re- radio

Artistic Reflection
by Karen Werner

Table of contents

Introduction
Chapter One Radio Art Lineages
Chapter Two Who are you SkottegatenFM?
Chapter Three Radio Multe, The Shadow and her Station
Chapter Four On-air Conversation as Co-creation
Chapter Five Seijo & her Soul
Conclusion
Appendix PhD Activities Spring 2020-Autumn 2024
Acknowledgements

Ink drawing of a radio by Karen Werner, 2020

3 Diaspora and radio have evocative overlaps. The word diaspora comes from the ancient Greek ‘speirein’ meaning to scatter about, to sow over, and ‘dia’ meaning across. Traveling another etymological route, ‘cast’, as in broadcast, comes from the Scandinavian 'kasta' meaning to throw, fling, hurl, emit and, later, to widely spread, disperse upon the ground.

When I started to work with my initial PhD proposal, Strange Radio, I considered how I might reframe my topic. re- radio emerged as a way “forward.” Rather than strangeness, a concept I still hold with interest and affection, I chose to follow the mirror-concept relationality amidst an awareness of the stranger and diaspora³. The word stranger is etymologically linked to exclusion; relationality is about inclusion. Human geographer and Indigenous scholar Lauren Tynan (trawlwulwuy) puts it this way: “When all things exist in relatedness, it is inconceivable that an entity, idea or person could exist outside of this network, or be considered as ‘Other’ to this system of relationality” (Tynan 2021, p.5). 

The shift from Strange Radio to re- radio was also inspired by the name of my PhD fellowship. “Relational sound practices” was the research call posted by my first supervisor Brandon LaBelle. What a great phrase! I wanted to open it up and enter it: What does relational mean and how do I relate to this concept? How does my language and culture inform and limit my understanding of relationality? What art do I make when sensing the world through a relational lens? How do my relational sound and radio practices relate to relational aesthetics and relational antagonism, phrases that are part of contemporary aesthetic discourses and point to particular politics? And what is revealed about radio when working through a relational paradigm?

Radio as an artistic medium 

Radio artist Gregory Whitehead describes radio as a swampy and foggy space.⁴ His descriptions of analog broadcast radio as an artistic medium inspire me regularly. With its fragile signals that emerge and decay, radio resembles “our own suppressed vulnerability and incoherence… Every broadcast becomes a tentative, unstable proposal for how the dispersed parts of ourselves might create a coherent universe. Then it all falls apart” (Whitehead, forthcoming, 8). Much as Whitehead loves to play with sound, he insists that radio is less about sound than about social relationships and spaces, including the economic and political contexts of broadcasting systems, the cultural expectations listeners bring to radio and the radio artist’s subjectivity (Ibid). Radio artist Hank Bull also underscores radio as spatial when he writes, “Radio is actually a form of sculpture, considering all the space involved” (Bull 1994, 48).   

An important aspect of re- radio is its location in Norway. Norway shut down its FM and AM national radio infrastructure in 2017. At the cost of 200 million Norwegian Kroner (approximately twenty-five million euros), the government built a parallel infrastructure for digital audio broadcasting (DAB) and moved its entire national broadcasting system, NRK, there. While Norway could have also kept NRK on FM, the government decided against it, leaving the FM infrastructure as ruins, the first country to do so. Since 2017, the sound of the FM dial on a typical day in Bergen is mostly static. Without a functioning AM and FM system, few Norwegians, aside from ham radio enthusiasts, those with old boats and cars and the few radio artists, have analogue radios to access FM radio stations. I often provide FM radios as part of my radio artworks in Bergen. At the same time, having an abandoned FM spectrum means it is relatively easy to set up an FM radio station in Norway, and there is plenty of room for experimentation, criticality and play.  

4 Whitehead distinguishes radio from podcast space. In the podcast: “entropy and interference: gone. Privacy of the listener: gone. Random accidents and the excitement of stumbling into a space you were not looking for: gone. As a rapidly expanding data set within the internet mine, a mine that extracts valuable information from our subjectivities without any compensation, podcasts have zero cultural autonomy while politically, they simply provide yet another squeaky clean window for scrutiny of the public by the surveillance state" (Whitehead forthcoming, 11).

Relationality 

My understanding of relationality in re- radio has been most influenced by Indigenous scholars such as Shawn Wilson (Cree) and Lauren Tynan, as well as Robin Kimmerer, who put relationality at the center of their scholarship, cultures and lives. Wilson writes, “Relationships do not merely shape reality, they are reality” (Wilson 2008, p.7). This world view is part of Cree language which, for example, has no words for grandchild or grandparent but rather a word for the relationship between grandparent and grandchild that both of them use to describe their connection. English by contrast is object oriented, pointing to grandchild and grandparent with separate nouns (Ibid. p. 80). I will return to Shawn Wilson’s contributions to relational research methodologies in the section below. 

Tynan elaborates on how relationality decenters entities including humans and focuses on the spaces between. In Tynan’s words: “Human and more-than-human beings never are – not isolated, not static, not known – but only become as they constantly emerge together” (Tynan 2021, 7).  Tynan links this understanding of relationality to the reciprocal ecological ethics expressed in Braiding Sweetgrass:

A relational reality creates relationships between ideas or entities, it is an affective force that compels us to not just understand the world as relational, but feel the world as kin.I can tell you that the world is relational and you may believe me, but beyond understanding the concept of relationality, to feel the world as kin is to enact a relational ethos and the responsibilities and account-abilities that accompany it (Tynan 2021, 7).

These discourses speak to profound aspects of relationality that span bodies and voices, spaces between, history’s ongoing presence and cosmology. Wilson, Tynan, Kimmerer and others inspire me to stretch my lived understanding and embodied knowledge of relationality, to immerse in this topic in my art as a way of deepening the ethics I work with and live by. At the same time, there are important ethical protocols to keep in mind when working with Indigenous theories, a point I return to below. The questions I ask about relationality through radio art are specific ones that live close to my experiences and hopefully support those broader constellations. re- radio’s inquiries take shape through the radio station as an artistic form and on-air conversation as co-creation, engaging with spaces between, co-emergences and becomings in these spaces and encounters. 

Two other tributaries inform relationality as it weaves through re- radio. My first encounter with relationality as a concept was within feminist psychology. In the 1990s I studied at a graduate school of education with Carol Gilligan, a psychologist who challenged classic western psychological narratives (psychological development as increasing individualism) by focusing on women and proposing a counter-narrative of relationality. Gilligan wrote In a Different Voice, which became a landmark psychological text (Gilligan 1982). When I studied with Gilligan, she was working with vocal practitioner Kristin Linklater on the voice as a relational space. The emotional quality of a person’s voice is like a cello note, constituted in part by the resonating container of the person’s psychological environment and relationships with others, physically present as well as internalized. In The Birth of Pleasure: A New Map of Love, Gilligan links an individual’s voice and resonance to governance: democracy requires resonating spaces that draw forth rather than hinder voices (Gilligan 2002). The voice, which we may think of as coming from an individual body, is co-created, and this has individual and political implications. Gilligan’s creative attention to voice moved me and continues as a theme in my art and artistic research. 

Another tributary that informs my understanding of relationality comes from sound studies and its influence on disciplines like geography (LaBelle 2010, Kanngieser 2011). AM Kanngieser is a geographer who invokes relationality in the context of sound, specifically voice, and space.For Kannsieger, voice and space co-create each other. Borrowing from Mikhail Bakhtin and his belief that we create worlds and spaces through speaking and listening, Kanngieser underscores the reciprocal dynamics as well: that spaces shape voices. They write, “The size of a room or space and its volumic capacity, its resonant cavities, its density, its formal or informal feel and function…all contribute to how the voice moves within it, the kinds of utterances that are likely to be made and the ways in which we listen and respond to one another” (Kanngieser 2011, p. 11). Central to Kanngieser’s argument is that space is not fixed and immobile but rather active and “always becoming” (ibid, p.12). Though rooted in a different discourse, Kanngieser’s work overlaps with Carol Gilligan’s attention to co-constitution and the spaces between.

Towards a relational research methodology

In Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods, Shawn Wilson describes a relational research paradigm where research is a ceremony “to build stronger relationships or to bridge the distance between aspects of our cosmos and ourselves” (Wilson 2008, 137). Wilson reminds us that every act of research occurs within a research paradigm, a set of underlying beliefs about reality and the purpose of gaining knowledge. Too often in research these underlying beliefs are not articulated, considered or questioned. Wilson advocates making one’s cosmology, one’s research paradigm, explicit. It is an unexamined privilege to bypass this step, one that normalizes and reifies what he refers to as western world views and paradigms of knowledge. An aspect of this dominant world view is that knowledge is individual: a researcher discovers, authors and owns knowledge. This is “vastly different from an Indigenous paradigm where knowledge belongs to the cosmos of which we are part, and researchers are interpreters of this knowledge” (Ibid, 38).

In a virtual talk Wilson gave at Bergen’s Art Academy in March 2022, he invited those who are not Indigenous researchers to be indigenist, much as those who do not identify as women are invited to be feminist. Scholars such as Baruk Jacob share processes for those who are not Indigenous to engage with Indigenous theories in ways that can be indigenist rather than culturally extractive and appropriative.⁵ Lakota artist and scholar Kite shared practices and protocols for indigenist ways of being at a workshop she gave in Bergen in 2023, asking participants to consider who our communities are and what our communities need, including what tools they need.⁶ In workshops with Sámi scholar Liisa-Ravna Finbog, we were invited to experience a Sámi research methodology: casually talking for hours in small sewing circles while doing beadwork, following patterns Finbog gave us that refer to reciprocity, knowledge and clear thinking.⁷ American anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli, in discussing her longtime participation in the Karrabing Collective during another Bergen workshop, encouraged a persistence in working “together, otherwise, towards” constructive responses to settler colonialism through our art, teaching and research.⁸

re- radio’s methodology, the ways I have been gathering, or ideally interpreting, knowledge in this artistic research PhD, draws on these indigenist workshops, talks and texts. In indigenist values and priorities I find artistic research practices that support a relational ontology and provide a supportive framework for my areas of inquiry and art practice. 

In keeping with the motion of re-, my methodology has emphasized repetition, duration and slowness, creating a three-month artwork, then an ongoing multi-year artwork and finally a nine-evening-long artwork, each following a score or routine that I repeat daily, nightly, weekly or monthly. I or we show up and surrender to a set form or score. This approach invites the element of time, wearing through the researcher’s I and making room for knowledge to be received. This might be called a ritualistic approach to knowledge.

5 See Baruk Jacob’s web resource https://publish.obsidian.md/reflexiv/ 

6 Workshop with Suzanne Kite, “Dreaming with Nonhumans and AI,” Bergen Senter for Elektronisk Kunst, December 2023

7 Workshop with Liisa-Ravna Finbog, “Indigenous Methodologies and Creative Practices,” Tampere University, Finland, November 2022

8 Workshop with Elizabeth Povinelli, “Nonfiction, Fictodocumentary Film, and Myth: Bending Aesthetics to Critical Askesis in Settler Late Liberalism,” Bergen Senter for Elektronisk Kunst, October 2022

Another aspect of re- that infuses re- radio’s methodology is taking a step back⁹ to make space. By back I do not mean towards nostalgia, returning to analogue forms of communication like FM for their own sake. Rather I mean not believing so firmly in the world and the self as it is often constructed, for example resisting the assumption that linearity and progress are the only valid time narratives and opening to diverse and simultaneously co-existing experiences of time. re- invites disorientation, humility, allowing for more porous perceptions of time and space, so other cosmologies, causalities and grammars seep in.

A third aspect of my methodology has been sociality, specifically thinking and talking with others on-air, including interlocuters at a radio station as well as imagined radio listeners. At times these interlocuters are friends; other times they are people excited by the idea of a neighborhood or community radio station. Sometimes we are similar demographically; sometimes we come from different cultures, languages and generations. Sometimes I lead; sometimes I follow. The radio station as an artistic form emerged organically from this longing for sociality. In the ways I approach the radio station, relationality is both a method and an artistic material in the form of conversation.

9 I think of Oslo based artistic researcher colleague Fernanda Branco and her performative practice of walking backwards. 

One form of re- radio’s sociality is an approach to on-air dialogue that I call conversation as co-creation, which I will expand on in Chapter Four. This approach arose in the early days of SkottegatenFM, the first re- radio station I created, as I wanted to distinguish the on-air talking we would do from the more familiar radio or podcast interview form. The familiar interview form tired me, and I wanted to pace myself for the daily transmissions on the station. As SkottegatenFM progressed I noticed I was sometimes free-associating with, in and on radio waves, a practice I came to call thinking-speaking-writing. In the second radio station I created, Radio Multe, other conversational practices and communicative forms emerged: participants making programs on the radio station informally joined each other’s programs as drop-in interlocuters, and we tried on-air experiments like the think outloud protocol¹⁰, sharing our uncensored internal thoughts on-air in real time. A third central artwork of re- radio, Seijo & her Soul, revolves around on-air conversation as co-creation with a small group of people, the Radio Multe Ensemble. Together we have tried prompts and practices to artistically activate communicative spaces that encourage presence rather than presentation. The intention is to soften the self, especially in radio spaces that, to varying degrees, move our voices from interior to exterior spaces. Softening the self allows for co-creation, so the space between can be acknowledged, animated and expressed.

10 As I explain in Chapter Three, this is a creative alteration of thinking aloud protocol, a similar method used in product design, psychology and social sciences.  

 11 Unless otherwise noted, photographs and drawings in the artistic reflection are by Karen Werner.

A map of the reflective text ¹¹

Chapter One Radio Art Lineages provides a general context about electromagnetism alongside the invention and history of radio. I review radio art as a genre and pay special attention to artists who have worked with the radio station as an artistic form. 

Chapter Two Who are you SkottegatenFM? is an in-depth description of the first of the three central artworks in re- radio. Weaving together ideas from Anna Friz and Tetsuo Kogawa, I frame this station as practicing resonant rather than radiant radio. 

Chapter Three Radio Multe, The Shadow and her Radio Station is a detailed description of the second of the three central artworks. I compare aspects of Radio Multe to SkottegatenFM and explain why I frame Radio Multe as an art work. I also consider Radio Multe in relation to Nicolas Bourriaud’s  relational aesthetics and Claire Bishop’s discussions of participatory art and relational antagonism to clarify how I am engaging with the politics of relationality. Finally, I show how Radio Multe has been a generative space for testing unconventional radiophonic approaches.

Chapter Four On-air Conversation as Co-creation draws on dialogical aesthetics as discussed by Grant Kester to trace a red-thread in re- radio regarding conversation as an artistic material. I share a range of dialogical practices that have emerged in re- radio with a special interest in how being on air affects conversation and possibilities for thinking and becoming. 

Chapter Five Seijo & her Soul describes the third of the three central artworks, a durational performance installation that combines elements from SkottegatenFM and Radio Multe, including on-air conversation as co-creation, within an immersive art gallery context. The final section reflects on story as a relational knowledge practice with relevance for artistic research. 

In the Conclusion I review insights from this artistic research journey and casts seeds for future artistic research.

The Appendix is a summary of the activities and artworks that have been part of this artistic research PhD. 

Documentation

Extensive documentation of SkottegatenFM, Radio Multe and Seijo & her Soul, including a list of participants in each work, is located in a separate area of this exposition located here. As durational, participatory and, in one case, ongoing artworks, documenting the full experience is not possible. The photographs, video and extensive archive of audio recordings in conjunction with the written reflections offer an approximate experience.¹²

In terms of audio documentation, I recommend the edited SkottegatenFM reel (53:00) and Radio Multe reel (55:00), both of which are assemblages made of excerpts from transmissions in chronological order. These reels are available in the Documentation section. When making these reels my intention was to help readers and listeners of re- radio navigate efficiently through a lot of material. After making these reels I find them, especially the SkottegatenFM reel, to be evocative radio essays as well. 

For Seijo & her Soul I recommend the audio-video reel (5:00) made from audio and video recordings of the nine evenings of the performance installation, also available in the Documentation section.

I also recommend Radio Midway (55:00), a lecture-performance-transmission created in fall 2023 that provides an early framing of SkottegatenFM, Radio Multe and a unnamed shadow/ jamming station through the materiality of narrowcast radio in a dark room. This video can be accessed in the Appendix. 

12 Norwegian artistic research PhD projects often present documentation of artistic results and reflection in separate sections. For process-based projects such as re- radio, documentation of artistic results and reflection become more blended. This may be the case especially with my approach to radio. In re- radio’s Research Catalogue exposition I have created separate sections for documentation of artistic results and artistic reflection. But I also bring reflection into the artworks themselves. And, documentation slips into the reflection text because of the durational aspects of the artwork that benefit from narrative framing. 

Chapter One:

Radio Art Lineages

13 French artist duo Bureau d ́Etudes, who among other things research and design detailed posters of communication infrastructures and other power systems, write that humans of the twenty-first century are constituted by an electromagnetic cosmology: “Understanding the electromagnetic field is the only way to understand ourselves and our surroundings” (quoted in Joyce 2008, 8). The phrase electromagnetic cosmology is evocative, blending the scientific (electromagnetism) with the cultural and spiritual (cosmology) and serves as a springboard for the scientific, historical and artistic contexts provided in this chapter.

In this chapter I sketch aspects of an electromagnetic cosmology¹³, with a general overview of electromagnetism and the invention of wireless radio. I turn my focus to radio as an artistic medium, including a link to Listening in the Dark, a two-hour radio program I produced and curated to showcase a range of approaches to radio art. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the radio station as an artistic form to further situate and relate my work to others in the field.

Electromagnetic fields, wired and wireless inventions

The electromagnetic field is an expression from physics that refers to a physical field produced by electrically charged objects and affecting nearby charged particles. This physical field is a combination of electric and magnetic fields which move through space as electromagnetic waves. Electromagnetic waves move in various wavelengths and frequencies and as a result contain varying amounts of energy. The electromagnetic spectrum is a way of representing this variation of wavelengths and frequencies; radio waves are at one end of the spectrum which is characterized by the longest wavelengths and slowest frequency. At the other end with the shortest wavelengths and fastest frequencies are gamma rays. Somewhere in between is visible light.

As much as I read and ask a friend who is a physicist my questions about electromagnetism and radio and have learned enough to explain some things, there are many aspects of radio and  electromagnetism that I do not understand. I believe this too is part of the electromagnetic cosmology, that we inhabit electromagnetic fields and live with inventions harnessing these natural forces and yet do not understand what they are or how they work.An electromagnetic cosmology also inevitably brings with it a sense of awe, since electromagnetism was an essential part of the Big Bang, traces of which which can still experience in cosmic background noise. 

In the 1820s western scientists started to understand electromagnetism and how to generate it. By 1840 Samuel Morse had invented the telegraph, which involves an electric current moving through a coil to generate a magnetic field. The telegraph allowed for near-instantaneous transmission of information over great distances. Previously letters or messages would take months to reach their intended receiver. Recognizing the social implications of long-distance communication, the first message Morse sent over the telegraph, in Morse code, was: “What hath God wrought?” (Headrick 1988).

Initially the electromagnetic pulses of Morse code were carried by cables on the land. Before long, underwater ocean cables were introduced and soon after the first Transatlantic telegraph line was laid on the ocean floor between England and eastern Canada, and then beyond. By 1900 investors wanted more reliable and faster communication systems and wireless radio was invented, with Marconi credited. At first it was Morse code that was sent on wireless transmitters from land to ships on the ocean. By 1906 music and the human voice were carried from transmitter to receiver without any cables through the “air.” Within the next two decades, radio infrastructures emerged, including regulatory and organizational systems for the radio spectrum, radio stations, widely available radio receivers and national radio networks.

Radio as an artistic medium

One definition of radio art is “works created specifically for terrestrial AM/FM broadcast, whether it be via commercial, public, community, or pirate transmission.”¹⁵ Gregory Whitehead opens this definition a bit, writing that radio art is “all explorations of the aesthetic and poetic possibilities present within broadcast space” (Whitehead 2024, 200). Not long after radio was invented, artists began imagining its creative and social possibilities. One early example is Velimir Khlebnikov, a Russian avant-garde poet who in 1921 wrote “The Radio of the Future,” imagining a global medium for sharing art, lectures and new forms of communication (Khlebnikov 1985).¹⁶ 

Contemporary networks and hubs supporting the study, production and sharing of radio art include independent non-commercial radio stations such as Resonance FM in London and Wave Farm’s WGXC in Hudson, New York. Since 1987, Österreichischer Rundfunk (ORF)’s program Kunstradio has commissioned and broadcast radio art on Austria’s national radio network. Regional German radio networks such as Deutschlandfunk Kultur have been active, partnering recently with Bauhaus-Universität Weimar’s Experimental Radio degree program to create radio art residencies. Deutschlandfunk Kultur and Berlin’s Savvy Contemporary co-commissioned radio artworks as part of documenta 14’s Every Time a Ear Di Soun. Radia.fm, whose tagline is “new and forgotten ways of making radio,” is a network of twenty independent, non-commercial community radio stations across Europe, North America, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Israel that rotate invitations to producers and share work across the Radia network. Canada has a rich radio art scene with experimental community and university stations across the country, as well as the west coast galleries Western Front and Walter Phillips Gallery at Banff that have radio art legacies. Canada is also home to the radio-centric New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA). In Scotland an annual festival called Radiophrenia commissions and programs radio artworks for twenty-four hours a day for two weeks. A radio art gallery and archive called Assembly is in the process of launching in Beijing, China.

15 From the transmission arts organization Wave Farm’s website: https://wavefarm.org

16 There is a rich cultural history of radio art’s early days beyond the scope of this artistic research reflection. See, for example, Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead’s edited collection Wireless Imagination: Sound Radio and the Avant-Garde (1994), Neil Verma’s Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics, and American Radio Drama (2012) and Daniel Gilfillan’s Pieces of Sound: German Experimental Radio (2009), among many others.

Though there is less of an institutionalized festival or commissioning infrastructure for radio art within Central and South America, Southeast Asia and Africa, artists based in these regions and in the diaspora are an important part of radio art.¹⁷ The radio art genre, though, has a bias towards countries with early investments in national radio networks, infrastructure and funding resources, i.e. those in Europe. Not surprisingly, those with national radio resources are countries that have a history of colonizing and extracting resources from other regions. I became sensitized to this global context of radio art while participating in a year-long online reading group on Sound and Imperialism organized through Princeton University during re- radio, and reckoned with ways the invention of radio expanded the reach and efficacy of European colonialism (Headrick 1988). This uneven distribution of radio infrastructure, including archives, has limited a shared knowledge of international radio art histories¹⁸ and the proliferation of more diverse approaches to the medium until fairly recently. 

My own introduction to radio art was through Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), which I explored while following the work of Sherre DeLys whom I later asked to be my first radio mentor. ABC used to do adventurous commissions on a national radio program called The Listening Room (1988-2003) and later on a show called Soundproof (2014-2017). Though no longer active, Soundproof has an archive of “Radio Yaks” about radio art with Soundproof host Miyuki Jokiranta. 

Two publications based on radio art exhibitions have been integral to re- radio: first, Radio Re-think: Art, Sound and Transmission was produced as part of an eponymous exhibition at Banff in 1994 (Augaitis and Lander, ed. 1994). Second, Radio Revolten: 30 Days of Radio Art accompanied a 2016 month-long festival in Halle, Germany, that I was able to attend for a week (Aufermann, Hahmann, Washington and Wendt 2019). Radio Revolten included durational performance (an artist lived at the top of a medieval tower, and one could climb up to join in daily radio oracles); a nightly live and on-air cabaret; a building full of radio installations; other radio installations created for old church structures in Halle’s city center; a radio art conference and exhibitions throughout the city related to radio history. Radio Revolten was amazing for its variety, ambition, duration and public accessibility. The festival reached many different communities: radio artists from all over attended and participated; the local community radio station was an anchor; several regional cultural institutions were involved in exhibiting and hosting events. A Radio Revolten banner hung over Halle’s city center, and unconventional art spaces, like the tower and church, integrated the festival into city life. The 2016 iteration followed one in 2006 and will hopefully occur again in 2026.

17 To name two favorite examples: Anguezomo Mboulou Mba Bikoro, from Gabon and based in Berlin, and Masimba Hwati, from Zimbabwe and based in Vienna.

18 A 2023-2024 series recognizing one hundred years of radio and radio art at Berlin’s Das Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) is one effort to globalize the narrative of radio and radio art.

In “A RadioArt Manifesto,” Tetsuo Kogawa makes a distinction between artradio and radioart.  Artradio has used radio as a medium just like paper is a medium used by people writing a book. My own introduction to radio was in this vein, approaching radio as a vehicle for sounds and stories. In Kogawa’s words: “Radio technology was secondary. The point was content that the station carries” (Kogawa 2008). Kogawa prefers radioart, especially working in a hands-on way, literally “penser avec les mains,” waving his hand through radio waves on homemade transmitters, changing radio as material with direct physical touch. Kogawa adds, “radioart is a process art rather than an object art” (Ibid).  

Kogawa’s attention to radio as a material and not only a medium is inspiring. Still, I find myself working in between artradio and radioart, more aligned with artists such as Gregory Whitehead and my PhD co-supervisor Anna Friz who stand out for me as artists bridging artradio and radioart. They make works for radio broadcast or narrowcast that are also in dialogue with radio, whether addressing communication histories, military uses of radio, radio tropes like the on-air expert or call-in show, qualities of radiophonic space or speculative radio futures. Gregory Whitehead creates ear plays and poetic compositions for broadcast, often including voice, text and rich soundbeds plus a twisted, critical sense of humor. One piece I like to share with people is Pressures of the Unspeakable (1992), in which Whitehead impersonates an expert interviewed on a radio show about his study of the human screamscape. People are invited to phone-in their screams. Anna Friz’s practice is multifaceted including compositions for narrow and broadcast, installations, live on-air collaborations, clandestine radio stations and more. One of Friz’s works I return to is Radiotelegraph (2013), composed from a series of recorded narrowcasts on the eastern coast of Iceland, in which Friz speaks a poem in Morse code to the day’s fading light.

20  See https://westernfront.ca/archives/get/ca_occurrences/1766

The radio station as an artistic form

The radio station can be approached as an artistic form or “formation,” to use Nicolas Bourriaud’s word, which I understand as an artwork that embraces an element of change over time (Bourriaud 2002). The radio station is not well known as an artistic form, yet there are exciting examples located inside and outside of art institutions. Artistic considerations in a radio station, which I describe at the end of this section, include scale (a strong or weak signal, the number of senders and receivers), medium (FM, AM, Citizen’s Band, internet, string or imagined), duration, relationship to licensing bodies and other infrastructure and the station’s guiding inquiries or aims. 

Some artists who make radio stations frame their stations as art, though some do not. Below I discuss five examples to seed a lineage of possibility, identifying works that together deepen and expand common assumptions and inspire future directions of the radio station as an artistic form. A question is raised in this kind of speculative lineage: What are the boundaries of what constitutes a radio station? Must it use radio waves or could sound waves be the medium? Must the radio station send signals or can it receive them? For the sake of this initial consideration, I focus on projects that use radio waves in some way; several examples challenge a conventional understanding of sender-receiver.


I begin with Duane Linklater’s Apparatus for the Circulation of Indigenous Voices and Ideas into the Air (2017), a radio station situated in a gallery, Vancouver’s Western Front, which has a rich legacy of radio experimentation. Linklater’s exhibition included an AM radio station made available to Vancouver’s Indigenous community to use freely for the duration of the exhibition.²⁰ Linklater, who is Cree, was inspired in part by Wawatay Radio, a network of First Nation-run radio stations broadcasting in the Oji-Cre language in Northern Ontario. The radio station was also used by Linklater during the exhibition to launch his record label EHEPIK Records, focusing on music by Indigenous artists. Linklater creatively integrated the radio station into an exhibition format: the station transmitter became a sculpture assembled with snowshoes, blue tarp and painted rocks, and Linklater created banners and prints for the walls of the gallery space that referred to music culture and resistance of the American Indian Movement. 

Duane Linklater’s Apparatus for the circulation of Indigenous voices and ideas into the air, Nov 10 – Dec 16, 2017, photographs by Dennis Ha.

The feminist art collective Oda Projesi, which translates into English as Room Project, created a durational artwork, 101.7 Efem (2000-2005), that moved beyond the gallery and into the space of the home and neighborhood, much as SkottegatenFM did, though 101.7 Efem was more explicitly political. The station was an unlicensed mini-FM located inside an apartment in Istanbul's run-down Galata district over a four-year period. 101.7 Efem provided an intimate space for home-made radio programs as well as artistic projects related to urban housing and gentrification in the neighborhood. Art collective members Özge Açikkol, Güneş Savaş and Seçil Yersel inhabited a ground-floor apartment with access to a courtyard for the duration of the station (Rauh 2019).

Oda Projesi, Picnic, Galata\nIstanbul, Juni 2004, Photo source: https://werkleitz.de/picnic-galata)

 In contrast to 101.7 Efem’s fixed apartment block location and fragile mini-FM signal, Pan African Space Station (2008- ) creates pop-up live radio studios at libraries, universities and museums and all over the world, sending via online streaming.

 PASS in Amsterdam, 2016. Photo source: https://www.amsterdamsfondsvoordekunst.nl/over-afk/meer-informatie-over-het-fonds/nieuws/pan-african-space-station-landt-in-amsterdam/

Invoking Sun Ra, PASS “lands” in cities, festivals, conferences and art exhibitions, including documenta 15, and activates transient communities whose aim is to challenge and expand understandings of African cultures, epistemologies and histories of resistance. PASS was started in 2008 by Chimurenga, “a project-based mutable object, workspace, and pan-African platform for editorial activities,” founded by Ntone Edjabe in Cape Town, in collaboration with musician Neo Muyanga. ²¹  In their words:

Taking advantage of both the intimacy and unpredictability of the live studio and the reach and scope of the internet, PASS seeks to forge new collaborations across time and space. The live studio becomes one for entangling different realities and experiences – with participants and listeners prompted by ideas of utopia and oppression, history and the future, borders, time, art and technology, and, more importantly, community. A combination of live conversations, travelogues, discussion sessions and performances, together with exhibitions of new and archival material interrogates our shared histories.²²

PASS’ documenta 15 project was part of their ongoing project Radio Freedom, re-broadcasting recordings of anti-colonial radio broadcasts from Cairo, Accra, Conakry, Algiers, Lusaka, and Dar es Salaam on Freies Radio Kassel (Free Radio Kassel), other local non-commercial stations and through sound systems near Kassel’s public square.

21  I am inspired by the description of the Chimurenga Library, using a familiar community resource, the library, as a seed for creative re-imagining in both conceptual and physical space: “The Chimurenga Library …seeks to re-imagine the library as a laboratory for curiosity, new adventures, critical thinking, daydreaming, socio-political involvement, partying, or just random perusal. The library and archive can be investigated as both conceptual and physical spaces in which memories are preserved, history is written, and both are reactivated” (https://panafricanspacestation.org.za/about/). Re-imagining the radio station follows a similar line of thinking, animating conceptual and physical possibilities within a familiar community format.

22  See https://panafricanspacestation.org.za/about/

The final two examples are of artists who push the radio station form in unusual ways. Ebru Kurbak and Irene Posch’s Knitted Radio (2014) create the radio station as wearable textile electronics, a form of tactical media.²³ Created just after brutal police responses to the 2013 protests at Istanbul’s Taksim Square, Knitted Radio involves handmade sweaters that are mini-FM transmitters, crafted from wool blended with copper and stainless steel threads, creating capacitors that connect to hand-made transmitters (following designs by Tetsuo Kogawa) ready to transmit from an attachable microphone or mp3 player. The sweater-wearer becomes a secret mobile radio station able to share strategic information. The artists published their patterns in a knitting magazine.

23  See https://www.stitchingworlds.net/theknittedradio/

Ebru Kurbak and Irene Posch’s Knitted Radio, 2014, Photo source: http://ireneposch.net/the-knitted-radio/

Ioana Vreme Moser’s Arboreal Receptors (2021-) also pushes the radio station into an unusual form, in this case receiving rather than sending signals. Vreme Moser created and installed “electronic garments” that make audible to humans the radio waves received by trees, acting as natural antennas. Trees are already engaged in their own fragile complex interspecies communication system, referred to by biologists as the wood-wide-web. From within a stand of trees, Arboreal Receptors send percusive and humming sounds, audible translations of the pervasive human-made electromagnetic smog: “The clinkering patterns and the pitch of drone-like humming become the epitome of the inconceivable yet ever-expanding technological fabrics that weave us into complicit relations of exploitation” (Lemos 2024). I took a workshop with Vreme Moser at Bergen Senter for Elektronisk Kunst in 2022 where she presented Arboreal Receptors, and the work impressed me. Is this a tree’s radio station? These are not the signals or medium of the tree’s choosing; the human listener encounters signals that humans have imposed on trees.

 Ioana Vreme Moser’s Arboreal Receptors (2021-), Photo source https://www.ioanavrememoser.com/arborealreceptors

Radio Station as Artistic Form: formal parameters 

Following Hank Bull’s observation that “radio is a form of sculpture given all the space involved,” I have found it helpful to make a living list of sculptural considerations while making a radio station as an artistic form. Each of these formal choices affects qualities of the space involved. 

Placement

Where station is located

Rooted and/or nomadic 

Scenography

Physical dimensions

Decor, seating

How participants are positioned in relation to each other

Duration

How long the station will exist

Is it a pop-up, a set-time frame, indefinite?

If pop-up, is it one-time or recurring?

On-air timing 

When the station is activated. For example, each day at noon 

How long the station transmits at each activation. For example, 1 minute, 24 hours, as long as a church bell rings 

Access 

Who can send, and how does one send 

Who can receive, and how does one receive  

Who has the keys, knows the passwords and can operate the radio station?

In what language(s) 

Who are the prioritized species, for example is the station for living humans, a river,and/or other beings  

Decision-making 

Who has made formal decisions about the station, and according to what process 

Medium and strength of transmission  

What medium carries signals: AM, FM, shortwave, online, string, imagined, citizen’sband

How far the signals are intended/ able to reach 

Relationship to licensing bodies and other communication infrastructure

Licensed or unlicensed station 

Intentionally jamming an existing transmission or operating in an unused line  or frequency

Secret or announced in some way 

One to Many/ Many to Many/ Many to One

How transmission is structured: one signal to many listeners or other forms?

Does the station embody resonant and/or radiant radio, to borrow Anna Friz’s terms? 

Concept/ Mission

Intention of the station. For example, to distribute certain content, to propose 

particular kinds of interaction, to provide a refuge for misfits, to be open to whatever anyone wants  

Guiding assumptions or inquiries about communication 

Archive & Memory

Are transmissions saved and if so how and why? 

Is documentation used and if so what forms? 

SkottegatenFM street party poster designed by Marianne Hallseth, April 2021

In this chapter I describe the formation of SkottegatenFM, a three-month radio station I set up in my dining room during Covid lockdowns. I describe the station and, responding to the question Who are you SkottegatenFM?, I weave in the insights of radio artists and theorists Tetsuo Kogawa and Anna Friz to consider ideas of resonant rather than radiant radio. 

88.6FM, 88.6FM....Skottegaaaaten....Bergen, Norrrwaaaay.....SkottegatenFM! ²⁴

In the deep winter of 2021, a mini-FM radio station began transmitting in a neighborhood called Nordnes in Bergen, Norway. Nordnes has medieval alleyways, cobblestone streets and old buildings—once home to maritime and sardine factory workers, now predominantly middle class. On the windowsill of a third-floor apartment on Skottegaten, a .5 watt transmitter sent radio waves at the frequency of 88.6FM; inside the apartment, a dining room table became a radio station with a mixer, two mics and a recorder connected to a radio.²⁵ After three months, the dining room table returned to its original function for meals, the transmitter was packed away, and SkottegatenFM went to bed. 

Seeds for a mini-FM station

SkottegatenFM emerges (the present verb tense feels right as the signal still reverberates) from a lineage of critical radio art practices and practitioners, including artist-theorist Tetsuo Kogawa, perhaps best known for teaching people to build their own low-watt FM transmitters. In 1983, Kogawa launched the mini-FM station Radio Home Run in Tokyo with some of his former university students. Despite its modest reach—half-mile radius in a dense urban area—the station lasted fourteen years. Although people laughed at the idea of a radio station with a signal that only reached a short walking distance, Kogawa observed how mini-FM enabled new kinds of communication. The station served its participants more than its listeners, and the act of transmitting together offered a qualitatively different feel than other forms of collective action. Kogawa also noted the therapeutic functions of mini-FM:

24 SkottegatenFM’s jingle was composed by Lisa Davol. 

25 Bergen Senter for Elektronisk Kunst (BEK) supported SkottegatenFM with a home residency. Hordaland Kunstsenter, up the hill from the transmitter, created a SkottegatenFM listening station in their café.

26 SkottegatenFM had FM radios available for borrowing, given that only a few people have FM radios in Norway these days.

Hand-delivered neighborhood invitation to SkottegatenFM, February 2021, photograph by William Kudahl

A score for SkottegatenFM  

Score for mini-FM station:

+ Set up a radio station for 3 months

+ Transmit everyday

+ Have another transmitter available to anyone who wants to do their own show from their home

+ Create ways for people to be in touch with the radio station (i.e. a station email address) 

SkottegatenFM began as a text score for a temporary radio station that would weave in many points of transmission and prioritize local circulation through a fragile and enveloping signal. The intended senders and listeners were neighborhood residents. 

Spreading the word about SkottegatenFM was largely analogue: hand-drawn ink SkottegatenFM postcards, in keeping with the fragility of the signal. In Norwegian and English, the postcard informed neighbors about the station and how they could tune in and access the weekly programming schedule. People could contact the station to borrow a transmitter or FM radio.²⁶ Just before the station's launch, two hundred neighboring households received the hand-delivered postcards.

Those who joined SkottegatenFM on air were based in Europe, North America and Bergen. Participants from the United States had to wake before 6:00 am to phone in and be on air at noon Norwegian time, and people were almost always willing to do so. SkottegatenFM, which sometimes felt like a pretend platform made out of air, a micro-transmitter radio station with few if any listeners in a country with no supported FM infrastructure, a kind of impossible signal amidst the ruins, had palpable momentum. Some people now refer to SkottegatenFM as if it is a "thing", curious when they can tune in again and asking whether they can produce a program. The Bergen Kommune referred to SkottegatenFM in its funding support of a related project in Bergen. This enacted performativity of SkottegatenFM has been one of the joyous discoveries of this project: how declaration, showing up and repetition can create a world we believe in, which in turn shapes us.

SkottegatenFM Outdoor Events

Three outdoor events expanded SkottegatenFM's reach and realness. In March 2021 SkottegatenFM was part of the annual Bergen experimental sound festival, Borealis. We set up the station under a tent below my apartment, the power and transmitter cords hanging out the third-floor living room window down to the sidewalk. The day's programming included sound and music commissions celebrating spring's birthday and the Iranian New Year Nowruz celebration, including a reading of Hafiz poetry in Persian by Madihe Gharibi. Finn Tokvam, a Norwegian national radio (NRK) DJ, who is a neighbor, played antique records on his hand-cranked record player on air. Another neighbor, Linda Børnes, set up a tent to sell her mother's hand-knit sweaters. Linda made waffles under her tent and gave them away to people who stopped by SkottegatenFM in the rain. 

The second outdoor event, a Saturday afternoon street party with live broadcast-talk by me, followed by Simon Alejandro's DJ-ing, took place a month later; this one sponsored by Bergen Senter for Elektronisk Kunst (BEK). Who are you SkottegatenFM? posters popped up all over the neighborhood announcing the event. The day was gloriously sunny and warm. BEK set up a waffle tent. We needed electricity for the waffles, and a neighbor agreed to have the extension cord drop from his window; he later joined the party. One of the DJ's record players broke, and the vintage clothing shop next door lent us one. Linda Børnes set up her sweaters again, and two other neighbors sold their wares creating a market place. Families set up blankets, kids danced on the cobblestones and interacted with the radios set up all over the street. While Simon played Zouk music, a woman came to me and said with fervor, "People have been lonely! Do you know how lonely people have been?" During my broadcast my microphone created feedback from all the people on the street, so I shortened my forty-five-minute talk about Tetsuo Kogawa and the poetry of the gap. Several kids stepped in to speak into the microphone and be on the radio, excited as their voices traveled to the other side of the street. 

Who are you SkottegatenFM? street party, organized with BEK, April 2021  © Nayara Leite/BONO 2023

Who are you Skottegaten FM?  

SkottegatenFM is and was a convivial and resonant way of being together, activated through the local circuit. The signal emanated from the navel of a home, the dining room table. A faint and temporary signal, one declared and described more so than actually received, became a regular excuse to be physically together in a pleasurable way in the public space of the street and in the non-physical space of radio transmissions. I believe the faint, precarious and temporary signal summons people in a way that is co-creative and asks for co-stewardship. People stepped in to complete the circuit. Notably, the circuit was not only local but folded in people from all over who joined on the line or responded to the station's story as presented on social media. Here too, the weakness of the signal – intentionally without an internet stream for those far away to access – drew people into the station's "family". 

As the weather became warmer, I placed cheap FM radios all over Skottegaten and the nearby streets during transmission times. Bergen artist Su Liao helped by taking the radios for walks and videotaping them receiving signals during the broadcast. Sometimes cats would sniff the radios placed on a doorstep or in planters in front of apartments. Sometimes the radios took a rest at the edge of the transmission's reach by the fjord, or visited the playground. I enjoyed the radios as animated objects, a kind of toy-theatre or ventriloquist performance. FM radios, especially in Norway these days, are like toys: seemingly passé, retro, breakable, beloved, fascinating. Broadcasting without a view from the dining room table, I imagined the radios on the streets speaking to or surprising passersby.

One of the realizations of running SkottegatenFM for three months is that a mini-FM station is durational performance art, an insight also shared by Tetsuo Kogawa (Kogawa 1994). Within performance art one sets the terms of engagement, and SkottegatenFM's terms, which emerged organically in the first weeks, were to treat interactions with others as a co-creative process. This approach was necessitated by the daily broadcast schedule, not having time to prepare a new show each day, and was also inspired by Ricarda Denzer's show I heard my mind today at noon, a riff on the poem Mein Denken ("My Thinking") by Monika Rink, and others, including Brandon LaBelle, who have invoked daydreaming in the context of listening. On SkottegatenFM, daydreaming involved listening and speaking. Whether broadcasting solo or with others, I would let go of preparing and made room for drifting, improvising and getting lost and found together—our own form of echolocation. I found this approach pleasurable as it invited surprises and insights. In this relaxed space, given the station's relational set-up and priorities, the roles of the radio host and interviewee blurred. So did those of sender and receiver, speaker and listener.

Another quality of resonant radio is how we are carried by the signal. As Kogawa notes, being on air—whether solo or with others—is a qualitatively different experience compared to not being on air. Heightened presence and intentionality come from using a microphone and wearing headphones, both of which bring sounds very close to one's body. Even more salient is the possibility that someone/something else may be tuning in. The heightened listening and speaking-space of a radio station affected me as I broadcast each day at noon. I always discovered something new when I broadcast solo, even when I chose a topic moments before going on air. Being carried by SkottegatenFM's radio waves invited me to think as a form of speaking, or to speak as a form of thinking, or to speak-think-write. I found I listened to myself and to others on air in a deeper way, and became profoundly moved by words I read aloud, often holding back tears on Tuesday's poetry shows.

An important context for SkottegatenFM is who and what constitutes the station's possible audience: the local neighborhood. One aspect of this is real estate and its relationship to class, age, ethnic and racial demographics. Over the past five years, Nordnes has become an expensive area for renting and owning, with new condominium constructions on the edge of Puddefjorden. Norway's housing policies have encouraged homeownership since the 1950s while also favoring public housing distributed throughout the city to some degree. Skottegaten has one municipally-owned apartment building directly opposite the building where I rent. The apartments are subsidized and designated for low-income tenants. Residents in the municipality-owned building seemed reluctant to be part of the radio station, even though I encouraged them to stop by during the street events. One resident, who kindly offered electrical power for us to run the waffle maker, joined one of the street parties.

SkottegatenFM is, to some degree, an integrative project blurring boundaries, removing distances and smoothing out gaps between art and life, including art venue and private home; performance art and social life; interior and exterior spaces; neighbors, collaborators and audience members; art-making and researching. SkottegatenFM brought participants closer, introducing us to each other, weaving us into a shared experience. In these ways, SkottegatenFM has been about overcoming rather than experiencing distance.

But what about Anna Friz's beautiful proposition about resonant radio inviting participants to actually experience rather than overcome distance? Resonant radio means listening for experiences of distance and the multiple forms and qualities of distance— whether spatial, temporal, species, cultural, linguistic, psychological or political— including refusal, avoidance and indifference. How important is it to be honest about difference rather than to erase it? What are the experiences of distance within the nearness of SkottegatenFM?

The residents of the municipality-owned building on Skottegaten are my closest neighbors; our windows peer into each other across the street, and I suspect they could see the station in my dining room. Earlier in the winter, before the radio station launched, I danced beside the window with two boys from one of the other apartments, each to our own music while they shone a flashlight on me and I on them. Still, the residents of this building kept their distance from SkottegatenFM —perhaps these relationships might need more time to develop.

Similarly, even as the second transmitter became available, my dream of roving points of transmission was not realized in the three months of SkottegatenFM's existence. In the third month I actively encouraged neighbors to borrow the transmitter and had one interested taker, the national radio DJ Finn Tokvam, whose job eventually became too busy and prevented him from participating. 

Friz has defined resonant radio as inviting experiences of distance, and I again wonder what distance means and how distance connects to relationality. What does the space between us sound like, whoever “us” might be? What does it mean to experience distance?, and when does distance signify separation? I recall my old Zen teacher, Roshi Eve Marko, who said the only sin is separation. What role does distance play in conviviality and community-building, which have been central to SkottegatenFM? Radio art and mini-FM become practices for asking these rich questions and for better understanding the poetics and politics of relationality, including recognizing the ways "we" are one and also different. To honor distance rather than to overcome it.

As a practice, I wonder if efforts to overcome distance can simultaneously facilitate experiences of distance and difference. I sense Gloria Anzaldúa's wisdom in the mix when she reminds us of the seemingly paradoxical path of a two-way movement—a simultaneous drawing in and sending out, "a going deep into the self and an expanding out into the world "(Anzaldúa 1981, 207). Anzaldúa's celebrated phrase el mundo zurdo connotes the path of a two-way movement that can lead to individual and social repair, "a simultaneous recreation of the self and reconstruction of society" (Ibid). This two-way movement is how we recreate the world as more life-affirming, reconciling what is with what should be, understanding that what is most near and intimate is also far-reaching and political. The path of a two-way movement has wonderful radiophonic overtones, as a radio station entails expanding into the atmosphere while rooting into the ground, into a physical location.  I believe that resonant radio embodies this two-way movement: simultaneously moving inward and outward, up and down, near and far, embracing both the familiar and the unfamiliar.


To create a radio station is to create a world with terms of engagement, guidelines for communing. SkottegatenFM is a platform I initiated, even as it simultaneously shapes me, and I cannot predict or control the full circuit of communications, nor can I determine precisely when they begin or end. Radio's two-way movement is an ongoing revelation—one I recall, forget and recall again. I remember a story a neighbor shared of her experience during SkottegatenFM's final transmission party. She sat on the stoop of the vintage clothing shop, with a radio near her broadcasting both a voice on the line from the U.S. and my voice coming from the opposite side of the street. She felt the enchantment and simple pleasure of voices mingling near and far in the radio, into the ear, onto the street. What is radio for? What is communication? Should we echolocate and enjoy the pure signal? I'm here! You are there! Do we need any more? Within mini-FM's spirit of inquiry, and the relationships in space created and felt through sound, the question Who are you SkottegatenFM? keeps unfolding.

A midday SkottegatenFM transmission, March 2021, photograph by Su Liao

Chapter Three:

Radio Multe, The Shadow and her Station²⁷

Mini-FM versus community FM

As discussed in the prior chapter, SkottegatenFM embodied what Anna Friz calls resonant radio,  prioritizing dynamic local circulation, many-to-many forms of communication, being “immersive, palpable,” reliant on weak signals, and inviting experiences of distance rather than necessarily overcoming it (Friz 2013). In the spirit of Tetsuo Kogawa’s Tokyo-based Radio Home Run, Radio Multe sends out while simultaneously drawing in.Though there is a significant difference between SkottegatenFM and Radio Multe, the former being mini-FM and the latter being community FM radio, Radio Multe is still an example of resonant radio. In fact, in Norway the abandoned FM spectrum is essentially a resonant radio playground.

Even as both forms lend themselves to resonant radio, there are notable differences between mini-FM and community FM radio that affect the qualities of radio space. As an example of mini-FM, SkottegatenFM used a .5 watt transmitter and embraced its neighborhood station radius and function. Radio Multe, in contrast, is a city-wide community FM and online radio station. The FM signal goes across the city; it is licensed and recognized by Bergen Kommune as a community resource. The station has been visited by the Kommune cultural leadership and received funding towards our rent and gear, and we have been featured in the Bergen city newspaper Bergens Tidende.

In experiential terms, I operated the SkottegatenFM mini-FM transmitter on my windowsill and could transmit whenever I wanted. I sipped tea by my microphone on the dining room table and occasionally looked into the neighbors’ apartments, and in a sense was talking to them. We shared the soundscape of the street; if a truck went by it was also heard on the radio. One could walk SkottegatenFM’s signal radius with a receiver, hearing the signal’s edges turned to static five blocks away in any direction. I could lend out the transmitter to neighbors, and there was no online streaming to set up. The few times I transmitted from outside, on the street, I dropped the transmitter cable out my third-floor window like an umbilical cord.

The community radio set-up of Radio Multe is different. I send audio from the radio station through the internet, using a computer program called Audio Hijack, to a computer on the island of Askøy just outside Bergen. The Askøy computer is linked to a transmitter in the basement of the building that is linked to a tall antenna outside. Needless to say, I cannot see the transmitter or antenna on Askøy when I am at Radio Multe in Bergen. This transmitter and its antenna belong to Bergen Kringkaster which was, until the 1970s, a relay station for NRK, Norway’s national radio, bringing the national radio signal to Bergen. Bergen Kringkaster maintains an AM and FM license and is transmitting twenty-four hours a day with a 50-watt FM transmitter. A dedicated group of volunteers meet weekly to host open houses at the historic Askøy site, which showcases a history of transmitters and old radios, plus equipment for ham radio operators. A few stations like Radio Multe rent broadcast time on Kringkaster’s frequencies. We coordinate the times we will rent in advance.

Radio Multe needs its own licenses, one for transmitting and one for content, with two separate national agencies. As the one submitting the forms for these licenses, I am called the redaktor, or director, which I must announce with my name at the beginning and end of each transmission. I send in annual forms reporting the number of programmers, broadcast hours and diversity of the content. As is the case in most community radio stations these days, Radio Multe also streams online. We do this as a partner stream at Wave Farm, so anyone who happens to be on the Wave Farm site and sees we are on-air can tune in. Or people find the streaming link at Radio Multe’s website or social media pages. Radio Multe has an online archive for recorded shows at Internet Archive.

During Radio Multe’s first year, the Kringkaster signal was spotty. The coverage has improved considerably in the past year, thanks to a new 25-watt FM Kringkaster transmitter located in Bergen’s Damsgård neighborhood. I have traveled around Bergen on a bus and climbed our local mountain Fløyen with a receiver to see how far the Kringkaster signal travels. Especially since the new Damsgård transmitter has been installed, I have been able to receive the signal everywhere in city center, except, ironically, in the Art Academy. Iron in the building’s construction prevents FM radio waves from entering. 

Before 1980 Norway had one licensed radio network, NRK. Beginning in 1981 commercial and non-commercial radio stations could get licenses on FM and AM, a policy shift intended to increase media diversity. A celebrated and still operating feminist independent radio station in Oslo called Radio Rakel started broadcasting in 1984, an example of what I think of as a community radio station.²⁸

One observation from these experiences of mini-FM and community FM stations is how the quality of voice is different on the two stations. My wandering, associative, relaxed voice on SkottegatenFM sounds like someone talking to an old friend, an intimate, a family member. Even as Radio Multe is “immersive and palpable,” everyone is more publicly presentable on the community station, our voices more performative and aware of being received. Does mini-FM put the center of gravity in the sender, while community FM, especially with its online presence, shift the center of gravity towards the receiver, outside the body? As I describe later in this chapter, one of the things I play with in Radio Multe is turning off the online stream when I do unannounced secret broadcasts. There I drift and float in the forgotten current of Norwegian FM in a way I learned and loved on SkottegatenFM. How do the mini-FM and community radio spaces compare in terms of making spaces where we can communicate in co-creative ways, becoming otherwise together? I hold this as a question to be woven into re- radio’s third central artwork, Seijo & her Soul, which involves simultaneous separate transmissions on mini-FM and community radio.

28 When I first dreamed up a community radio station for Bergen, I called it Bergen Community Radio. I received feedback that the word community has religious connotations in Norway and that people might think the station was Christian. The story behind Bergen Community Radio’s new name, Radio Multe, can be heard in the Radio Multe reel.

Who are you Radio Multe? Phase One, November 2021- August 2022
The aims of Radio Multe are to catalyze meaningful interactions across multiple language, ages and ethnic subcultures in Bergen through a shared artistic project; to generate engaging, relevant, and diverse radio programming and to creatively and collectively experiment with what a community radio station is and can be.

The first home of Radio Multe, Nygårdsgaten 52, Bergen, November 2021
photograph by  © Nayara Leite/BONO  

Radio Multe has had two phases so far. In the first phase which lasted six months, Radio Multe inhabited a storefront on Nygardsgaten near Grieg Hall in Bergen city center thanks to funding from Bergen Kommune encouraging artists to make use of empty storefronts. The storefront had a built-in window seat and opened to the street. Next door was a barber shop; across the street was a used record store and a block away was a Somalian community space and cafe. We put a sign outside every time we went on air to make the station’s presence known and make walkers-by curious. Whenever possible the door was propped open during broadcasts.

In the first Radio Multe space, we broadcast each Saturday morning at 10.00 for two hours. I put the call out for programs and reached out to lots of people from various parts of Bergen to introduce them to the station and encourage them to propose a show. Highlights during phase one were weekly programs including Plant Oriented, Pauliina Pöllänen’s call-in plant care show, and Siavash Kheirkhah and Sepideh Garakani’s Melodies of the Motherland, a show about the lullabies sung by Bergen’s immigrant communities. I co-launched a program Byen Var/Our City with my neighbor Anna Watson, whom I had met through SkottegatenFM, and I also had my own show Signals and Connections. Both of these ongoing programs involved oral histories, the former about ways Bergen residents have intervened in city development to ensure a liveable city, and the latter about radio-related histories. I was the radio engineer for all the shows. Soon after launching, Radio Multe was invited to collaborate with Bergen Senter for Elektronisk Kunst, Borealis, BIT Teatergarasjen and Hordaland Kunstsenter for broadcasts, and with the immigrant-arts organization Her og Der for a radio story workshop.


Hanan Benammar’s program Musical Chairs, during BEK’s Symposium, “The Only Lasting Truth is Change,” November 2021,  photograph by © Nayara Leite/BONO 2023

Kjetil Egeland and Pauliina Pöllänen on Plant Oriented, December 2021

One exciting innovation early on was that since the station did not have a license to play recorded music, we brought in live musicians to make music for shows. Pauliina Pöllänen had this idea initially for Plant Oriented and was accompanied by her friend Kjetil Egeland. Later Fabian Lanzmaier did live music for my Signals and Connections show and Marshall Trammel did an on-air “tuning” of Radio Multe with his snare drum. Making our own music was wonderful and inspired the idea for live on-air music whenever possible, including in Seijo & her Soul.

With the support of the Meltzer Fond, I spent summer 2022 at the art exhibition documenta 15 in Kassel and then in Berlin researching the radio station as a kind of collective. documenta 15’s theme that year was the art collective, and in Berlin I visited the vibrant independent FM, or what they call, free radio scene. I was interested in what ways a radio station is or could be conceived of as a collective. The collective form de-centers the individual artist and moves towards alternative forms of subjectivity and authorship. I continue to be committed to the radio station as a kind of alternative subjectivity. I like to think of Radio Multe as an expanded, diffuse alter ego for those involved. 

In Berlin, I visited Cashmere Radio, Cola Bora Dio, Savvy Funk, re-boot.fm and an online station at the Templehof Gate called THF Radio. In 2010, a regional media authority made 88.4FM available in Berlin (as well as 90.7FM in Potsdam) for free radio stations to use. Two umbrella organizations, each representing about five active radio stations, share the frequencies; one umbrella group uses the frequencies Monday-Thursday, the other group Friday-Sunday.

Kate Donovan on air with Hooops and Katharina Smets, Cola Bora Dio broadcast event, Berlin, June 2022.

Thanks to an invitation from Berlin radio theorist and artist Kate Donovan, I spent a Tuesday on-air with Cola Bora Dio and was inspired by their broadcast set-up at Kate’s garden house on the outskirts of Berlin. Each programmer rolled into the garden porch at their allotted time, did a show for an hour and then lingered afterwards. The garden was like an outdoor living room-potluck picnic-public library. Some people listened to the live radio program, others read or chatted. We made spaghetti, made radio and spoke with each other about our interests.

Who are you, Radio Multe? Phase Two, September 2022- ongoing

Due to landlord issues and a desire for cheaper rent, in August 2022 I moved Radio Multe into a new space. A group of Bergen artists had located a massive empty and affordable warehouse office space for building ship interiors in a marina industrial section of Laksevåg, across the fjord from where SkottegatenFM had been. The warehouse space is now known as the unfinished institution/den uferdige institusjonen. Radio Multe was no longer a storefront visible to the street and able to  catch the curiosity of people walking by, but the same month we moved we were featured in the local Bergen newspaper, Bergens Tidende, and this media shout-out did even more to bring in new participants and programmers. I was worried that being out of the city center would affect participation but the opposite happened. 

Exterior of den uferdige institusjonen, Laksevåg, Norway, spring 2023

I hosted a Radio Multe community meal in September 2022 and, following my experience with Berlin’s Cola Bora Dio, we agreed to switch from a two-hour weekly to a six-hour Sunday afternoon format that included eating and socializing together. I set up the new station space with two long tables fitted with four mics and headphones, a colorfully patterned tablecloth donated by one of our programmers, white fairy lights, a rug, a basket of wool socks so people enter the station with shoes off, four chairs along the wall for those who want to be in the station but not on-air, and the Radio Multe banner on the wall.

Radio Multe jule party, December 2022, photograph by Siavash Kheirkhah

Eating together and socializing at Radio Multe broadcast events, spring 2024 and fall 2023 
Third photograph by Siavash Kheirkhah

29 Guattari was also a fan of Tetsuo Kogawa’s mini-FM work, discussed in Chapter Two, for its micro-political potential, and he visited Radio Home Run in Tokyo. See Tetsuo Kogawa’s article, ”Guattari and Japan: On the Formation of Guattari's Micropolitics." InterCommunication 12 (1995): 135-143.

Radio Multe as relational aesthetics? 

Before describing some of my own experiments within Radio Multe’s structure, I want to share one of the main inquiries I had in the station’s first year: What are Radio Multe’s politics? Is the station a community art project, bringing people together across different cultures? Needed in Bergen, yes, but this can be a worrisome band-aid or, worse, be complicit with photogenic misrepresentation regarding inequality and challenges faced by the diaspora in Norway and globally. I decided it was time to learn more about relational aesthetics, participatory art and relational antagonism as a way of examining assumptions and clarifying my approach to relationality and the politics of Radio Multe.

Nicolas Bourriaud’s often cited book Relational Aesthetics describes artistic practices that address inter-human relations. In his words, “Art is made of the same material as the social exchanges,” specifically the “minute space of daily gestures” (Bourriaud 2002, 17). In relational aesthetics, there is an interactivity with viewers who are invited to experience various services (meals, spaces to rest, lending libraries), parties and contracts for interacting. The artworks are less about form and object than they are about “formations” that emerge through encounters (Ibid, 21). These formations activate momentary micro-communities and micro-utopias, a contrast to broader utopian aspirations of social sculpture lineages. If there is a politics in relational aesthetics, its voice, given ample space by Bourriaud, belongs to Felix Guattari, who believed that social transformation happens in micro-gestures and concrete organizing rooted in our daily lives.²⁹ Bourriaud hones in on Guattari’s efforts to de-naturalize and reinvent subjectivity. For both Guattari and Bourriaud, “Art is the thing around which subjectivity can reform itself” (Ibid, 97).

Artists and artworks exemplifying relational aesthetics for Bourriaud include Gabriel Orozco hanging a hammock at MoMA’s garden, Jens Haaning broadcasting jokes in Turkish in a public space in Copenhagen and Rirkrit Tiravanija creating an installation with a pot of boiling water, camping gear and boxes of ramen for viewers to make and eat, among many other examples.  Another artist mentioned is Lincoln Tobier, whose work caught my attention since in the 1990s he made radio stations, such as Mini-A.M, in art gallery contexts, inviting viewers to make programs that were narrowcast with a 1-watt AM transmitter. In another instance, the station would only play the Beach Boy’s entire oeuvre. One art critic interpreted Tobier’s station as having a “besmirched idealism associated with participatory, socially engaged artmaking” (Decter 1995, 102).Most of the artworks discussed in Relational Aesthetics are created for and experienced in gallery or museum contexts and to varying degrees share this “besmirched idealism” more than activating alternative, sustained subjectivities a la Guattari. For these reasons, SkottegatenFM and Radio Multe share similar preoccupations but do not really exemplify relational aesthetics as Bourriaud describes it.

How do SkottegatenFM and Radio Multe relate to Claire Bishop’s more critical arguments about participatory art and relational antagonism? In her 2012 book Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, Bishop argues that relational and participatory art forms are too often lacking in critical reflection, preferring a semblance of togetherness over an honest exploration of tensions. Inviting audience members in as actors or participants can, in fact, distract from audience experiences that would provoke critical thinking and contemplation. Bishop quotes one of her exemplars, artist Santiago Sierra: “I do not want to invite or oblige viewers to become interactive with what I do; I do not want to activate the public. I want to give of myself, to engage myself to such a degree that viewers confronted with the work can take part and become involved, but not as actors” (Bishop 2012, 60).

Artificial Hells builds on points Bishop articulated in 2004 in response to Bourriaud’s relational aesthetic curations at that time (Bishop 2004). Amidst her early critical responses to relational aesthetics, Bishop raises the interesting issue of relational antagonism, a term she borrows from Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau. Based on a Lacanian assumption that subjectivity is divided, de-centered and incomplete, antagonism for Laclau and Mouffe emerges between incomplete identities. Antagonism differs from contradiction or binary/oppositional difference, since in antagonism there is a more slippery identification with others. Bishop suggests that Bourriaud’s assumptions about subjectivity are, in contrast, a whole and centered subject, and the artists who exemplify his relational aesthetics set up experiences of belonging and comfortable togetherness rather than, as Bishop prefers, unease and discomfort. Does Bishop take into account Bourriaud’s close reading of Guattari and, following Guattari, his belief in art as a space for shifting subjectivities? Not really. There is more subtlety in Bourriaud than she gives him credit for. 

Bishop turns our attention to artists and artworks that create sustained tension, debate, discomfort, discussion, conflict and instability, a relational antagonism. Two of Bishop’s exemplars, Sierra and Thomas Hirschhorn, create situations where a person is confronted with unsettling, uncomfortable practices. For example, in a work by Sierra, in which the artist paid street vendors in Venice to dye their hair blond during the Biennale, presenting the art audience with, among other things, tension about commerce and class dynamics in contemporary art. Something subtle is made palpable; perception is jolted or shifts, which is an ambition of western avant-garde lineages, in this case provoking awareness that invites ambivalence.

SkottegatenFM and Radio Multe may be, in fact, creating a semblance of togetherness over an honest exploration of tensions, to refer back to Bishop’s criticism of participatory art. While SkottegatenFM, in which I was shaping almost every transmission, included a lot of “critical thinking and contemplation,” it has not been my style to approach this through provocation, which is an energy Bishop seems to prefer. Nor did that durational work or Radio Multe “create sustained tension… discomfort…conflict and instability, a relational antagonism,” though we certainly debate and discuss. In Radio Multe, I can see how “inviting audience members in as actors or participants can…distract from audience experiences that would provoke critical thinking and contemplation.” The critical questions in Radio Multe are diffuse, long-term and, as mentioned, not why most people participate in the station. 

I had a conversation about the politics of these two radio stations with my artistic research colleague and friend Sidsel Christensen at a cafe on a Sunday afternoon. Sidsel said, “We make art to shift perceptions, yet what do we assume criticality looks and feels like?” A space opens from her question. Bishop favors a criticality that is subtle, sharp and deep, cutting a veil that ripples across time like a good story, its own kind of duration. One of the struggles of re- radio has been to find a broader palette of criticality. I say struggle rather than question, because I want very much to shift narratives of normalcy and have internalized an assumption that critical artwork looks and feels a certain way, along the lines of what Bishop praises.

30  I learned from the Community Economies Collective, an international research-activist-artist group dedicated to shifting economic discourses towards non-capitalist imaginaries, about the efficacy of long term collective ontological politics. Since I first joined the collective in 2006, more artists have joined, and I will re-engage with the collective after re- radio is completed to host an on-air think-along about community and mini-FM and community economies.  https://www.communityeconomies.org/people/community-economies-collective The collective is now actively embracing artistic work as a form of knowledge in its ontological politics towards rethinking economies, providing rich possibilities for artistic research collaboration.

31 In this way research becomes re- search; the re- invites a pause, a turning, a backward step.

In my artistic research, I seek a more embodied knowledge of relationality, tunneling through the ruins of a more individualistic psychological, educational and cultural socialization as I have experienced. Relationality, as I am activating the word in re- radio, means sensing how self is a formation, changing in relation to the qualities of the spaces we co-create and interact in (Kannsieger 2011). In their politics of relation, an affective politics of voice, both Carol Gilligan and AM Kannsieger expand the palette of criticality that Bishop offers. They underscore an embodied knowledge of relationality and an awareness of how we create and are co-constituted by the spaces between. It is this expanded politics of relation that I seek in re- radio. 

Harkening back to Shawn Wilson and Lauren Tynan whose works were also discussed in the Introduction, relational ontological politics and research paradigms are another way to broaden a palette of critical relationality. To energize a relational world view is an ontological or cosmological politics, a spiritual activism, to use Gloria Anzaldúa’s phrase (Anzaldúa 2015). Such a politics may sound abstract and intangible, but ontological politics takes material form in several ways, including through relational research paradigms put forward in academic contexts, shaping what constitutes knowledge, how knowledge-making resources are allocated and who we can un/become in research and educational spaces.³⁰ Another way of grounding ontological politics is through activist actions and discourses such as those embodied by Indigenous activists who practice and articulate a relational, reciprocal ethos (Simpson and Klein, 2013). 

An individual artist or artistic researcher can embrace ontological politics but to change culture is a concerted collective endeavor best synergized with other multifaceted pressure points: in artistic, activist, educational, curatorial, research, funding, non-governmental and governmental organizations and other contexts. I value ontological politics for calling attention to the often unexamined paradigms and cultures we are relaying, jamming, co-constituting every day. As an artistic researcher, it is important to me to engage with this aspect of research³¹ ethics: What worlds am I co-creating through this work as artist? As researcher? Though research, knowledge and activism are seemingly neutral or self-evident terms, political scientists John Law and John Urry remind us that nothing is neutral. Every action and question, the way we understand and practice research, knowledge, resistance or art is always an interference, jamming some worlds while helping to enact others (Law and Urry 2004). I return to this point in discussing the politics and poetics of knowledge at the end of Chapter Five.

Hassan El Bouzidi during his ongoing program, A Step into World Music, April 2023, photograph by Siavash Kheirkhah

A hybrid studio-community space encouraging radiophonic play

In this final section, I share specific examples of how Radio Multe, a radio station that simultaneously asks what a radio station is, has provided a space in which to play and test approaches through collaborations, sketches and works-in-progress. I have made Radio Multe into a generative atmosphere for trying out new things radiophonically. It is integral that such a generative space is a shared one: a community station and not a private studio. My own way of leaning into this space has included making radio programs as well as experimenting with radio station scenography and live performances that are both on-air and in person, occasionally mixing Radio Multe’s community signal with a second mini-FM signal. I like to imagine the darkness of radio space, not knowing who is out there or where I am going, moving slowly, curiously in the murkiness, the way creative work often is. How fortunate I am to be working with multe, a berry that grows in moist and murky landscapes of peat. 

Below are five examples of works-in-progress and sketches that have emerged from Radio Multe’s hybrid studio-community space. As will become more apparent in Chapter Five, these investigations bear fruit in the durational performance installation Seijo & her Soul, the third central artwork of re- radio.

Jamming the Signal 

A few months after launching Radio Multe I was asking questions about the politics of the station and had Claire Bishop’s points about relational antagonism on my mind, alongside John Law and John Urry’s ideas about interference. In his book A Dying Colonialism, Franz Fanonoffers a point of entry for thinking about a radiophonic version of antagonism: jamming (Fanon 1965). Fanon writes about “The Voice of Free and Fighting Algeria,” a clandestine radio station created in 1956 by Algerians fighting French colonial rule. As Fanon describes, French colonial government, threatened by the Algerian resistance, jammed the transmissions of “The Voice of Free and Fighting Algeria”. Fanon sets the scene: people sitting at Algerian cafes ready to tune into the broadcasts. They would hear the Voice in fragments, choppy broken words, then the sounds of jamming. They would turn the radio dial to find a second frequency carrying the Voice and soon this, too, would be jammed. Through the din of jamming, the Algerians listened to the static and noise and imagined the words. As Fanon writes, “Everyone participates...the listeners compensate for the fragmentary nature of the news” by making their own newscast (Fanon 1965, 75). 

Fanon’s words led me to the history, techniques and science of radio jamming. Some of my research became an early Radio Multe program, Signals and Connections, in which I spoke with András Simongáti-Farquhar who wrote an MA thesis, “Aesthetic Potential in Cold War Analogue Radio Jamming” (Simongáti-Farquhar 2016). The program is partly an interview to gather more information and partly a conversation-as-co-creation with András. I created an audio paper from these various materials that I presented at a Sounding Research event as a lecture-performance-transmission. For that I used a weak transmitter and a radio to speak live on-air in a duet with the room’s sound system playing a composed sound bed. (You can see and hear documentation of the audio paper in Appendix 1). This piece could use some development so that I am better situated in it, but I mention this example to show Radio Multe’s potential for critical contemplation, discussion and seeding new forms. Jamming the Signal is part of revealing radio’s multifaceted histories connected to resistance as well as oppression and violence. Jamming points to multiple meanings, both musical and military, and this anecdote suggests that the French interference made the Algerian listeners more active and creative collaborators in the messages. Obscuration and partial audibility can draw a listener in as a participant rather than a passive receiver of content. Radio, “an unstable place full of seeps, secrets and sinkholes” is well suited to this kind of sender-receiver co-creation, in contrast to digital internet space which, as Gregory Whitehead continues, is, “as dry and naked as a sun-baked boneyard” (Whitehead forthcoming, 11).

Shadow Station

After making Jamming the Signal, I imagined a shadow radio station as another kind of counter-signal, undermining, interrupting or jamming with a signal. Radio Multe’s new space had an unused room on the other side of the wall, mirroring the space the radio station was set up in. What an opportunity to create a shadow or jamming station. I kept it unnamed and allowed the space to be undefined, emergent, changing, disobedient and strange. Whereas Radio Multe has a color image of the logo taped to its windows, I posted a black and white version of the sign on the shadow station’s window and wrote in clumsy left-handed writing, “shadow station”.

Radio Multe on the left, unnamed shadow station on the right. 

Secret Broadcasts

Making FM radio stations in Norway, where few listen to FM and AM or have easy access to radio receivers, is its own kind of obscuration and compromised signal. There is a poignance in this, signals sent and not received, and no one knowing the signals exist. This reminds me of indigenist-Indigenous cosmologies, present but not really acknowledged or received by dominant western cultures, at everyone’s peril (See Tynan 2021, Wilson 2008, Simpson 2013). 

In spring 2023, I started doing unannounced Thursday 18.00 shows on Radio Multe every other week that I called “secret broadcasts”. For these, I turned off the station’s online stream and sent only on FM. I addressed an imaginary listener, someone stuck in rush hour traffic in an old car that still had an FM radio. I would tell them the story of Seijo and her Soul and then riff about what I thought the story meant. (In Chapter Five I will describe this story and why I choose to work with it.) As mentioned earlier, I missed the more ambly, intimate style that emerged on SkottegatenFM and wanted to think-speak-write and free associate on air with this story. On at least one secret broadcast, I set up the weak transmitter in the shadow station and spoke into it. I had placed a radio receiver in front of a mic at Radio Multe so I was “playing” the shadow mini-FM radio station on the community radio station. 

Quantum Society - A Duet for Two Radio Stations

Radio Multe collaborated with Denmark-based writer and artist Sara Gebran to do a live on-air “activation” of her book Quantum Society for an audience both in the station and at home listening to the radio. We invited Kjersti Sundland and Sidsel Christensen to join, and after three days working together we created a performance for Radio Multe and her shadow station. One favorite moment was reading a section about particles and waves: Sara and I read about waves in Radio Multe, while Sidsel and Kjersti read about particles in the shadow station. Both stations were sending at the same time on the same frequency, from different microphones in the two rooms. I got excited by the dramaturgical and radiophonic possibilities of the dual radio station approach and had an idea to develop a duet for two radio stations, each sending on a different frequency. This idea harkens back to Jose Maceda’s stunning piece Ugnayan, for 20 Radio Stations, composed for Manila’s FM spectrum on New Year’s Day in 1974, and is an approach well-suited to Norway’s abandoned spectrum. 

Sara Gebran and Karen Werner, Radio Multe performance of Quantum Society, April 2023, photograph by Siavash Kheirkhah

Kjersti Sundland and Sidsel Christensen in shadow radio station performance of Quantum Society, April 2023, photograph by Siavash Kheirkhah

Think Outloud Protocol

While developing Radio Multe, I was also identifying re- radio artistic research threads to develop into a third artistic work. Tempted by several strands, I wanted to focus on one topic to go deep with. By fall 2023, I chose to focus on on-air conversation as co-creation, as a specific kind of relationality and a way of being and thinking together in radio space. 

André Mestre, a composer and researcher in artificial intelligence and creativity, had stopped by at a Radio Multe broadcast event, and we later had a conversation about a methodology used in his AI research called “Thinking Aloud Protocol” that involves recording one’s process of thinking to train computers. I shared some of my preoccupations with conversation as co-creation, aiming towards a different kind of intelligence, even jamming AI by opening up relational and creative spaces between humans. We agreed to make a Think Outloud Protocol program in October 2023 with a live sound bed by an artist visiting from Vienna, Andreas Zißler. The program is excerpted in the Radio Multe reel. André is now part of the Radio Multe Ensemble. I say more about on-air conversation as co-creation and the Radio Multe Ensemble in upcoming chapters.

In describing these five sketches or works-in-progress, I convey how Radio Multe invites radical play. Shifting away from the art world’s adoption of western scientific language, such as laboratory and experiment, I join Anna Friz’s formulation to say Radio Multe is a “burrow of investigation.”

Radio Multe reel

Think Outloud Protocol program at Radio Multe, with André Mestre, Andreas Zißler, Karen Werner, Victoria Levada and others, October 2023, photograph by Siavash Kheirkhah

Chapter Four:
On-air Conversation as Co-creation

On-air conversation as co-creation is a conceptual frame and set of practices that first emerged during SkottegatenFM. Initially, I saw this as an ancillary or side theme but experimental on-air conversation practices continued, lingered and winded their way through this re- radio journey as I will describe in this chapter. Reading Grant Kester’s book on dialogical aesthetics, Conversation Pieces: Community + Communication in Modern Art, I was introduced to numerous ways that contemporary artists have worked with conversation as an artistic material. I have come to see the everyday practice of conversation as an artistic path of embodied relationality, with particular relevance in radio space.

In this chapter, I review key themes in dialogical aesthetics as Kester frames it and reflect on my work in that context. I share a genealogy of practices and examples from re- radio to define and ground what I mean by on-air conversation as co-creation. The audio excerpts provide more direct information that convey affective qualities including rhythm, pace, tone and how relaxed and expansive or contracted someone feels on air at that moment. I address how on-air, by which I mean transmitting through AM or FM radio, conversation differs in significant ways from other conversations in terms of sonic-spatial experiences, dramaturgy and experiences of self. I consider how on-air conversations are affected by factors such as how many people are participating; the intention or guiding prompt for a conversation; the scale of the radio space (i.e. mini-FM, communityFM, online); the radio infrastructure one is a part of; whether there is an audience physically present; how well those conversing know each other and whether people are conversing in their mother tongue. In order to intentionally work with all of these parameters and deepen on-air conversation as co-creation practice, I started the Radio Multe Ensemble in spring 2024. I introduce the Ensemble’s guiding principles and aspirations and link these back to Kester’s focus on conversation as an artistic material.

Dialogical aesthetics

Kester’s exploration of dialogical aesthetics draws on the literary theories and philosophical works of Mikhail Bakhtin and Emmanuel Levinas in the context of contemporary art practices. At the heart of Kester’s aesthetic preoccupation is conversation, which is “reframed as an active, generative process that can help us speak and imagine beyond the limits of fixed identities, official discourse, and the perceived inevitability of political conflict” (Kester 2004, 9-10). Kester’s dialogical aesthetics privileges listening, including “listening to” and learning about the specific site where the artwork happens. These conversational and listening approaches are durational, since shifting perspectives outside one’s self-interest requires time. The works are conceptually accessible and direct as well. Kester sees these artistic priorities as sharing avant-garde’s focus on shifting perception and consciousness. At the same time, they challenge avant-garde art’s tradition of immediacy and shock as a way of creating perceptual shifts and the assumption that good art is difficult to understand. Dialogical aesthetics challenges the autonomy of the artist and art object in which a “viewer’s response has no immediate reciprocal affect on the constitution of the work…the physical object remains essentially static” (Kester 2004, 77). In dialogical aesthetics, by contrast, the work is inherently collaborative, created in real time by the artist and the viewer; the art requires this interaction. These ideas resonate with my re- radio artwork and artistic research methodology.

Kester lays out a spectrum of artistic practices that center around conversation and exemplify dialogical aesthetics, which I will review in some detail here given the centrality of conversation in re- radio. Kester includes conversations organized to solve social problems, as enacted by the Viennese art collective WochenKlausur. WochenKlausur was known for creating “enclosures” for a set amount of time, with invited guests from varied backgrounds. One example of their artworks is Intervention to Aid Drug-Addicted Women (1994, 1995, Zurich) involving boat trips with sex workers, activists, journalists and policy makers who were invited to have conversations about a specific local problem: women drug addicts doing sex work to pay for their drugs. What emerged in the context of the art event was a consensus among the invited participants, which led to a concrete intervention: creating a boardinghouse providing shelter, safety and services for these women.  

Another approach within dialogical aesthetics is more open-ended, not searching for a concrete solution so much as challenging stereotypes through a series of choreographed private and public conversations. Here Kester uses the example of The Roof is on Fire (1994) made in Oakland, California, by Suzanne Lacy and collaborators. The artist taught media literacy to Latino and African-American teens and then created an artwork in which the teens sat in cars parked on a rooftop and discussed with each other how they have been perceived by the media. Audience members were in the role of overhearer and witness. Another part of the work involved members of the Oakland Police Department dialoguing with the teens over a period of six weeks, plus the production of a video that was later used in the community policing programs. The Roof is on Fire integrated dialogue in several ways in both preparing for and creating these artworks; each step had different parameters for who was dialoguing, who was listening and what the topics and aims were. The goal was not a tangible intervention or bridge-building, as much as consciousness-raising about racist media narratives.  

Another way of working with dialogical aesthetics is to cultivate provisional utopian spaces that can hold dialogue across polarized differences or, more realistically, reflect on recent experiences where provisional reconciliation was achieved and has shown the possibilities for peace. Kester’s example is the Routes Project (2002) organized by Littoral Arts in Northern Ireland. Since the 1970s, public transportation was a rare space in Belfast where Catholics and Protestants interacted; a union policy required that both Catholic and Protestant bus drivers take routes across all parts of the city so everyone, Catholics and Protestants, would ride the bus together. Routes Project brought Catholic and Protestant bus drivers together with artists to dialogue, witness, reflect on and make art from these bus-driving experiences. 

I want to mention another thread within dialogical aesthetics, one Kester sees as an antecedent, because I find it inspiring, watering seeds that have popped up in re- radio. Beginning in the 1970s, Helen and Newton Harrison created process-based installations, each dedicated to a specific ecosystem. These installations involved open-ended conversations referred to as “conversational drifts” with people who were experts about that particular ecosystem. The conversational drifts were intended to create unexpected new knowledges, questions, imaginaries and, at times, concrete solutions. The Harrisons were committed to an expanded time-sense in relation to the ecosystems and, drawing on insights from the conversational drifts, worked with images, metaphors and forms “so that [viewers and participants] literally see the problem differently” (Kester, 2004, 66).

Of the examples Kester mentions, conversational drifts are most similar to the softening of the self and emergences that I seek in on-air conversation as co-creation, though the Harrison’s practices are oriented towards a more focused outcome. In fact, all of Kester’s examples are responding to an explicitly stated social problem, and in this way my approach has been different. Kester’s examples respond to specific social issues like misogyny, racism, structural inequality, colonialism or climate change. My approach so far with on-air conversation as co-creation has been to pay attention to the ways voices, thinking and collectivity co-emerge in specific radiophonic spaces. My aspiration has been to deconstruct radio communication’s legacy as a linear message-delivery system from sender to receiver and re-configure communication as co-presence and emergence.

Reflecting on my approach in relation to Kester’s examples, I sense ways in which my socialization (as white, American, a woman, a PhD fellow and new to Norway) has influenced my decisions and aspirations within this practice. I play with distance, including the distance between ethnic and generational groups who do not meaningfully interact in Bergen.³² My work sustains imagination and a politics of possibility. Yet, my focus on co-presence may not be the priority for someone who experiences excessive surveillance in a store in Bergen because they are Black, and has many other daily stresses that I do not experience. In Radio Multe, in particular, while creating a space for meaningful exchanges across diverse demographics, I have had an unacknowledged bias in my ideas of co-creation towards unity, rather than also cultivating space for difference and even antagonism among participants, which requires trust and time to be skillful. Realizing this deepens my engagement with the station’s guiding questions: What is community? What is communication? 

32 A 2014 study conducted by the Council of Europe’s Intercultural Cities concluded that Bergen needs “more opportunities and structure wherein diverse elements within Bergen society can encounter each other, interact and find co‐working opportunities.” See https://www.coe.int/en/web/interculturalcities Though this research is a decade old, the conclusions are consistent with my experiences in Bergen during re- radio.

A genealogy of on-air conversation as co-creation 

In this section I provide a genealogy of initial sparks that have evolved into phrases, practices, experiments and eventually a group, the Radio Multe Ensemble, for working with on-air conversation as an artistic material. As I elaborate below, a lexicon of on-air conversation as co-creation includes speaking-thinking-writing, think-alongs, think outloud protocol, unthinking together and learning with. These are not distinct practices but rather came into being in different contexts during re- radio, some in mini-FM and some in community FM contexts.

Conversation as co-creation first arose in SkottegatenFM. Soon after the station launched and I invited people on-air, I realized I could easily lapse into the interview form, focusing on content a radio listener might want to hear. SkottegatenFM launched during Covid lockdowns and quarantines, and I was seeking meaningful interactions, preferring to play and create with people on-air. A conventional radio interview format positions the interviewee as a more or less coherent subject presenting content, presenting the self. On-air conversation as co-creation, by contrast, invites people sharing a conversation to become present in the moment, relaxing into the space between, and becoming curious about what they can conjure together. As Kester puts it, dialogical aesthetics relies on people who are not radically autonomous but rather “defined in terms of openness, of listening…and of a willingness to accept a position of dependence and intersubjective vulnerability relative to the viewer or collaborator” (Kester 2004, 107). I made a verbal slip once while telling someone that in the performance installation Seijo & her Soul (described in more detail in the next chapter), we are in the air when I meant to say on the air; i luft rather than på luft in Norwegian. Later I realized, “in the air” is an apt way of describing on-air conversation as co-creation; letting oneself disperse, mingle and get carried away in radio space rather than being an independent signal on a mission with a message.

A bit later during SkottegatenFM, informed by weekly conversations with artist Ricarda Denzer who brought Sigmund Freud’s writing about daydreams to my attention, as well as my own moments of speaking in the air without fellow interlocuters, a related practice emerged that I have called thinking-speaking-writing. This is a solo version of on-air conversation as co-creation. One can hear the conversational drifting and “intersubjective vulnerability” in my voice in audio clip #1 (14:14) where I think-speak-write about a friendship, listening to my mind and Sigmund Freud’s ideas about day-dreaming. Sometimes I mix up the order of the words and call this practice speaking-thinking-writing or listening-speaking-thinking and these, too, are accurate terms. In this practice, thinking and speaking coalesce and create an auditory writing co-constituted by the sonic space. The sonic space includes the sound of my microphoned voice in my headphones, an imagined sound of a radio in a listener’s home or car and radiophonic space, the mini-FM signals creating a canopy over our neighborhood. 

Unlike writing that is fixed on a page or a computer screen, thinking-speaking-writing fades into the air. The moment of articulation is privileged; even if there is a recording, this too fades and is harder to grasp a hold of than a visual print. Yet in these moments of thinking-speaking-writing on air, something shifts; the speaker-thinker-writer expands beyond the bounds of their familiar interior (self, home) and slides into public radio space. The associative communication is an unusual and potentially generative bridge between these realms, softening the distance between interiority and exteriority, more of a window than a wall.

In summer 2021, after SkottegatenFM had ended, I received funding from Bergen Kommune to rent a storefront in Bergen and to launch Bergen Community Radio. I wanted to conceive the station with others, in the spirit of a “conversation as co-creation” approach that was present in and on SkottegatenFM. Tenthaus Radio, a project of the Tenthaus Art Collective in Oslo, shares the radio station space of InterFM, a multilingual community FM radio station in Oslo that also streams online. They welcomed members of the Bergen Community Radio extended community (myself, William Kudahl and Kate Donovan via telephone from Berlin) to brainstorm who and what this new Bergen community radio station could be. We did an on-air think-along, What is a Radio Station? with Tenthaus members Ebba Moi and Isak Ree joining. To facilitate a playful brainstorm, we set up a prompt where we went round and round a circle, each person dreaming up a possible radio station. In audio clip #2 (2:49)one can hear a playful camaraderie, a conversational drift inspiring each other’s thinking and nurturing imagination. 

33  Interestingly, this conversation practice sounds similar to a cold war radio jamming technique, the cloud of spoken word (Norelli 2017).

In the Bergen community-radio-station-as-artwork Radio Multe that eventually emerged, we have continued experimenting with on-air conversational practices, intending to expand the subjectivities of participants and foster collectivity. One example already discussed in Chapter Three is Think Outloud Protocol with André Mestre and others. Rather than having a brainstorming topic as we did in the What is a Radio Station?, here we are reflecting on conversation and thinking per se. As with Tenthaus Radio, this example is on community FM and streaming online. Here is a short excerpt from Think Outloud Protocol, audio clip #3 (2:19) illustrating a prompt that shook us out of the familiar forms of communicating.³³

34 Thank you to Lake Radio member Louise Tandrup Esbensen for making this recording of the room during this transmission, as our Shortwave recording faltered.

In summer 2023, Shortwave Collective, a feminist international collective that I have been a part of since November 2022, was invited to create Living Radio Lab at Struer Sound and Listening Biennial in Struer, Denmark. This living installation included workshops for making open wave-receivers which are DIY receivers based on foxhole radios. A few members of the collective, including Kate Donovan and myself, initiated a daily mini-FM station within the Lab to “unthink radio together”. We activated a mini-FM radio station each morning for an hour and set up radios in nearby public spaces. Visitors sat by the radios and listened or came into the Lab to join the circle of chairs where we were transmitting. Each day we focused the transmission on unthinking one part of a radio receiver: one day we unthought the antenna; another day we unthought the ground, another day diode. Even though we were not scientists and most of us knew little about radio technology, the unthinking conversations were fruitful for imagining radio in fresh ways; we created a new radio imaginary through this associative, playful and fun act of unthinking-together on air. The degree of “intersubjective vulnerability” or openness to unthink, depended on who was present each day. For some people, it is a pleasure to free-associate and approach this elusive co-creation in radio space. For others this is not of interest, they prefer to know than co-create, or do not trust that another way of communicating is possible. Even amidst these differences, the daily repetition of the process was generative in unthinking radio, not only expanding the narrative of what a radio is but building an intimacy for regular participants. Audio clip #4 (10:25)is an excerpt from a session on unthinking the antenna.³⁴

In winter of 2024, I was a “tracer” for a week of workshops held at Bergen Architecture School, part of their convening of the 2025 Bergen Assembly for which the theme is “learning with”. I was partnered with two students, Emma Domino and Maia Garrido, who were leading a workshop called “Across Minds” about women, migration and ethical loneliness. Other participants included Tilda Zsemberovszky and Lingyu Zhao. The workshop entailed the act of reading three texts silently together: photocopied excerpts from Jill Staufer’s Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard, Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic and Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Stauffer 2015, Otsuka 2011, Hartman 2007).

The mini-FM radio station for “learning with”

Reading from the margins of a text

My role as a tracer was to poetically document knowledge. I set up a mini-FM radio station at Bergen Architecture School with a view of the sea, and during the week the participants in the workshop and I went on air each morning and afternoon. During transmissions, we tuned the radios to our frequency throughout the building and in the elevator. We posed our questions on air in the morning, read all day together making generous notes in the margins of our photocopies and at the end of the day reflected again on air about what we had read. On the last day, while other workshop groups listened to our radios or watched us at our mini radio station, we went on air and read aloud each other’s comments in the margins, merging texts and voices. As one can hear in audio clip #5 (4:19), our voices weave in and out like a diffuse cloud of spoken word, and a delicate co-creation emerges with moments of synchronicity. One listener called our narrowcast “amplified intimacy”. I want to do more on-air “learning with” that blurs education, collectivity and art. 

A final context enabled me to dive deeper into on-air conversation as co-creation: in April and June 2024 I did residencies at Bergen Kunsthall’s Live Studio. I set up Radio Multe’s FM and online transmission as well as the mini-FM shadow station and invited people I know in Bergen to go on air with me, one person each day, to try out conversation as co-creation. 

I invited people whom I have enjoyed conversing with, because of the way they are present, curious, honest, open, associative and playful, and I feel comfortable being this way with them. In addition, they were keen on trying this with me and schedules permitted it.

In the future, I would like to co-generate conditions, but to begin I was the one creating the prompts and parameters. In April, we conversed about what we thought conversation as co-creation means and feels like. In June, we conversed about the story of Seijo and her Soul, associating together what the story means to us at that moment. The conversation partners at Live Studio were Yimin Dong, Feronia Wennborg, Josephine Sommers, Alan Ó Raghallaigh, Karlo Berger, Clare Ellis, Carol Stampone and Dinara Yañgeldina.

Listening back to the recordings of these on-air conversations, I hear how varied they are in terms of content and in terms of the relational spaces, in other words, who my co-conversationalist and I became in the space together, the degree to which we were able to relax and co-create a generative grounds for fresh insights, and the degree to which we presented the information. These dynamics sometimes change subtly over the course of the conversation. I am surprised to hear, at times, a formality in my own voice; I was leading the effort to co-create on-air yet was not always fully at ease. If the conversations went over an hour, I hear how tired I became, too. 

A significant and at the same time obvious discovery is how on-air conversation as co-creation benefits from mutual trust and positive affect, for example, a long friendship between conversation partners. The on-air conversation with Karlo Berger is unusual in that I have known Karlo for thirty years; he joined me on air via telephone from the United States, I felt a bing bing! This is what I was seeking in on-air conversation as co-creation. There is an ease between us; we are listening well to each other, and the co-created space allows for a play and newinsights to emerge. The pleasure that comes from this is palpable. Audio clip #6 (9:44) includes excerpts from this on-air conversation as co-creation between Karlo and me.

After the April Live Studio conversations, I decided to create the Radio Multe Ensemble, now more aware that creative conversations require time to build trust and intersubjective openness, play and vulnerability that I want to activate. The Ensemble’s name, Radio Multe Ensemble, links the group to the radio station’s mission; the question of what a radio station is and what communication and community can be. André Mestre, who had been part of Think Outloud Protocol, joined as did many of those who participated during Live Studio. Our first task as an Ensemble revolved around the performance installation Seijo & her Soul which I describe in the next chapter, as well as details about the Ensemble’s creative processes and practices.

On air, in air  

While “conversation as co-creation” practices can be cultivated in non-radiophonic spaces, radio creates a dramaturgical intensity. Gregory Whitehead speaks to the theatrical uniqueness of radio space: "Radio offers artists, those with ears so inclined, an intensely philosophical medium... In his 13th Text for Nothing, Beckett summons the impossible voice and the unmakeable being into that ultimate murmur, when all will be empty. Radio art begins at the intersection of the impossible, the unmakeable and the empty. Where do we go from there?" (Whitehead, forthcoming, 1).

The radio station becomes a sacred space of heightened presence and absence, co-constituted by an unknown, imagined listener-witness. Headphones, microphones and designated on-air times encourage ritualistic attention. For those new to radio, being on-air can be cathartic. Knowing that one’s voice is projected beyond one’s body and into other spaces, gives many of us a boost of confidence; one feels important in a public way. This publicness can also feel intimidating. At Radio Multe I encounter people who are wary of going on air, initially visiting with an intention to listen or socialize. With a bit of encouragement they become comfortable on air.

The radio phrase “on the air” conjures related phrases such as: castles in the air, walking on air, love or change is in the air, up in the air. Air is invoked as an atmosphere, invisible but present, even palpable. Being in or on the air suggests a fragile, unstable reality yet one that has begun to grow in the imagination like a speech act does. Working with radio is similar to this, and the context of a country like Norway without a functioning radio system  We go on air, yes, and people can hear what we express in places far from our bodies, but we also enter an imagined space when we go on air. We become bigger, expanding into space, into the homes and moving cars of people we do not know. Some part of us is here and another part elsewhere, creating an evocative gap within the self and one that lends itself well to the story of Seijo and her Soul, to be discussed shortly.

Chapter Five:
Seijo & her Soul

Seijo & her Soul is the third central artwork of re- radio and brings together elements of SkottegatenFM and Radio Multe with the radio station works-in-progress and sketches, described in Chapters Three and Four, including the unnamed shadow radio station, the story of Seijo and her Soul, on-air conversation as co-creation and the Radio Multe Ensemble. Seijo & her Soul is a durational (nine evenings from dusk until dark) performance installation created within a Bergen’s art exhibition space called USF’s Visningsrommet and open to the public from 31 August to 8 September 2024. In this chapter, I describe this multifaceted durational work. To conclude, I enter the logic of storytelling, which is at the heart of this piece, and propose story as a relational knowledge practice, linking to Shawn Wilson’s point that “researchers are interpreters of…knowledge” more so than originators of knowledge (Wilson 2008, 38). To further unsettle knowledge, I weave in insights from artistic researchers who aspire to non-knowledge.

A Multifaceted Durational Performance Installation

This work is created from several elements: the story of Seijo and her Soul; a visual score for two radio stations; the Radio Multe Ensemble; the installation’s scenography with expanded spatial and temporal boundaries; the visitors’ role; the radios receiving the transmissions and the paper broadcasts. In this section, I describe each element in detail.

Seijo & her Soul³⁵

At the heart of this artwork is the story of Seijo and her Soul. The story is as follows:

Once there was a child named Seijo, and she had a best friend, Ojo. They played together all the time. As they grew up, they fell in love and wanted to spend their lives together.

Seijo’s father said, “Oh no, no, I know who you should marry” and chose another partner for Seijo.

Ojo was very sad. Realizing his heart would mend only if he moved away, he prepared to leave in a boat one night.

Seijo, too, despaired. Sensing Ojo leaving in the darkness, she crept out of her window, walked to the water and stepped into Ojo’s boat with him. The two traveled far away to a new place where they started a family together and were happy.

Years pass. Seijo wants to return home and reconcile with her father. Ojo agrees to join her, and they travel back by boat. 

Ojo says, “Let me greet your father first, and tell him you are coming.” Ojo knocks on the door of Seijo’s father and explains that Seijo is near, ready to greet him.

Seijo’s father replies, “Ojo, what are you talking about? Ever since you left, Seijo has been in a coma in her bed.”  

Seijo approaches the door of her father’s house. 

As she does, Seijo wakes from her coma, rises from her bed and walks to the door of the house. 

In the doorway, Seijo faces Seijo.

Which is the real Seijo?

35 This section is adapted from a zine accompanying the Seijo and her Soul performance installation. The entire zine text is shared in Appendix Two.

The story of Seijo and her Soul has been floating in the air as a ghost story since ancient times in China. In the 13th century, the Chinese Chan/Zen master Mumon included the story of Seijo and her Soul in his book The Gateless Gate, a collection of koans, or cases, still central to Zen Buddhist training (Mumon 1993).³⁶ Seijo is a rare female protagonist in this collection.  

In koan study, a student is given a paradoxical story such as Seijo and her Soul. Sitting with a teacher, the student is asked to retell and then respond to the story, in this case to answer the question posed at the end: Which is the real Seijo? Koan study is a kind of conversation as co-creation, shifting from presenting an answer to becoming the answer. The teacher decides when the student has passed the koan. It may take a week, or a decade. Perhaps it is what the student says, or more likely how they say it, a quality of voice.

As Chinese and Japanese Buddhism spread all over the world, the story of Seijo and her Soul traveled all over as well, sometimes outside Buddhist contexts. In Argentina, Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares included the story in their collection of myths, Cuentos breves y extraordinarios (Borges and Casares 1967). The book was translated into English in 1971 as Extraordinary Tales where the story of Seijo and her Soul appears as “The Encounter” (Borges 1971).³⁷

Though I have a history with Seijo and her Soul through my Zen Buddhist training, I am limited in my knowledge about ancient and contemporary China, which is the birthplace of the story. My engagement with Seijo and her Soul is shaped by my language and culture. I am grateful to Ben Wenhou Yu, co-founder and managing director of Bergen’s Northing Centre for East Asian Art and Culture, and Yimin Dong for providing helpful linguistic and cultural contexts.

I have been working on air with the story of Seijo and her Soul since spring 2023, and I find the story to be a limitless well. In my interactions with the story, I have felt the distance between interiority and exteriority; presence and perfomance; experiences of diaspora and leaving a part of oneself behind; disassociation and experiences of obstruction amidst patriarchy; microscopic movements between intimacy and independence; challenges of art-making while also reflecting in artistic research; what it means to go on air, sending one’s voice from the body into a city, and more. I refer to Seijo and her Soul’s unfolding meanings and to story generally as a relational form of knowledge at the end of this chapter.

36 Mumon wrote in ancient Chinese, which Radio Multe Ensemble member Yimin Dong translated into Mandarin and English. Through these translations, the koan's title becomes Seijo leaving her Soul. Another Ensemble member, André Mestre, found the translation, Seijo has two Souls. Further, in Mumon’s ancient text, the protagonist’s name is Qianniang; Seijo is a Japanese adaptation of the name. Yimin Dong also located an earlier version of the story in Jiandeng Xinhua, a collection of stories by Qu You. The story’s migration across time, cultures and languages contributes to an appreciation of communication's complexity. 

37 Johanna Sevholt brought this version of the story to my attention while we were screen printing the paper broadcasts.

Radio Multe Ensemble 

The Radio Multe Ensemble is a group of people I have convened to practice on-air conversation as co-creation. As discussed in Chapter Four, the Ensemble emerged as an idea in April 2024 while I was testing on-air conversation as co-creation with invited conversation partners. Most of these people have been involved in Radio Multe in some way, whether as participants, visitors or supporters. The Radio Multe Ensemble for the Seijo and her Soul performance installation was: Alan Ó Raghallaigh, André Mestre, Carol Stampone, Dinara Yañgeldina, Feronia Wennborg, Yimin Dong and me. 

We prepared and trained in a focused way for Seijo & her Soul by meeting weekly in the month prior. Our meetings entailed getting to know each other and building trust and a sense of play through improvisational games, for example, tossing objects back and forth and other physical group activities. We did exercises that helped us shift from thinking to a more embodied awareness so we could approach conversation as an embodied practice. We did deep belly breathing, vocalizing practices and a deep listening exercise developed by Pauline Oliveros (Oliveros 2005). We tried scenarios and prompts for on-air conversation as co-creation such as dividing into groups of two or three and enacting increasingly longer versions of the score, usually on-air.

After sharing my own journey of what led me to this topic, we discussed what conversation as co-creation means to each of us, what it feels like when we are in it and what practices help us sustain it or interrupt it. At the request of Ensemble members, I offered a methodology for engaging with the story:

At dusk each night, tell the story of Seijo and her Soul (aka Seijo leaving her soul, Seijo the soul that ran away, Seijo and her two Souls) to the air, to yourself and/or to another person or being. This can be done orally even if only as a whisper, just to bring it outside your body; if you prefer to write, you can do that. The telling can be as long or as short as you want. After several days, you can take liberties with the story: spin it, turn it around if you want, tell it in reverse or from the point of view of another character. After the story is over, pause for a breath or two and then speak in a whisper or louder what's resonant in the story for you at that moment. This can also be as long or as short as you want. After that, make a sound of any kind or duration.

A Visual Score for Two Radio Stations: Radio Multe and an unnamed shadow station

I created a visual score, designed by Amy Franceschini, for the wall in direct view when one enters the installation. The score was drawn directly onto the wall of the installation space by Johanna Sevholt; what emerged is a translation of Amy’s original design through Johanna’s hand. Having the score directly on the wall rather than printed and hung, created an immediacy; the architectural space became a score.

Seijo & her Soul score designed by Amy Franceschini

Johanna Sevholt painting the score onto the installation wall, August 2024

The score conveys the dramaturgy of the performance installation as it unfolds from dusk until dark. Given the performance installation’s reliance on listening more than seeing, the score is pared down and involves a mirrored repetition: the first movement is repeated in the third movement but flips which radio station is doing what. Radio thrives on simple narrative structures and repetition, as oral storytelling traditions know well.

The score is divided into three equal movements. Each lasts twenty-three minutes so that the performance installation is activated for seventy minutes or so, each evening. During the first movement of the score, two Ensemble members stationed at Radio Multe take turns telling the story of Seijo and her Soul on air. At the same time, one person from the Ensemble sits at the unnamed shadow station and, sending on a different frequency, makes music, broadly defined, on air – this can be quiet humming or improvised singing into the microphone, or electronic music they make live from a computer or modular synthesizer. At both stations, the Ensemble members speak softly and make sounds or music very close to the microphones, so the sounds are not heard directly within the installation but only through the visitors’ radio receivers.

In the second movement, Ensemble members at both stations shift into conversing about what the story of Seijo and her Soul means to them at that moment. The two stationed at Radio Multe do on-air conversation as co-creation following techniques we have practiced in the prior month; on the unnamed shadow radio station one Ensemble member does the same but without an apparent interlocutor, only radio space and imagined/internalized listeners. The third movement returns to the first movement, only now switching the tasks so that Radio Multe provides music while the shadow radio station tells the story.

The score is repeated over nine evenings with Radio Multe Ensemble members rotating who is on air each night. In a similar spirit as the other central works in re- radio, this work is durational, so that through nightly repetitions we, the Ensemble and visitors, transform, feeling on-air conversation as co-creation in our bodies. So too, repeating the story of Seijo and her Soul, each evening into the fading light, is ritualistic, enabling the story to find footing within Bergen, within the performance installation, within the spaces between radio stations and radio receivers, within the people sending-receiving. As the story comes nearer, the distance between Seijo and her Soul is more palpable and potent. Extending the spatial and temporal dimensions of the work shares these intentions, as I will discuss in another section.

But what durations would serve this transformation? Here practicality played a role, striking a balance between intensity and rest. Nine evenings came to mind. I was reminded of a work Robert Rauschenburg created in 1966 at Bell Laboratories called “9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering”.³⁸ The nine evenings of Seijo & her Soul is a nod to that title though not otherwise referencing its approach. The performance installation’s timing from dusk until dark de-centers time from human clocks, especially radio clocks, and reconnects us to forms of time humans do not control. The shift to darkness is also in appreciation of radio space’s evocation of darkness, losing sight of where and who we are, softening the edges of the self into the fading light. The dusk starting time, of course, shifts over the nine days from 20.44 on August 31 to20.20 on September 8. After the seventy-minute performance, the room becomes quite dark, softly illuminated by old radios on the floor that have been transformed into lights.³⁹

38 Juliane Zelweis told me about Rauschenburg’s “9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering.” More information about that series is here: https://9evenings.org/

39 Bergen Kringkaster volunteer and Radio Multe programmer Øystein Ask was my partner in making these lights and Anna Friz suggested the idea.

Scenography  

I use the word scenography to refer to the location of Bergen’s former United Sardine Factory building, now an art complex referred to as USF, as well as to the layout of the Visningsrommet exhibition space and the design of the installation. USF is in the Nordnes neighborhood of Bergen and triangulates with locations of two other central artworks of re- radio: USF is down the street from SkottegatenFM’s location and also directly across the fjord from Radio Multe’s home in the industrial marina section of Laksevåg. While SkottegatenFM was created in the space between a dining room and a neighborhood and Radio Multe is its own community institution-as-artwork, Seijo & her Soul is located within an established art exhibition space in Bergen. This variety of contexts has provided rich variables for developing radio art and artistic research, particularly in terms of audience expectations and relationships.

The USF complex is directly on the Puddefjord, a water throughway from the sea into Bergen. Visningsrommet is a ground-floor exhibition space that receives applications from artists and presents a dozen shows per year. One side of the exhibition space is entirely glass, and from the inside one has a view of the Puddefjord, though not facing it directly. Anyone walking by, on route to a popular swimming and sunbathing spot, easily notices the exhibition space. The space outside Visningsrommet is a cement courtyard where, in the summer, there are occasional DJs and dance parties; the USF restaurant Skippers is next to the Puddefjord and is quite active. 

As mentioned, the performance installation is lit by abandoned radios that have been transformed into lights, a nod to radio being part of the light spectrum. The white shades are drawn on the Visningsrommet windows, aside from one window near the shadow station which is covered with kefir to make a whitewash paint. This whitewashed window has a transparent circle in the center, like a ship porthole facing the fjord, providing a defined view of the water from the shadow station. Water is a symbolically rich aspect of the Seijo and her Soul story.

At left, the installation window painted with buttermilk focusing the shadow radio station's view of the fjord. At right, a broken radio transformed into an installation light by Øystein Ask. 

I call this work a performance installation. By installation I mean an art work presented as a whole, rather than as discrete works of art, and where the viewer is immersed and essential (Bishop 2005). In this case, the piece is only activated when visitors turn on their radios and tune to the frequencies of the stations (I explain this set up more in the next section.) I define performance installation as an installation that has a time-based activity, human or otherwise: something unfolds in time and space that is one element within the immersive environment. 

Seijo & her Soul’s scenography extends beyond the Visningsrommet space and beyond the nine evenings. The spatial and temporal boundaries of the performance installation are evoked in the visual score which is created on X and Y axes indicating space (near and far) and time (dusk to dark). Working with two radio stations, one of which is a city-wide frequency, means the piece inevitably moves beyond the boundaries of Visningsrommet and can also be heard on radios inside apartments or cars around Bergen. The posters, or paper broadcasts, are another way the performance installation blurs inside and outside spaces and extends the duration or time of the performance installation: the piece exists as long as the paper broadcasts linger and decay on the streets of Bergen. The story of Seijo and her Soul also confounds clear demarcations of space and time by immersing visitors in the unique imaginary of an ancient story and through this particular story’s migration across centuries, languages and continents. Seijo & her Soul’s scenographic and dramaturgical elements contribute to perceiving what composer and deep listener Pauline Oliveros calls the “time-space continuum” (Oliveros 2005). As mentioned in the Reflection’s Introduction, with re- radio’s backward step I aspire to create more porous perceptions of time and space, so other cosmologies, causalities and grammars may seep in.

Visitors with Radios

I have been using the word visitor rather than audience in this artwork. For example, the Seijo & her Soul poster discussed in the next section includes the words “with the Radio Multe Ensemble and visitors”. Though audience has an etymological connection to audition and listening, which is a privileged experience in Seijo & her Soul, I associate the word audience with an anonymous, faceless group positioned outside the artwork, even consuming it. I can imagine a visitor as someone who, if they trust the situation, can surrender to it and be changed by an experience. With a visitor, I can sense the relational space between us.

While making Seijo & her Soul, Ann Hamilton’s 2012 work, the event of a thread came to mind. In this performance installation, people sit on swings that move a big white fabric hanging in the center of an enormous room.⁴⁰ The documentation shows people of all ages lying on the floor under the billowing curtain, relaxed and enchanted. There are many elements in Hamilton’s installation, including live radio transmissions, the sound of old telephones ringing, messenger pigeons, radios wrapped in paper bags like parcels and more. The audience is not separate from the piece; they are needed to activate the piece by swinging, for one thing. Hamilton said, “I’m much more interested in experiences where you cannot stand outside them but have to be immersed” (Colomina, 2012, 85). These words echo Grant Kester’s words about dialogical aesthetics challenging the autonomy of the artist and art object in which a “viewer’s response has no immediate reciprocal effect on the constitution of the work…the physical object remains essentially static” (Kester 2004, 30). Creating situations that require the visitor’s immersion helps us experience the space as relational and co-constituted. There are no bystanders.

In terms of the visitor’s physical movement through Seijo & her Soul, people enter USF’s lobby just outside Visningsrommet and are greeted by an usher, Peppi Reenkola, who offers each person an FM radio and basic instructions for experiencing the piece. Each radio has a parcel tag with the frequencies of the two radio stations. Visitors are instructed that they are collectively creating the soundscape through their radio tuning. Peppi also explains that people are welcome to experience the work as if they were listening to the radio at home or in the car: they can tune in and out, coming and going as they wish and not just at designated start and end times. They are also welcome to linger on the bean bags or benches within the installation, walk around the space or go outside with the radios to walk or sit where chairs are also provided. Before leaving, they are asked to return their radio and are given a paper broadcast in the form of a zine to carry away with them.

40 Documentation of this 2012 work by Ann Hamilton is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8-S0ziUseo

Radios receiving transmissions

The stations I have created in re- radio have focused on the experiences in and on air, and in the relational spaces of the radio stations. But the radio receiver is also an evocative speaking subject-object that invites further exploration. In SkottegatenFM, I worked with radios on the streets during street parties, and playfully as characters in chairs having a conversation (about toy theater) or taking a rest by the fjord. In Seijo & her Soul, radios are integral and present as subject-objects held in the hands of the visitors, carrying the voices of others in the space. Bringing in the radio as a speaking subject-object is at the edges of my art practice, and an ode to my long-time love of puppetry and toy theatre. 

Paper Broadcasts

The phrase paper broadcast emerged in a conversation with Amy Franceschini of the art collective Futurefarmers, whom I commissioned to design the Seijo & her Soul posters and score. I had initially thought of doing secret broadcasts of the Seijo and her Soul story over many months. I imagined posters around Bergen, a new one wheat-pasted all over the city on each new moon.⁴¹

While discussing the initial version of the work, Amy came up with the phrase, which delights me. Paper broadcasts call attention to paper as a companion to radio: analogue, overlooked amidst digital innovations and vulnerable to weather and wear. Paper broadcasts show the life cycle of a signal as it disintegrates or is covered over. Most of all, the paper broadcast is not pointing to an art event but is itself art, transmitting a narrower distance between announcement and event, a relationality in which nothing is Other (Tynan 2021).⁴²

41 In this alternate version of Seijo and her Soul that would last eight or nine months, the posters would announce the secret broadcasts in a obscured way, mentioning only the frequency and not the times of the broadcasts. I would also have FM radios available for loan with relevant information at museums and business in town. Though I am drawn to elements in this version of the piece, such as the duration, the cycle of monthly posters, the secret broadcasts and the poignancy and antagonism of signals sent and not heard/ignored, it would be more viable as a work created collectively given the number of transmissions involved. The nine-evening performance installation invited other possibilities, described throughout this section, for weaving together threads in re- radio.

42 Creating works on paper is new for me and has been a pleasant discovery in Seijo and her Soul. Making the screen print posters at the Art Academy in Bergen was a collaborative process with Johanna Sevholt and me printing and Anna Bjorkman, the printing lab technician, making the acetates and offering guidance on preparing the screens. Ciara Phillips did the initial training and helped with early tests. Johanna and I printed over eighty posters, no two the same.

Paper broadcasts emerge and decay on Bergen’s street, August 2024,
photographs by Siavash Kheirkhah

In the weeks before the performance installation, Peppi Reenkola and I wheatpasted Seijo & her Soul paper broadcasts all over Bergen. The process itself was rich as we became familiar with the poster media ecology of the city – the glossy, professionally designed, standard sized   announcements on thick paper with big fonts taped on every metal box alongside a recurring family of fellow posters. Protest events were announced on smaller sheets and wheatpasted. In this constellation of street announcements, the Seijo & her Soul paper broadcasts come from a different world, luxuriating in large thin sheets of paper, speaking their information softly in a tiny hand-written script, drawing the viewer in close. One onlooker said the text looked like a poem. To my eyes, the posters transmit the care and joy they were made with, as does the wheatpaste, a non-toxic alternative to poster tape. With wheatpaste, the posters become one with the city’s walls, metal boxes and round poles, at times blending into the city grey. We watched as the posters were covered, spray painted, weathered and sometimes flagrantly taped over with another event’s poster.

A second paper broadcast that is part of Seijo & her Soul is an eight-page risographed zine given to installation visitors as they return their FM radios and leave the space. While the poster initially sent a signal into the air and the performance kept the signal alight, the zine extends it after the event, transforming personal backpacks and bags into carrier waves.

The zine was designed and riso-printed by Johanna Sevholt with illustrations by Amy Franceschini. Written in a straightforward style, the zine integrates artistic research with art and also invites non-academic readers into the artistic research. As mentioned, the zine is given to visitors only as they leave so that during the live event their focus is aural rather than textual. I aim to create moments of enchantment in the performance installation and imagine visitors surrendering to the listening experience, softening their sense of self and becoming part of the conversation as co-creation. After they leave, visitors can supplement the experience and re-engage with the story and salient themes of re- radio through the zine. The zine can be viewed in the Documentation section.

Re- storying Artistic Research

This chapter provides a thorough description of the multilayered performance installation Seijo & her Soul. re- radio themes and inquiries are woven throughout the piece and descriptions —through the choice of story that brings in existential, spiritual, psychological and political aspects of distance, interiority and exteriority; the score, scenography, radio stations and paper broadcasts that extend spatial and temporal boundaries of the artwork; the choreography and positioning of the visitors with radio receivers as co-creators; and the Ensemble’s creative practices that invite embodiment, presence and attention to spaces between. 

As I write this, Seijo & her Soul is still a few weeks away, so this chapter focuses on artistic choices and intentions more so than on lived experiences. If the reader has not visited the work in person, they can get a sense of the performance installation through a video reel produced by Siavash Kheirkhah and available in the Documentation section. 

As a final point, I link Seijo & her Soul back to re-radio’s artistic research inquiries, with a focus on the project’s relational methodology. One insight that emerged from making this artwork is how rich story is as a relational knowledge practice. As I have been reminded in my repeated encounters with Seijo and her Soul over the last year and a half, a good story is a limitless well. Just when I think I have encountered the story’s many meanings, a new meaning arises in telling and conversational co-creating, as the daily audio recordings from the performance installation illustrate. These recordings are also available in the Documentation section.

Story as knowledge resonates with Shawn Wilson’s Indigenous research paradigm, mentioned in the Introduction, in which “researchers are interpreters of…knowledge” more so than originators of knowledge (Wilson 2008, 38). This is a profound point in terms of how it positions a researcher in relation to their topic. I cannot do justice here to the legacies of story as knowledge in multiple spiritual traditions and cosmologies. Yet, based on my experiences with Seijo and her Soul, I want to call attention to a seed floating within the academic field of artistic research and approach artistic research knowledge as one approaches a story, highlighting the relationality of interpretation more than the autonomy of discovery and the mystery of this process. Artworks and artistic research are, at their best, like ancient stories; they create worlds with their own time-space logic that resist closure and inspire co-creation and becoming.

This seed may seem obvious, but knowledge is invoked frequently in artistic research without clear definitions of what knowledge is. Henk Borgdorff, whose work is central to the Norwegian approach to artistic research, typifies this when he writes, “Art practice qualifies as research if its purpose is to expand our knowledge and understanding by conducting an original investigation in and through art objects and creative processes” (Borgdorff 2011, 13).

Artistic research holds radical possibilities for jamming or interfering with conventional, often unexamined approaches to knowledge and research. Yet, as Kamini Vellodi argues, artistic knowledge is too often “leveled to other forms of thought” (Vellodi 2017, 221). Developing a Deleuzian critique of artistic research, Vellodi proposes instead to construct thought from “encounters which escape all recognition” (Vellodi quoting Deleuze 2017, 221). In Lucy Cotter’s words, “In artistic research, the artist is a thinker who redefines the very nature of what it means to think” (Cotter 2019, 26). Sarat Maharaj, who directs a Swedish artistic research PhD program, similarly proposes “non-knowledge” beyond the radar of conscious thought, holding open contradictions and intuition (Cotter 2019, 31). Working at the edges of philosophy and artistic practice, Denise Ferreira da Silva is more explicit about the politics of knowledge, asserting an “ethical mandate to open up other ways of knowing” (da Silva 2014, 81). Da Silva develops a Black feminist poethics for un-organizing, un-forming, un-thinking the world as we know it (Ibid. 2014). 

Proposals like these from Vellodi, Cotter, Maharaj and da Silva, in addition to the Indigenous and indigenist relational research paradigms described in the Introduction, bring a more explicit politics of knowledge to Borgdorff’s artistic research writing. These proposals energize artistic researchers to approach their artworks as spaces of unrecognizable and unstable emergent knowledge. In unsettling knowledge, these approaches also enable artistic researchers to contribute to cross-disciplinary fields in unique and much-needed ways, rather than staying only within the field of artistic research. I hope the public durational encounters with Seijo & her Soul have created “non-knowledge” and opened “contradictions and intuition beyond the radar of conscious thought” for the Ensemble, including myself, for visitors and maybe even for Seijo and her soul. Radio’s instability as a medium has more to contribute to non-knowledge than I had realized before starting re- radio.

Conclusion  

In 2020, re- radio began as an artistic research PhD project by entering the phrase “relational sound practices” in hopes of deepening an embodied experience of relationality in the context of radio. 

In the four and a half years of artistically researching this topic, re- radio comes to an end with a body of artworks made for narrow and broad-cast, performance-lecture-transmissions, radio essays, radio stations as artistic forms, an Ensemble dedicated to on-air conversation as co-creation, and a performance installation that plays with spatial and temporal boundaries and includes works on paper. These artworks, as well as the reflections presented here, contribute to the fields of radio art, especially regarding mini-FM, community radio and the radio station as an artistic form; relational aesthetics and the politics of relationality; dialogical aesthetics; durational and process-based art practices and artistic research. 

Bringing this Artistic Reflection to a close, I take stock of threads in the project that linger and could spark further inquiry, for example themes of interiority and exteriority, especially in relation to Gloria Anzaldúa’s intimate and public “path of a two-way movement”; radio, words and weaving; jamming and interference, including the evocative “cloud of spoken word” jamming technique; how the radio station as an artistic form creates immersive art, positioning audiences into something more akin to neighbors-participants-listeners; the radio station as a performance scenography, especially with the shadow station plus the rich dramaturgical possibilities of radio receivers, for example in puppetry and subject-object theatre; creating collaborative works for multiple frequencies on Norway’s abandoned FM spectrum; qualities of voice and relationality in various radiophonic spaces; paper broadcasts about radio and other media, including the media landscape of street posters; on-air conversation as co-creation with a more explicit recognition of power and difference and critical artistic research practices that contribute to the unsettling of knowledge. 

Four threads in particular feel alive for future artistic research and art practice: first, I would like to continue making mini-FM stations of set durations for unthinking together and learning with, blurring boundaries between art, teaching and artistic research. This approach builds on the “unthinking radio together” sessions done under the umbrella of Shortwave Collective and my role as a tracer in the “learning with” workshop at Bergen Architecture School as part of Bergen Assembly. These configurations of mini-FM resonate with examples Claire Bishop shares in Artificial Hells’ final chapter,“Pedagogic Projects: ‘How do you bring a classroom to life as if it were a work of art?’” where she discusses pedagogical projects and learning spaces as art (Bishop 2012). A notable example is Tania Bruguera’s Cátedra Arte de Conducta (2002-2009), an art school conceived of as a work of art that Bruguera ran from her home in Havana and in which students created extraordinary works.⁴³

I am curious about the unthinking, unlearning and related shifts in subjectivity that can happen in mini-FM spaces. So far, I have experienced a sense of connection and intimacy emerging in week-long “unlearning” transmissions, but I wonder: can we skillfully make space for difference? Perhaps through collaborative facilitation, I want to activate mini-FM stations that can hold paradoxical experiences of intimacy and becoming together while recognizing differences and distances between us. This too may be a path of a two-way movement. This is an advanced psycho-political state of being – embodying nearness and farness, similarity and difference, a version of Anzaldúa’s path of a two-way movement. I believe mini-FM’s radiophonic and radio station spaces, alongside intentional conversational practices, can activate such poetic and political possibilities.

A related set of questions regards conversation as co-creation, on-air or otherwise, and governance; that is, how a group of people make decisions together and how power circulates between and from them. Here I am interested in what John Durham Peters calls polylogue and the vocal and conversational practices that carry, distribute or block power (Peters 1999). Polylogue could be a project (if collectively discussed and decided!) for the Radio Multe Ensemble, or for learning and educational contexts. I am curious what physical – that is architectural, scenographic or communicative – spaces serve polylogue and distributed governance. And here, too, I wonder how such spaces can embody relationalities that are both near and far, intimate while embodying and recognizing difference.

A third interest emerging from re- radio is, at this point, informational: to learn more about the politics of the FM spectrum. Immersion in this aspect of electromagnetic cosmology involves learning about the science and politics of data storage and encryption, and other ways the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum is being auctioned off and approached as a resource. This becomes especially relevant as more countries, including Switzerland, United Kingdom and Germany, plan to dismantle their AM and FM infrastructures. Another informational inquiry related to the politics of the FM spectrum is what Zita Joyce calls “the radio spectrum as Indigenous space” (Joyce 2020). Joyce refers to the Māori claims that the radio spectrum is included in the “taonga” (treasures) guaranteed to them under the Treaty of Waitangi. The Māori now have rights over a portion of the radio spectrum and have launched the Māori Spectrum Entity.⁴⁴

And finally for now, a concept and practice that draws me in artistically and as an artistic research methodology is speaking nearby, conceived by filmmaker and writer Trinh T. Minh-ha (Minh-ha 1991). Speaking nearby is inspiring as an evocative methodology that also embodies the spirit of mini-FM in particular, literally speaking to, with and from a nearby place. Speaking nearby embodies relational knowledge in which meaning is revealed more than discovered and activates a spatial poetics that can allow for nearness and difference.

I will conclude this Artistic Reflection with Minh-ha’s words about speaking nearby, that evoke the poetry and meaning possible within relationality; resonant radio; on-air conversation as co-creation; voice, orality and aurality; difference and distance; artistic research knowledge that is also non-knowledge; and porous boundaries between making art, learning and living.

43 I read about Tania Bruguera’s school while getting news in spring 2024 that the experimental U.S. college, Goddard College, where I taught for over fifteen years, is closing – its finances too burdened for the school to continue after eighty-six years. The school, which started in 1938, grew out of a commitment to anti-fascism and developed a listening and student-centered pedagogy; it was a transformative college for many students and faculty, including me. Teaching at Goddard helped me grow as a thinker, educator, organizer/activist and artist because of the resonant container we co-created as a community across time. At its best, this kind of resonant collective space is a form of love, providing “room for the soul to grow,” as Ivan Klima writes in Love and Garbage (Klima 1993). Reading Bishop’s examples of artworks that bridge art and learning has been reassuring amidst the news of Goddard and also reminds me that the ways I think about relationality in re- radio come from my lived experiences at Goddard. As of August 2024, a group of Goddard neighbors, alumni and former faculty and administrators have purchased the college campus and plan to develop it along the lines of the school’s values.

44 https://waateanews.com/2022/02/02/maori-spectrum-entity-to-hold-20-percent-of-future-allocation/

Speaking nearby is: 

A speaking that does not objectify,

does not point to an object

as if it is distant

from the speaking subject

or absent from the speaking place. 

A speaking that reflects on itself and can come very close

to a subject without, however, seizing or claiming it. 

A speaking that does not necessarily attempt 

to convert the world into a textual object

but engages in a constant process of interrogation and rethinking. 

A speaking that is constantly in the process 

of becoming, rather than being (Minh-ha 1991, 26).

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Additional sources in re- radio narrow and broad-casts:

Alcalá, Rose, ed. and translator, Spit Temple: The Selected Performances of Cecilia Vicuña. Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Press, 2012.

Dickinson, Emily. Emily Dickinson: A Collection of Poems. Edited by Joan Didion. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022.

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Freud, Sigmund. “The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming.” In On Creativity and the Unconscious: Papers on the Psychology of Art, Literature, Love, Religion by Sigmund Freud, ed. Benjamin Nelson, 44-55. New York: Harper Collins, 1958, 2009.

Gebran, Sara. Quantum Society. Berlin: Errant Bodies. 

Lalla. Naked Song. Translated by Coleman Barks. Maypop, 1992.

Otsuka, Julie. The Buddha in the Attic. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011.

Rinck, Monika. To Refrain from Embracing. Translated by Nicholas Grindell. Providence: Burning Deck, 2011.

Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.

Spahr, Juliana. This Connection of Everyone with Lungs. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. 

Stauffer, Jill. Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. 

Valkeapää, Nils-Aslak. The sun, my father. Translated by Ralph Salisbury, Lars Nordström, Harald Gaski. Vaasa, Finland : DAT O.S., 1997.

Audiography, including works included in the Listening in the Dark radio program

Bull, Hank and Patrick Ready, HP Show: The Land of Science.https://wavefarm.org/radio/archive/works/msh1fd

Calvo,Charo. Qualia.https://wavefarm.org/wf/archive/23a4vf

DeLys, Sherre. 2010. From Scratch (Fidelity)https://wavefarm.org/wf/archive/a1df9x

El-Dabh, Halim. Leiyla and the Poet.
https://archive.org/details/halimeldabhleiylaandthepoet1959

El Haouli, Janete and José Augusto Mannis. Memories of Zarah. https://wavefarm.org/wf/archive/znjv66

Fisher, Leonard. Earth Police.
https://wavefarm.org/ta/archive/works/7dkhh2

Friz, Anna. 2013. Radiotelegraph.
https://wavefarm.org/wf/archive/2m5f5t

Friz, Anna. Absolute Value of Noise, and Glenn Gear. Hymn.
https://absolutevalueofnoise.bandcamp.com/album/somewhere-a-voice-is-calling

Hodell Åke. Spirit of Ecstacy Racing Car Opera.
https://wavefarm.org/ta/archive/works/cw1dpq

Kogawa, Tetsuo. Penser Avec Les Mains.
https://wavefarm.org/wf/archive/dd457v

Maceda, Jose. Ugnayan, for 20 Radio Stations.  https://wavefarm.org/radio/archive/artists/j53mwk

Schwartz, Tony. Music in Marble Halls.
https://wavefarm.org/ta/archive/works/ep7b5w

Westerkamp, Hildegard. Breathing Room.
https://www.hildegardwesterkamp.ca/sound/comp/2/breathing/

Whitehead, Gregory. Pressures of the Unspeakable.
https://wavefarm.org/wf/archive/gjsj1k

Appendix:
PhD Activities and Artworks, Spring 2020-Autumn 2024

Acknowledgements

Marion Werner, Philip Werner; PhD supervisors Brandon LaBelle, Ciara Phillips, Tao Sambolec, Anna Friz and mentor Maia Urstad; midway and slutt committee members Anne-Helen Mydland, Frans Jacobi, Geir Tore Holm, Nicola Gunn, Katrine Hjelde; PhD assessment committee Trond Lossius, Michelle Teran and Ingvold Holm; all SkottegatenFM, Radio Multe and Seijo & her Soul participants, including everyone in the Radio Multe Ensemble; Bergen colleagues and friends Pauliina Pöllänen, Sidsel Christensen, Juliane Zelwies, Kjersti Sundland, Sabine Popp, Marieke Verbiesen, Feronia Wennborg, Chloe Lewis, Siavash Kheirkhah, Winnifred Jelier, Zsofia Surjan and Dániel Péter Bíro; friends far away but close: Ben Stumpf, Abby Shuman, Karlo Berger, Clare Ellis, Laura Wulf, Liz Canner, Tinja Ruusuvuori, Leena Ylä-Lyly, Anna Watson, Alvaro Seiça, Kate Donovan, Ricarda Denzer, Gregory Whitehead and the Independent Community Radio Network (ICRN).

Towards the final stretch, Johanna Sevholt, Peppi Reenkola and Øystein Ask helped Seijo & her Soul come to life. Maiken Larsen Solholmvik designed re- radio’s Research Catalogue exposition. Ira Ferris copy edited the text. During this PhD project, I worked with many institutions and collectives around Bergen: Bergen Architecture School, Bergen Assembly, Bergen Senter for Elektronisk Kunst, Bergen Kringkaster, Bergen Kommune, Bergen Kunsthall, BIT Teatergarasgen, Blokk, Borealis, den uferdige institusjonen, Her og Der, Hordaland Kunstsenter and USF. 

Thank you!