RADIO ECOLOGIES – LOST IN TRANSMISSION by KATE DONOVAN & GABI SCHAFFNER RADIO ECOLOGIES … is a Radio Art piece by Kate Donovan, 2020, with narration by Molly Donovan Higham. In this piece, radio is acknowledged as a natural as well as a human-made phenomena, that is interconnected and active across species and scales. The work asks: How does an expanded perspective impact our imagination of radio in the future? In the beginning, there was radio. Some say that there was a quickening, and that the Earth’s core bubbled and burped to release the egg, and that the soft, brittle egg cracked to release the worm – the double worm of two entwined in one – to let it slither out and go underground, to disperse through all the elements and up through the aether, burrowing down and emerging up at the same time. But the sun and rocks and stars know that there was radio even before that. And nuclear waste (among other things) will go on to tell our more-than-human successors that there will still be radio, even then. LOST IN TRANSMISSION … is a collaborative piece by Kate Donovan and Gabi Schaffner; editing and sound design: Gabi Schaffner. How can we conceive of an expedition in non-territorial terms? Can we read the signals of our ecosphere? What if a reed turns out to be an antenna? Kate Donovan and Gabi Schaffner venture into the water retention basin of the Tempelhofer Feld, Berlin: at times an idyllic lake, sometimes a swampland the size of a football field, this body of water fluctuates between effective area and dreamscape, biomass and place of retreat. KATE DONOVAN is a practicing radio artist, facilitator and researcher based in Berlin. Her artistic practice deals with radio in an elemental sense, in terms of frequency, transmission and interconnectedness (but also disruption and interference). Her editorial and organisational work in free and community radio fosters inclusion and experimentation. Recent and current projects include: Datscha Radio 17, a garden radio art festival on the future of the garden in the Anthropocene; ‘The Bespoke Headpiece’, a speculative telling of radio history which was developed during a transmission arts residency at Wave Farm in 2018; and the ongoing radio show ‘elements’, which broadcasts monthly via CoLaboRadio, on FM in Berlin and Potsdam, and online. GABI SCHAFFNER works as an interdisciplinary artist in the field of visionary documentation, poetics and sound art. Traveling forms a vital part of her artistic practice – as a source for sound and language recordings but also as “a rite of passage” enabling the artist to explore alternative narrative structures. Her works in the field of sound and radio art have been broadcast internationally, including commissions by Deutschlandradio, SWR, ABC Australia and many more. Besides radio she has realized site-specific projects and exhibitions in India, Australia, Iceland, Spain, Finland, France and, most recently, Taiwan. Her collaborative project Datscha Radio – of which Kate Donovan also forms part – won the Award of the Berlin Network of Free Project Spaces and Initiatives 2019. Find out more about DATSCHA RADIO at www.datscharadio.de credits: great many thanks to KATE DONOVAN & GABI SCHAFFNER for RADIO ECOLOGIES – LOST IN TRANSMISSION! metadata: RADIO ECOLOGIES – LOST IN TRANSMISSION – by KATE DONOVAN & GABI SCHAFFNER radia production: miss.gunst [GUNST + radiator x] production date: october 2020 station: radio x, frankfurt am main (germany) length: 28 min. licence: (cc-by-nc) KATE DONOVAN & GABI SCHAFFNER www.radiox.de – www.gunst.info – www.datscharadio.de additional info: includes radia jingles (in/out), station and program info/intro (english) links: radio x & radiator x: www.radiox.de – www.radiox.de/radiator-x GUNSTradio & radiator x: www.gunst.info – www.gunst.info/radiator Datscha Radio: www.datscharadio.de

Each week one member of the Radia Network produce 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: 17 partners in nine countries and growing all the time.

Radia Stations

* Campus Paris (Paris, FR)
* CFRC 101.9 FM (Kingston, CA)
* CKUT (Montréal, CA)
* JET FM (Nantes, FR)
* Kanal 103 (Skopje, MK)
* Orange 94.0 (Vienna, AT)
* Radio Campus (Brussels, BE)
* Radio Corax (Halle, DE)
* Radio Grenouille (Marseille, FR)
* Radio Helsinki (Graz, AT)
* Radio Nova (Oslo, NO)
* 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)
* Wave Farm WGXC 90.7-FM (New York, USA)
* XL Air (Brussels, BE)

Affiliates

* Kunstradio (Vienna, AT) More information at http://radia.fm