of effectively realized utopias, where the real places, all other real places we can find inside the culture, are represented, contested and inverted; a kind of place that is outside all places, even if it can be actually located. These places, because they are totally other in relation to the places they reflect and about which they speak, I shall call them, in contraposition to utopias, heterotopias. (Id., ibid.)
These heterotopoi, or "other places", would be spaces of otherness, privileged places of displacement, such as gardens, hospitals, asylums, cemeteries, penal colonies, or even the ship, that typical heterotopia, always in motion, constantly in transit, a spot in the ocean, a detached territory, a floating ground.
        For Farabet, the electronic space would be a new existing non-place, where, "from within the outside", radios can interfere or intervene, creating soundscapes. It is such an "other place", out of which radio waves flow at one single material time, invisibly, transmitting sounds capable of changing the way we hear, that allows one to talk about heterotopy. This is the vision of artistic radio advocated by Farabet in the lecture "Realité/Fiction", given in Geneva in 1982, and written in the author's peculiar poetic style:
The grid on a loudspeaker very much resembles the bars of a prison. But where is the prisoner? Before of behind it? Censorship [censure] of the grid, caesura [césure] of the frame. In fact, nothing is more acrobatic and wall-crossing than sound. Is the radiophonic space a utopia? No, it is not. I propose to take up an old neologism of Michel Foucault's: it is a "heterotopic space" -- which is not a nowhere space but an "other" space, a place cut into the real and, however, aside, somewhat like a "reserve", whose internal structure would be utterly singular, a possible place of impossible encounters... the somewhat shifty kingdom of transit, of which invisible technicians are the princes… a zone of filtering and infiltration... a crossroads of collisions and diversions, appearances and disappearances, of fitting-together and superimposition, of jitter and contamination, a factory for the knitting of sound and meaning… a factory that processes true stories to make them into fables, and fables to make them into true stories... a place of anamorphoses. A borderland place, marginal, tangential to my universe, located on the edge of my body. Close by and yet alien. A place where what surrounds me still passes by, but in the wrong order, and so light... A place that sends my own images back to me, but as incidental, refracted. Heterotopia. (Farabet 1994: 88)
This place, artistically occupied by creators of sound, becomes a heterotopia. It is a space -- an electronic heterotopia, favourable to that unsettling radio, pregnant with estrangement -- through which acoustic art, soundscape composition, sound sculpture and other aesthetic experiments can be created in their plenitude. Maybe this is the heterotopic space, marginal to a market radio that forges a reified way of hearing, that the components of the Ars Acustica international group and, by extension, all radio artists, are claiming and trying to extend to all radiophonic waves of the planet.
        However, these creators' and producers' theories and practices stumble on a double difficulty. First, the little sensitivity or the almost complete lack of understanding on the part of radio station directors and of information radio network professionals. Second, the urgency of creating -- in a radio context saturated with stale, refractory information and educational practices -- these other spaces, these heterotopoi of Foucault's and Farabet's.
In this respect, it is necessary to reiterate the important role we, listeners and creative musicians, play in the possible restructuring of radio. Only then, maybe, contents will be changed and radio will stop being a mere slave to globalizing capitalism, to timed labour and timed leisure. Radio will stop being the vehicle of production, consumerism and profitable "soundtracks" to eventually become, in Pierre Marietan's (1997: 10) expression, "a marked radio, centring the sonic existent, musicalizing the space one picks up, the space of listening".
        The need for experimental studios in radio acoustic art ought not to be seen as an eccentricity or the apology of technique, since the airing, the opening of ideas, the existence and maintenance of creative people in studios is critical. Thus, it will become possible to reach a higher goal: that of working -- jointly with production and research crews -- in the formulation and discussion of "an aesthetics of the radio piece and of the radio in general, guided by social reality" (Schöning 1980: 171). Aiming towards this goal, we shall give decisive steps for the creation of an experimental radio, artistically and educationally relevant.
Experiments, not as mere art for art's sake -- but as a driving process, with effects not only on artistic production but also on radio itself as a distribution and communication machine. This seems utopian. But much has already been thought in the pioneering times of radio, fifty years ago, and much of what was thought has already become reality... (Schöning 1980: 172)
Note

[*] English translation by Martha Schlemm.

References

Réné FARABET. 1994. Realité/Fiction. Bref éloge du coup de tonnere et du bruit d'ailes. Arles: Phonurgia Nova, p. 75-88. Originally, a talk delivered to the European Broadcasting Union in Berlin, May 1981, and published by EBU under the title "La pelure d'oignon" (Geneva, 1982).

Michel FOUCAULT. 1984. Espaços outros: utopias e heterotopias. Outra: revista de criação 1(1): 16-19.

Heidi GRUNDMANN and Gerfried STOCKER. 1995. Horizontal Radio: a Telematic Radio Network Project. Proceedings of the Sixth Symposium on Electronic Arts. Montreal: Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts (ISEA), <http://www.isea.qc.ca/symposium/archives/abstracts95/menu.html>.

Klaus SCHÖNING. 1980. Em defesa de uma criança abandonada. In George Bernard Sperber (ed.), Introdução à Peça Radiofônica. São Paulo: Editora Pedagógica e Universitária, pp. 167-88. (German Original published in 1979).

Klaus SCHÖNING. 1997. On the Archaeology of Acoustic Art in Radio. In Sound Klangreise Journey. Studio Akustische Kunst (155 Werke, 1968-1997). Cologne: Westdeutscher Rundfunk, pp. 12-21.

Pierre MARIETAN. 1997. Pour un art sonore au quotidien. Written personal communication (10-page mimeograph).
 
 

 
 Biography

Janete El Haouli received a Master's in Communication Sciences and a Doctorate in Arts from São Paulo University (USP). She teaches in the Music and Theatre courses of the State University of Londrina, where she also coordinates the Nucleus for Studies in Music and Contemporaneousness and directs the university radio station. She is the author of Demetrio Stratos: alla ricerca della voce-musica (Milan: Auditorium Edizioni, 1999), of which an English edition is forthcoming. Her radio creations have been broadcast in Brazil, Germany, Russia and Finland.