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Promiscuous Technologies and the Radiophonic Grotesque:

Spilling out of the Electronic Corset

by Katarina Soukup

left: Radio Bicyclette in Amsterdam during "Next 5 Minutes 3" -1999

right: "At Home Abroad"- CESTA - 1999

As a media artist who works primarily in sound and radio, my goals are to explore the array of possibilities each one offers the artist. Sound has historically and traditionally played second fiddle to the image, and it is my mission to privilege aurality as the central sensory experience in my work, whether this means favouring oral history over written documentation or employing the ear as the primary conduit for sense-making and making sense of the world. My work also attempts to redefine the possibilities of radio technology, which over the course of its social and historical development has become narrowly defined as a one-way mass media channel. Low-power radio has enabled me to spill into public media space with possibilities beyond the tight corset of corporate domination and state regulation.

Promiscuous Technologies

I am obssessed with promiscuously (1) mingling technologies, such as radio, with unusual and performative contexts. Previous projects have involved, for instance, employing low-power radio technology in a performance for movement and sound entitled Radio Bicyclette (Mobile Memory Machine). The broadcasting device is made up of a bicycle, 1/2 watt stereo FM radio transmitter, and sound pieces. The public is invited participate by cycling along with me and by tuning their portable transistor radios to Radio Bicyclette’s FM frequency.

Radio Bicyclette alludes and pays homage to the vital role played by a web of clandestine radio stations in guiding non-violent, spontaneous resistance to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August, 1968. The sound pieces it diffuses weave oral histories ­recorded in Prague in the spring of 1998­ with amazing audio archives of the 1968 clandestine broadcasts. One of many dramatic moments in these archives is the take-over of the Czech Radio building by Soviet soldiers as it occurred live on the air. Radio Bicyclette also alludes to the fact that Czech radio pirates in 1968 often found unlikely and mobile sites from which to broadcast in order to avoid detection by Soviet authorities. In addition to this, the streets of Prague were filled with people blaring transistor radios in an attempt to keep informed about the crisis ­a radiophonic cacophony I hoped Radio Bicyclette would reproduce on modern-day streets of through public participation.

Another performance series for this two-wheeled radio apparatus is Radio Bicyclette2 (Urban Legends), which airs experimental sound pieces based on recordings of the city soundscape and the retelling of ‘urban legends,’ the folktales of late 20th century urban culture. The purpose of Radio Bicyclette 2 (Urban Legends) is to invigorate the art of listening in and to the metropolis. Radio Bicyclette 2 amplifies these obscure sounds and tales of the city, broadcasting them via low power radio through the streets in which they originated. The word ‘legend’ in the performance title refers not only to the outrageous stories, but also to an aural code for remapping and deciphering the urban landscape.

Radiophonic Grotesque

A recent project I am developing is a series of performances entitled Vêtements Radiophoniques (Radiophonic Clothes). The first performance in this series is to be presented within the context of a festival entitled At Home Abroad hosted by CESTA in the Czech Republic <http://www.cesta.cz> August 19-13, 1999. Since the festival themes are about reflections on adopted cultures from im/e/migrants, refugees, extra-legal and resident aliens, and Others making their homes on foreign soil, the goal of this “VR technology” is to evoke the visceral messiness of grotesque bodies, in order to to question the clean, closed borders of the modern nation-state. Using low-power radio, sound, and language, my goal is to expose “leaky bodies” of all kinds, be they national, sexual, or mediated bodies.

Though still considered a citizen of the same country (for the time being at least), when I moved to the province of Québec from the Canadian Prairies, I crossed the same sort of psychological territory that relocating to another country often does.

Québec sees itself as a francophone nation trapped within the larger state corpus of Canada: despite vast differences of region and ethnicity, the people beyond the borders of Québec are often lumped together and referred to as the “Rest of Canada.” I’ve become an unwilling member of this nebulous and homogonized tribe of foreigners on Québecois soil. When I arrived here, I was equipped with but the rudimentary basics of highschool French. Although the daughter of East European immigrants, I had been raised and educated in English, and consider it my most proficient language.

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