Street Radio: Self-Administrated Hybrid Polymorphous Platforms
A lack of fundamentally alternative models that societies could be built upon represents an end to debates over new social orders, with an acceptance of liberal democracy based on capitalist ideology. The philosophers Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard, emerging from the political milieu of the last attempt for revolution – Situationalist International – only managed to provide a manual for survival in a world of constant movement. However, is it possible to untangle the Gordian knot of individuals’ desires, interacting with or against, the various forces of contemporary society – and moreover, the mechanisms of power inherent in these roles – in order to understand and generate more autonomy for the individual, while maintaining a cohesive society? What are the relationships between individuals in an ever increasingly fragmented, but globally connected society?The humanities have traditionally been distinguished from the empirical nature of the social sciences through their critically analytic speculation of what the human condition is. Thus humanity scholars have traditionally been within a nexus of difference; of lived experience that an artist continually invents and reinvents through the manipulation of artistic materials. However, a major shift occurred during the Renaissance when the humanities began to be regarded as subjects to be studied and conserved rather than practised. And it was not until poststructuralism classically problematised this view that any hope of sensual subjectivity returning to art appeared. Nevertheless, many institutions of the 20th century have not been able to relinquish the impetus built from this paradigm shift and in reaction have solidified this tradition in neo-Kantian thought: resulting in academic idealist art that is often dry, detached, and encapsulated in the Modernist movements role in contemporary ‘research’ instead of being deconstructed as experience and expression. In tackling these issues this project attempts to both undermine the hegemony and unjustified mechanisms of constraint of capitalism and state that are enforced upon citizens, while also creating a new public domain platform to articulate from. However, this is not an attempt to overthrow traditional institutions but to refocus the field of struggle on everyday tangible practices; to reform them through promoting liberty.
This project endeavours to build from the implications of the burgeoning amateur culture and individual subjectivity of postmodern art; exemplified within this very University in such developments as the initiation of the Widening Participation programme by Prof. Richard Middleton during the late 1990s, and more recently, the creation of an online music forum (The Hub) by Dr. William Edmondes as an alternative university platform. It is the dramatic changes witnessed in the modes of production, consumption, and dissemination of music since the turn of the millennium that has led to many new philosophical reinterpretations of ideology in order to find new strategies and impetus for agency to challenge power. One of the ideas that has been widely debated is the impossible concept of autonomy as an almost existential battle to escape the constraints of ideology as the negative social relationships imposed by the capitalisation of culture; to the point of endorsing laissez faire capitalism as an answer itself. Nevertheless, contemporary postmodern/post-Marxist views, such as those of Gilles Deleuze, are often not interpreted for the freedom they allow individuals to creatively express and engage with the world and the people in it, as a constructive force. That is, autonomy as an active engagement and assertion of a relative subjective interpretation to manifest a representative cohesive whole of society, and the material relationships between it and everything else; the freedom for individuals to independently help and develop society together. The challenge is to find ways liberty and collective representations of individual expressions can coexist and interact coherently and to build structures to make malleable traditional institutions via a bombardment of specific targets with reasonable requests and not simply attacking generalised power itself. It is these less fundamental strategies – strategies that focus on social engagement – that this project begins to tackle.
By investigating potential uses of the soon to be redundant FM radio technology, this project will explore how the removal of limitations imposed on a resource, often seen as the end of a struggle, can become the beginning of a new strategy. Recently Armin Medosch and the London based technology development group Hive Networks led by artist-engineer Alexei Blinov created what they are calling ‘street radio’: a non-interactive format of broadcasting to a localised area via wireless technology and FM micro-radio transmitters. With the emergence of digital technology, the government are allowing more experimental approaches to the use of the FM bandwidth and micro-radio pioneers such as Tetsuo Kogawa are providing an invaluable framework for young artists to build from. However, where the use of this technology becomes really interesting from the perspective of social mobility is the way artists such as Juan Esteban Rios are using old and new technology alongside each other to bridge the digital divide. Moreover, when this strategy combines geographical specificity of transmissions with the internet and the emergence of the networked information society, can the strengths of digital technology, global connectivity, unlimited resources, and so forth, result in hybrid polymorphous platforms of expression that could eventually build to act as large-scale platforms to make representative traditional institutions? Can these platforms also provide localised social mobility and empowerment for individuals to be more active in developing our society towards a better condition? Can the broadening of cultural education/participation to independent public platforms help encompass diverse backgrounds while maximising participation in ways that traditionally theoretically informed, research-led pedagogic practice, cannot directly tackle within the traditional institutional framework? What are the implications of this kind of pluralistic learning; where engagement is formed on critical independence of mind to collaborate and help each other? What is the potential of street radio as a self-administered hybrid polymorphous platform?
