WGXC-90.7 FM
From the Radio Art Archive: "Penser Avec Les Mains" (2003) and "Requiem for Bagdad" (2003) by Tetsuo Kogawa
90.7-FM in NY's Upper Hudson Valley and wgxc.org/listen everywhere
http://www.wgxc.org/
Produced by Wave Farm Radio.
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.
The Wave Farm Broadcast Radio Art Archive is an online resource and broadcast series on Wave Farm’s WGXC 90.7-FM, which is syndicated to stations across the country through The Radio Art Hour. It aims to identify, coalesce, and celebrate historical and contemporary international radio artworks created specifically for terrestrial AM/FM/Shortwave broadcast, whether it be via commercial, public, community, or pirate transmission. The archive is a product of Wave Farm's Radio Artist Fellowship.
Radio artists explore broadcast radio space through a richly polyphonous mix of practices, including poetic resuscitations of conventional radio drama, documentary, interview and news formats; found and field sound compositions reframed by broadcast; performative inhabitations/embodiments of radio’s inherent qualities, such as entropy, anonymity and interference; playful celebrations/subversions of the complex relationship between senders and receivers, and the potential feedback loops between hosts and layers of audience, from in-studio to listeners at home to callers-in; use of radio space to bridge widely dispersed voices (be they living or dead), subjects, environments and communities, or to migrate through them in ways that would not be possible in real time and space; electroacoustic compositions with sounds primarily derived from gathering, generating and remixing radiophonic sources. Note: Wave Farm continues to expand this definition of radio art through engagement with contemporary practices including those revealed by Wave Farm Artists-in-residence, and the Radio Art Fellowship program.

