Radia Show 1030: duration unknown by Sarah Washington & Knut Aufermann (Mobile Radio)

This piece concerns the uncertainties and contradictions of modern-day car use, and unfolds in the mind rather more as an unfinished philosophical journey than a physical one. It was conceived as an antidote to the celebratory sentiment (although perhaps ironically intended) engendered in listeners by the Kraftwerk song ‘Autobahn’ – in relationship to the building of an out-of-time motorway bridge over the Mosel valley near Ürzig in Germany. The originally planned action was to detonate the record while it played on a portable turntable on the unfinished bridge, which was deemed somewhat tricky to realise.

The work was made for the show Cafe Sonore on the Dutch national radio channel VPRO in 2010, commissioned by Lukas Simonis. During a residency at WORM in Rotterdam to prepare source material, we recorded all the electronics on their wonderful array of analogue synths, which we interconnected with our own home-made instruments. We also set up radio and open-mic feedback processes in the studio. The voiceover was recorded in our home studio.

Each airing of the work is unique due to a production stunt; this version was specially produced for Radia in December 2024.

Sarah Washington and Knut Aufermann began Mobile Radio on the 18th September 2005. For the first two years the project was touring Europe without a home base. It was established as a travelling project to build upon our work across Europe in the fields of radio and sound art which had arisen during the three years that we helped to establish the London art radio station Resonance FM. Our work takes us to media and art festivals, conferences, universities, and one-off events where we run short-lived radio stations, create special live broadcasts, give workshops and talks, design radio installations and play concerts. We also make radiophonic works for public and community radios worldwide, and produce books on the topic of radio art. Nowadays based in Germany, we continue the work of Mobile Radio with those who want to develop concepts through the medium of radio. Our mission remains the same: to seek out new forms of radio by taking radio production out of the studio environment.

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