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Penser Avec Les Mains and Requiem for Bagdad (Audio)

Mar 20, 2020
Created by Tetsuo Kogawa (2003). Introduced by Karen Werner.
Tetsuo Kogawa is famous for teaching people all over the world to build their own microtransmitters. His radio art pieces have involved performing live with these microtransmitters. The first piece, Penser Avec Les Mains, (Thinking with the Hands) was adapted from a live performance Tetsuo did in 2003. The second piece, also from 2003, is called Requiem for Bagdad, created two weeks after US invaded Iraq in 2003. Tetsuo Kogawa has been interested in the hand in the context of radio art. In the first piece, he used his hands to build the transmitter and then to move the radio waves, inspired by a quote: “The true condition of humans, it is to think with their hands.” (La vraie condition de l'homme, c'est de penser avec ses mains, from Denis de Rougemont's Penser avec les mains, 1936.) Regarding the second piece Tetsuo Kogawa writes, “I was thinking of a requiem for Bagdad since the modern war tries to erase all of horizons, physical or conceptual. In fact, the US Air Force used 'E-bomb' to knock the Iraqi TV off the air with an 'experimental electromagnetic pulse device of over two billion watts.' This was the totally opposite use of airwaves against emancipating and finding innumerable horizons of airwaves." - Introduced by Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellow 2019/2020, Karen Werner.