Not at Home: The Uncanny Experiences of Radio Home Run

Heather Contant

In this paper, I attempt to better understand the Japanese media artist Tetsuo Kogawa’s concept of radioart by examining the relationship of this concept to movement. To do this, I focus on the Japanese term ika, which can be used to describe the uncanny feeling that results from aesthetic strategies, such as Viktor Shklovsky’s artistic techniques of defamiliarization or Bertolt Brecht’s alienating tactics of Verfremdungseffekt (V-Effekt). Discussions of ika not only circulated through and around the intellectual and artistic communities that Kogawa participated in during the 1970s and 1980s, they also influenced the practices of the very low-powered FM radio stations, Radio Polybucket and Radio Home Run, established by Kogawa’s students in the early 1980s. By discussing the emphasis of ika and physical movement in Radio Polybucket’s and Radio Home Run’s practices, I begin to trace a central element in Kogawa’s concept of radioart, which I call a kinetic interaction with the material conditions of radio. Through this kinetic interaction, Kogawa makes the material aspects of radio phenomena—its technology, its electromagnetic waves, and its sonic content—perceptible in a new way and thereby reveals previously hidden possibilities.

Smaller Areas and More Movements

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