Show 1051: Radiopille by Vienna Radia Collective Feat. Liese Schmidt

The exhibition ‘Die Pfeile des Wilden Apollo’ (an exhibition of the art collections in cooperation with the Exhibit Gallery at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna) explores the transition from the Enlightenment to early Romanticism through the central role of music as a vehicle for spiritual experience and national mysticism: sounds of an early folk movement, Nordic drone scapes as an expression of a new national mysticism, bardic singing and the sounds of cosmic forces.

The video work magnetic fan fiction (The Case of Miss – –) by Liese Schmidt responds to four portraits of so-called ‘clairvoyants’ shown in the exhibition, who are under the influence of a mesmeristic treatment. The work weaves together medical, spiritualist and media-technological narratives into a speculative story of mental transmission, in which primarily female, childlike and colonised bodies appear as transmitters and receivers of thoughts, diagnoses and cosmic visions. In a fictional extension of this narrative, the so-called ‘radio pill’ is hacked to send a patient’s thoughts back into the past. The result is a ‘magnetic fan fiction’ that makes a paranoid inner world audible via invisible frequencies. The ‘radio pill’ had an inspiring effect on the Vienna Radia Collective and prompted Fabi Lux and Karl H. Schönswetter to develop the idea of a radio station travelling through the body. Radiopille with contributions by Liese Schmidt, Fabi Lux and Karl H. Schönswetter

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