fugitive radio made a presentation and live broadcast at “one century abc”, a week-long program of experimental music, installation and performance organised by Äänipäivät at Titanik Gallery, Turku, 21–26 November. After meeting OOO Radio for their inaugural outside broadcast in Helsinki on the weekend, I wanted to present something that echoed their gesture and also connected some of the radio networks/projects that we potentially overlap. Unfortunately, I was hampered by an uncontrollable running nose and a technical glitch rendered the recording near unlistenable. So below is the script.

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fugitive radio-Out Of Office Radio: artradio2radioart
Out of Office Radio (OOO Radio) is a bicycle-mounted mobile radio station based in Helsinki, initiated by artists James Prevett and Samantha Lippett with bespoke speakers and a fabric designed by Timo Vaittinen and additional support from Iiri Poteri. It was launched this month as part of James’ exhibition, “Together With” at Forum Box art space in Helsinki with a focus on “the creation of curious and experimental sound in public space”. It is available online— indeed we are streaming live on it now—and they plan to make the mobile studio a loanable resource, prioritising “participatory approaches to broadcasting and distributing material that would otherwise not have a place on traditional radio stations.”

Some listeners may know that my ongoing project, fugitive radio, was initially proposed to be a “bicycle-mounted radio shack and mobile recording studio” to the Helsinki based media arts association, Pixelache, for their 2021 festival. So my interest was immediately piqued when I stumbled onto OOO Radio a little over a week ago. I reached out to Sam and James via email to offer a contribution and then last Saturday joined them alongside Iiri for their inaugural outside broadcast: an excursion to this sculpture of Elias Lönnrot.

James maintains a series, “Patsastellaan: Parties for Public Sculpture”, for which the artist invites other artists to collaborate on making a new work together, beginning from an existing public sculpture. Arguably these “parties” celebrate historically commissioned monuments, drawing attention to aspects of the built/designed/landscaped environment that are often overlooked; thus together we recall the histories and the contexts in which these sculptures were erected, to examine their details and encourage speculation or fabulation about their (continued or shifting) significance, symbolism and meaning.

[Audio description of the image]

These two people are passerby, I believe strangers to the artists who were intrigued enough to stop by on a wintery Saturday afternoon – can you see snow in the image?

I like how this person in the left is taking a photograph. I wonder if they put it on Instagram? Because that’s what I did, with the caption:

#outsideofficeradio streaming live with Elias Lönnrot. Public sculpture meets social sculpture as outside broadcast @forumbox

So for this performance/presentation, I would like to unpack this caption and this photographic/Instagramatic impulse, responding in turn to OOO Radio—art-radio-to-radioart—as a live (but not outside) broadcast.

Public sculpture
I grew up in Sydney, Australia and I think it was an artist and friend Deborah Kelly who once quipped to me, that if you really want to forget about a popular or political figure, then one sure way to do it is to turn them into a public sculpture that birds will shit on and that everyone would ignore. So, I’m interested in this prospect of public sculpture being a means of externalising or purging someone from the collective conscience. In some ways memorialising them, but also making their sanctioned legacy—literally the ideas and values that such a monument stands for—available for public scrutiny, critique, perhaps vandalism or even iconoclasm. Think of the toppling of statues of slave owners as part of the Black Lives Matter uprisings.

Social sculpture
“Social sculpture”, a term coined by the conceptual artist Jospeh Beuys to develop an understanding of art that encompasses all of society. According to Beuys: “EVERY HUMAN BEING IS AN ARTIST” with the potential to consciously contribute to a “TOTAL ART WORK OF THE FUTURE SOCIAL ORDER.” An entry on Wikipedia suggests that even a mundane task, such as peeling a potato, would contribute to such a TOTAL ART WORK, if undertaken as a conscious act. It reminds me of other traditions that endorse approaching the rituals of daily life into deliberate, intentional and potentially aesthetic actions—such as certain forms of Buddhism or (secular) mindfulness techniques that compel one to be present, attentive and calm.

Outside broadcast
fugitive radio was initiated in 2020 with the aforementioned Pixelache during the first waves of the COVID pandemic. During this time it seemed that everyone was making a podcast, but who was listening? So I began to wonder what it was we were doing. I came to think of these radio experiments as a kind of social phenomena with technology, emphasising the social production that accompanied the production of (experimental/amateur/art) radio.

The Japanese philosopher and performer, Tetsuo Kogawa, coined the term “radioart” (one word), to distinguish the “free play of frequencies” from art on the radio. It’s a notion that fugitive radio is aligned with, alongside open culture movements that emphasise the use and development of free/libre and open source tools and practices of sharing (digital commoning). As such, fugitive radio collaborates with like-minded groups and organisations including: {openradio}, lumbung radio/Station of Commons and πNode on which we are currently broadcasting.

I often describe fugitive radio as “responding to the uptake of radio in contemporary art by producing live, collectively-realised broadcast events.” Sometimes I say it as a vehicle for developing experimental modes of “performance/participatory radio.” During Pixelache Helsinki’s 2021 festival at Oodi Library, fugitive radio produced a regular hour-long outside broadcast over eight consecutive days, exploring formats that included: interviews, conversations and vox pops; Hum Klub; Karaoke Theory; environmental percussion (with artist Suva Das) alongside (augmented) soundscapes and of course glitches and occasional dead air.

Since then fugitive radio has gone on to produce events such as KARA-O-KLINIK, a karaoke therapy clinic (HIAP Suomenlinna, 2022), conceived as a kind of awkward durational sit-com; and NightShift, a live and improvised overnight broadcast and publishing performance/happening at the independent art book shop, Limestone Books, Maastricht and organised in collaboration with London-based artist/publisher Rose Nordin.

Over the last year I found myself emphasising that while fugitive radio has found a niche in contemporary art, it is not a visual arts project.

Radio communities
I think of this presentation of echoing OOO Radio’s inaugural outside broadcast; speaking to their social sculpture in the same way they are speaking to this monument of ….?

I’ve become intrigued by how the notion of “radio” or “broadcasting” frames a discussion. It seems that as soon as you put a microphone in front of a person they begin to perform. Or perhaps people simply perform to the situation. How much of this technology is necessary, especially if no-one is listening? Can we simply “frame” a conversation discursively and call it “radio”? Does anybody need to be listening? “If a radio broadcasts in a forest…” is something Sophea Lerner, one of the co-founders of the independent radio platform { openradio }, once said to me.

Nevertheless, technology is indeed one of fugitive radio’s concerns, emphasising the use of free/libre and open source tools and artist-developed platforms and software. I often describe my interest is in performing these infrastructures. And I would suggest that there is something similar going on in this pictures as James, Sam and Iirie perform—or perform to—the built environment. In doing so they bring others into the artwork understood as expanded sculpture, social practice or indeed social sculpture—as participants, interlocutors or onlookers, drawing attention to the situation by simply contributing their gaze.

Arguably, fugitive radio’s real interest is not so much about community radio, but rather “radio communities”. That is, those who use, develop and maintain alternative networked communication media technologies. I often claim that such radio communities suggest a counter-culture to the “pics-or-it-didn’t-happen” behaviour induced by popular social media platforms, such as Instagram. This might not be a revolutionary “FUTURE SOCIAL ORDER”, but it may nevertheless be emancipatory as people grasp the tools of production, communication and distribution and most importantly co-learn, share and socialise as “radio friends” or comrades.