Radia Show 1038: "Numberstations" by Lale Rodgarkia-Dara (Radio Helsinki)

There are two kinds of dedicated radio listeners. Those who head for their FM Soundscape while, working, reading living and those who head for numbers and morse-code on short wave. Distracting at least one of these groups may seem like an achievable aim. While we are discussing pipeline-holes and ripped internet-cables in the Baltic sea, the neo-rebellion in Iran and drones in circles, it had all been broadcasted beforehand.

This Radia-show is dedicated to numberstations, a way of broadcasting encrypted information via series of numbers or letters, using either automated voice, Morse code, or a digital mode. A method that has been used since WW I and is still used as this signals are not sensitive to any distortion and disturbance and reach out via aether into the air and water. Foreign intelligence agencies under water or overseas keep on using this practical method of informations transportation.

Lale Rodgarkia-Dara – works as an author, radio producer and media artist.

She is part of the Mz* Baltazar’s Laboratory Collective, which runs a feminist art/hacker space in Vienna, the Vienna Radia Collective (co-founder of radia.fm) as well as co-founder of Elektronik Teatime (until 2015) and the Radio Ironie Orchestra of Radio Helsinki (2019). She somehow always invents projects with literature, media art and mostly in transitory spaces or on the radio. Initiator and co-founder of the Palais Rössl. It is an intergenerational, polydisciplinary, queer, growing symbiotic connection of artists, musicians, designers and cultural workers in the heart of Vienna. Together with Judith Unterpertinger, she forms the duo Under the given circumstances. She is currently the strategic managing director of Radio Helsinki 92.6 – Freies Radio Graz.

In recent years, she has explored the intersection between art, science and culture in a series of socio-political and artistic projects. Since 2003 she has been holding radio workshops with young people and adults and giving lectures in formal and informal educational institutions and universities. She was artistic lecturer at the TU Vienna (SKUOR, 2013-2014), lecturer at the IEM – Institute for Electronic Music and Acoustics at the KUG in Graz (2017/2018) and at the Institute for Artistic Teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts in the field of Acoustics (2018/2019, 2021/2022), since 2024 University of Applied Arts Vienna (teaching as the collective Mz* Baltzar’s Laboratory). Juror for the Hans Weigel Literature Scholarship 2013-2015, advisory board and juror for the the Media Art Prize of the City of Vienna 2017, advisory board Literatur&Kritik 2023-2024.

Each week one member of the Radia Network produces a show for all the others. The Radia Network emerged from a series of meetings, clandestine events, late-night club discussions, and a lot of email exchanges between cultural radio producers across Europe. The topics vary and the reasons for forming a network are many, but Radia has become a concrete manifestation of the desire to use radio as an art form. The approaches differ, as do the local contexts; from commissioned radio art works to struggles for frequencies to copyright concerns, all the radios share the goal of an audio space where something different can happen. That different is also a form in the making––radio sounds different in each city, on each frequency. Taking radio as an art form, claiming that space for creative production in the mediascape and cracking apart the notion of radio, is what Radia does.

It is producing radio stuff that is hard to describe. Some of it can be labeled radio art, or experimental radio, or creative radio. Sometimes it talks, sometimes it doesn’t. It can be noisy, or a kind of soundscape, or a documentary, a document, a talk, a performance. Each and every week, one of the partners will provide the network program, commissioned and produced especially for this purpose: being broadcast by all the partners and made available online.

Some things have to be said about all those partners. They are radio stations, of the independent, non-commercial, community, cultural species. They all speak different languages, and this should create interesting problems. Although initially they were all European radio stations this has changed over time, and Radia has become not only larger but also more diverse: 22 partners in 14 countries and growing all the time.

Radia Stations

* Duuu (Paris, FR)
* ∏node (Mulhouse, Paris, FR)
* Diffusion (Sydney, AU)
* JET FM (Nantes, FR)
* Kanal 103 (Skopje, MK)
* Orange 94.0 (Vienna, AT)
* Radio Campus (Brussels, BE)
* Radio Grenouille (Marseille, FR)
* Radio Helsinki (Graz, AT)
* Radio One 91 FM (Dunedin, NZ)
* Radio Panik (Brussels, BE)
* Radio Papesse (Firenze, IT)
* Radio Student (Ljubljana, SI)
* radio x (Frankfurt/Main, DE)
* Rádio Zero (Lisboa, PT)
* RadioWORM (Rotterdam, NL)
* Reboot.fm (Berlin, DE)
* Resonance FM (London, UK)
* Soundart Radio (Dartington, UK)
* TEA FM (Zaragoza, ES)
* Usmaradio (San Marino, SM)
* Wave Farm WGXC 90.7-FM (New York, USA)

Affiliates

* Kunstradio (Vienna, AT)
* Mobile Radio (Ürzig, DE)
* Radioart106 (Haifa, PS48)

More information at http://radia.fm