Abstract:

Heidi Grundmann is a curator, producer and author living in Vienna. She is perhaps best known for her pioneering role in organizing large-scale telematic and network art projects since the late 1970s, and as the founder and executive producer of Kunstradio-Radiokunst, a weekly radio art programme and an online venue for radio experimentation aired on Austrias national radio. She is currently investigating ways to document the ephemeral radio projects of the 1990s, while initiating conversation on the hybrid future of radio. This interview begins with some background on the artistic milieu of telematic and network projects that Grundmann has worked on, and discusses her projects such as Reinventing Radio that she is currently pursuing.

Interview with Heidi Grundmann by Anna Friz

Heidi Grundmann makes connections. She is an extremely resourceful producer and organizer extraordinaire, with an ear for networks and a passion for radio. She has been a key organizer for numerous telematic art projects and curator of international symposia and exhibitions related to art practice in electronic media, particularly transmission media such as radio, television and Internet. She lectures and writes on radio, art, and new media. Though she does not consider herself an artist, the kinds of telematic and large-scale network projects that Grundmann has initiated continually question the fixed notions of artist, curator, and author. She has devised ways to build bridges between public institutions and underground artistic circles serving as much as an infiltrator as a producer. She is a catalyst who makes vital and creative meetings possible between individuals and collectives around the world, and has consistently provided artists with access to the technical resources needed for production and diffusion.
A brief description follows of some of the telematic and network projects and the artistic milieu in which Grundmann has been involved.

Telematic Art

As radio artist and theorist Gregory Whitehead has aptly noted: “Successive generations of technology do not so much displace as digest each other.” ¹ Since the early avant-garde, artists have continued to experiment in electronic space using telecommunications technology to expand the parameters of art and communication. Network art is one of participation. It involves multiple people, artists and non-artists alike, and its results consist not in the production of objects or images (even if they often get passed around during the exchange) but rather in the process of communication itself.

Artists working with telematics such as ham, pirate and community radio, telephony, telefacsimile, teleconferencing and slow-scan video in the 1970s and ‘80s were interested in building an ephemeral, temporal sculpture which couldnt be displayed in a gallery or museum because there was no actual art object produced; authorship was collective, and transmissions were sent and received between points in a network, deliberately avoiding one single site of artistic creation. Often the artists themselves had no idea of the scope or size of the piece. This kind of network art began to realize the aspirations of early avant-garde artists such as Bertolt Brecht who conceived of radio as a means of diffusion and radiation, a many-to-many format unlike the classic one-to-many radio model. These network-based artworks represented a search for human meaning in electronic space, for “if the object is removed completely, then what is left are relationships between participants.” ²

Networked group performances such as Die Welt in 24 Stunden , (curated for Ars Electronica 1982) connected artists in 16 cities on three continents for 24 hours via telephone lines, building a chain of transmissions that transcended geographical timezones and distances. Similarly, telematic collaborations between artists involved with BLIX in Vienna and the Western Front Society in Vancouver, Canada (1979-1983), gave birth to Wiencouver—-an imaginary city that exists in electronic space when artists correspond via telephone lines³

Kunstradio and net.radio

In 1987 Grundmann established the radio program Kunstradio-Radiokunst, a unique on-air and online gallery for radio and transmission arts which broadcasts weekly on 1, Austria’s national radio cultural channel (ORF). Since 1995 the_Kunstradio_ website has allowed the programme to extend far beyond the 55 minutes allotted by the ORF. Online presence has enabled Kunstradio to stream and archive its weekly shows, curate live performances at site-specific venues, co-ordinate and serve as a hub for international network projects and extend information on each programme and project, while also publishing manifestos and texts on media art. Over the years Kunstradio has served as a beacon to radio experimentation and innovation among public and independent radio producers and artists. From its inception, international artists—particularly those from Eastern Europe—have been invited to create new works for Kunstradio, leading to memorable collaborations with artists such as Gordan Paunovic and Radio B92 of Belgrade, Japans micro-radio guru Tetsuo Kogawa, and Austrian artist Elisabeth Schimana and her work in Russia’s Theremin Institute.

Through Kunstradio, Wiencouver was revisited in 1999 by a new generation of artists in Vancouver and Vienna using online streaming software or net.radio. The Western Front Society and CiTR campus/community radio took part on the Vancouver side. Wiencouver is a temporary electronic community, and such work requires a more plastic presentation venue than a gallery or a radio art program that is restricted by standardized time slots. These exchanges between Vancouver and Vienna have broadened to include artists in other cities, either ex-pat Vancouverites or Viennese, or artists implicated in the larger networks of friendship and creative endeavour. Though professing to be a mere point in the network, Kunstradio inevitably serves as a hub where artists connect and projects happen.

The development of net.radio further destabilized what we paradigmatically think of as radio. Despite growing commercial application of the technology, net.radio can also function as an autonomous sound streaming medium not limited to audio, and can mediate live, unrepeatable events as well as maintain downloadable archives of sound. Net.radio networks enable sound sculptures that are impermanent, extra-territorial and potentially massive. Building on telematic art, net.radio allows for huge networks linking digital and analogue, wired and wireless technologies—art without a single author or point of origin, embracing the creative commons, where content is in flux, and where the distinct categories of artist/producer and audience blur as all participants become points in the network.

An early joint radio and net.radio project was ORF Kunstradio’s Horizontal Radio in June 1995. ⁴ In a sprawling broadcast event that linked radio and internet to create a platform of transmission exchange, Horizontal Radio was a 24 hour collaboration between more than 200 artists in 24 cities world-wide on 14 national public radio networks, 24 private radio channels, pirate and independent radios, VHF, short-wave, and online in RealAudio. Grundmann says of the project:

The basic intention was to allow the unfolding of a media structure as heterogeneous as possible . . . Horizontal Radio functioned as an experimental field of tension generated by the highly differing characteristics of transmission and communication of the classical isosynchronous properties of radio and the asynchronous context and download-related properties of digital data networks. ⁵

The result was a constantly shifting social sound sculpture with an unknown tally of participants both wired and wireless. Kunstradio initiated many subsequent collaborative network projects including Rivers and Bridges (1996), Recycling the Future (1997), Sound Drifting (1999), and Radiotopia (2002), as well as annual Arts Birthday festivities (1998-2005).

A recurring theme for artists working with radio or any transmission medium is that of access to technology and airwaves. Neither is a given. In 1984, pioneer telecommunications artist Robert Adrian X noted that for telematic art collaborations to be possible internationally (not just in the West), “on the basis of cost and availability only two telecommunications media can be seriously considered—telephone and amateur radio.” ⁶ As an unregulated, unlicensed broadcasting media, net.radio is a viable alternative to traditional radio in countries with strict licensing laws that effectively prevent artists from affording to or qualifying to start up their own station, but could also be expensive in terms of bandwidth and system administration. It is no surprise, then, that the current crop of radio makers are utilizing both FM and net.radio, and often create content and run operations on open source Linux systems using free or self-developed software.

Reinventing Radio

Heidi Grundmann is currently part of a loose group of independent radio makers and media artist/activists seeking to expand the cultural definitions of radio. She is also developing methods to document ephemeral radio art and network projects of the 1990s. In 2004, at the Garage Festival in Stralsund and at Ars Electronica (Linz), Kunstradio began an ongoing project entitled Reinventing Radio. The participating groups included independent radio makers such as Reboot FM (Berlin) and r a d i o q u a l i a (New Zealand). The resulting conversations and networked performances consider radio on a continuum with other transmission and telematic media, and explore new hybrid possibilities for radio.

Anna Friz: What drew you to work in radio? What is it about radio now that continues to fascinate you?

Heidi Grundmann: I guess I must have been fascinated by radio quite early in my life, as I remember chancing a first test as a potential radio-announcer and being turned down because my voice sounded too young. Eventually I did become a radio-announcer, first on the Austrian National Radio (ORF) or rather one of its regional studios and then at the German Service of the BBC in London. It was there that I learnt to produce my own programs (although strictly in the cultural field; politics and news were reserved for men), and very soon I started to do reports for the culture department of the ORF from London. As a result, I was eventually asked to come to Vienna to work as a radio-journalist specialised in culture. In the mid-70s I had the chance to found a regular program on contemporary international visual arts on the culture channel of ORF. This involved a lot of travelling and I met many interesting artists with exciting ideas both in Austria and internationally. Some of them were involved in working with new technologies, among them [there were] quite a few who used sound as their sculptural material or had discovered radio as a sculptural space – wherever this space was accessible to them. These artists also tended to put their pieces on cassettes and send them around the world using the postal system to exchange their work with other artists. Of course the cassettes often showed up on local independent radio-programs somewhere on the other side of the world, being featured in radio-art shows or used as material for live mixes. I suppose you could say that this was the prehistoric version of file sharing on the Internet. More and more of these cassettes also landed on my desk and so I opened part of my program on visual arts to international examples of an Art to Listen to.

So one could say that first it was some unidentified interest in radio that attracted me, then it was the interest in radio as a very fast and versatile journalistic medium, and, ultimately, it was the revelation that many artists were actually dealing with radio as the subject, content and context of their work.

To come to the second part of your question: what continues to fascinate me is the fact that radio is still the most ubiquitous and accessible medium in the world, always adapting itself to the changing mediascape instead of – as it had been predicted many times – dying off. At the same time, radio technologies have become the main basis of communication between people, between people and machines and between machines and machines. It is precisely these changes and adaptations of the broadcast medium, as well as the importance of radio-technologies, that has captured the attention of artists since the beginning of the 20th century.

AF: Considering that radio broadcasting is largely dominated by corporate or state agendas, and considering that media artists are increasingly turning to new telecommunications systems such as locative media, is the good old radio still a viable or tactical space for artistic intervention?

Heidi Grundmann: Broadcasting is, of course, suffering from a long history of state-regulation and at times censorship. As well there is the very strong influence of commercial interests which are increasingly felt even in the few places where the notion of a public radio has prevailed for decades and until quite recently (like in Austria) under laws which not only prohibited commercial stations to go on air but, unfortunately, also independent local stations. And exactly at a time when the so-called cultural mission of public national radio is being undermined, radio broadcasting has become very much a tactical space for cultural producers, among them, sometimes as their spearheads, artists. One could even say that the degree to which artists manage to find access to broadcast radio is an indicator for the relative soundness of the broadcasting system of any society, at least in the First World, where good old radio also has a very nostalgic side to it (to which artists are far from immune). In other areas around the globe, broadcast radio still plays a very vital role, because of its comparatively cheap accessibility.

AF: What is expanded radio?

Heidi Grundmann: This is a very tentative term (in a certain, more or less associative/poetic analogy to identify Gene Youngbloods Expanded Cinema) recently applied to exemplary artists activities/projects which over the years went way beyond the broadcast paradigm, just as expanded cinema exploded the screen into all kinds of spaces and other media. In the case of radio, this expanding leads into different communication paradigms, redefining/blurring the relationship of producer/recipient, of the work of art as a finished product, etc. It refers to artists who have been working in the networks of international ham radio and their satellites, hooked up to the networks of international radio-telescopes, of weather satellites, systems monitoring tectonic movements of the earth, to the communication systems of airplanes and even space-capsules or just in setting up their own transceivers. Artists are now into GPS, wireless technologies, and cell-phones. And very exciting new types of projects are developed in these spaces: projects which are not just set up for the fun of it – something which is very legitimate – but also reflect the impact of digitalization and communication technologies on our culture, on societies, and on art and artists.

AF: In the past years there have been many initiatives by diverse artist and media activist groups to establish independent radio stations, such as Reboot FM in Berlin, radiostadt 1 in Dresden, and niradio in Helsinki. How different are they from the pirate radio stations of the last decades like Radio 100 or Radio Patapoe in Amsterdam?

Heidi Grundmann: Broadcasting in the Netherlands has been and still represents a unique model of broadcasting within the mediascape of Europe, not only within public broadcasting but also as far as its very rich and internationally inspiring activist and pirate radio (and TV) movements are concerned. Dutch media history is certainly very different from the complex German one within which Reboot FM (and others) are struggling for local frequencies. Central European broadcasting laws have been and remain very different from those in Britain or Italy for instance. Austria has been for decades an especially restrictive model where the monopoly of national public broadcasting prevailed longer than in any other Western or Eastern European situation. There is still no campus radio in Austria for example, so it is very difficult to compare histories of local independent, alternative radio, pirate radio, free radio, autonomous radio, etc. in different European contexts, let alone world-wide. (Canadas situation with its long history of campus/community radio is a unique example in itself, and one, which developed a rich history of radio-art).

One common denominator may be that over many years independent activist radio initiatives have had to deal with strong public sectors, some of them veritable state-radios (Eastern Europe), others arms-length licensing fee-models (Western Europe). Today, in the times of [Italys] Berlusconi (arguably the worst example in Europe), traditional European Public broadcasting and its legal obligation to provide minority and cultural programming is being undermined by a variety of economical, commercial and political forces. In this situation the development of a third sector becomes increasingly important also for the media-ecologies of the first world.

Artists and activists interested in developing this third sector (and adjoining alternative, indie, and pirate-radio) increasingly co-ordinate their strategies, and try to achieve visibility in political struggles on local and international levels, as well as with their demands for licenses and financing etc. They also collaborate in the development and application of innovative trans-local methods of decentralized programming, of networked production, the development and exchange of content, software, media-literacy etc.

It goes without saying that free and open source software plays quite a big role in all this. Many artists who work with radio in its many forms are at least knowledgeable about free and open source software and its implications, and tend to support, use and disseminate it. Some of them also create such software. Of course there is a long tradition for such activities and attitudes especially in radio-art and telecommunications art in general. Part of the story of this kind of art and its history are issues such as access, empowerment, exchange, knowledge sharing, the use or misuse of existing technologies, the construction of new ones, and a critical, innovative, subversive positioning of ones own activity in social, political technological contexts outside of a closed art system.

AF: I want to ask you about the dialogues that have begun under the rubric of Re-inventing Radio, initiated by Kunstradio, at Garage Festival in Stralsund, Germany and at Ars Electronica in 2004. How are artists dealing with issues of development and access to technological tools for radio making, exchange and diffusion, particularly for people outside of the wealthy western countries?

Heidi Grundmann: Re-inventing Radio is the title of an ongoing project, which will hopefully see many more manifestations in the future. This title is referring to the historical process within radio art, which I mentioned earlier, showing that generations of artists have worked on recovering radio as an apparatus of communication accessible to all. Simultaneously, [artists] found themselves again and again confronted with the dystopia of political and economical forces, which succeeded in turning every new technology of communication into an apparatus of distribution or of control and surveillance.

Up until now Re-Inventing Radio has not dealt with issues of the digital and other divides you mention. At the garage Festival 2005 in Stralsund it rather kept to the immediate practice of the participants of an intensive two-day meeting and focussed on some of the pressing issues of independent cultural radio in Europe, to which I have pointed before. The discussion of specific issues of radio-art was unanimously postponed to a later date. As it turns out, the meeting at garage Festival 2005 was one of the starting points for an initiative of different types of European so-called art radios, i.e. independent artist/activist on-air and on-line culture channels. A group took shape to collaboratively pursue these aims at the Transmediale 2005 and is now active in formulating a platform for intensified exchange of theory and practice on the art of making radio and radio-art proper.

Re-Inventing Radio at Ars Electronica 2005, aside from a (very) few radio-art projects and a small symposium, also contained a networked live Long NIght of Radio Art with its intensive hub in the concert hall of the Broadcasting House in Vienna. Here artists, who for many years had concentrated on challenging mainstream production strategies, were suddenly confronted with a new broadcasting format. The cultural channel of the Austrian Radio (ORF) is one of the first to broadcast its whole program on 5.1 (6-channel transmission) parallel to the usual stereo format.

The Long Night of Radio Art became not only the first live 5.1 broadcast of the Austrian National Radio, but probably also the worlds first in which artists (together with very eager sound-engineers) used this format for a new kind of on-air representation of an internationally networked on-air on-line on-site project. The simultaneous transmission of 6 channels meant that selected remote locations could be broadcast live each on their own channel.

AF: What is the next step for Kunstradio? Is Kunstradio secure within the structure of the ORF, or is it also vulnerable to the cuts in funding to cultural programming that have affected other experimental radio programmes that exist within state radio?

Heidi Grundmann: It is not really up to me to answer this questions. I am now more or less just an observer of how my successor as a producer of KUNSTRADIO, Elisabeth Zimmermann, is very successfully navigating KUNSTRADIO through the budget-cuts, populist pressures and other negative tendencies public radios (and especially their culture channels) are experiencing.

For now, it seems that Kunstradio is secure and recognized inside the structure of the ORF, probably also due to the alliances artists have formed with sound-engineers, administrative staff etc., some of whom found collaboration with artists very exciting and illuminating. Through these unusual and innovative collaborations artists were able to influence not so much experimental radio programmes (are there any?), but the daily fabric of radio-production, and the critical curiosity of experts inside the institution for the alternative views on main-stream (read: commercial) technologies. I guess one could also claim that Kunstradio, with its unique collaboration with international artists and at the same time its very active participation in the Ars Acustica group of international radio-art producers inside the EBU (European Broadcasting Union of Public Radios), has also succeeded in influencing the attitudes of the members of this group, and to inspire them to participate in projects like the legendary Horizontal Radio (1995) or the Arts Birthday celebrations (2005).

Unfortunately, Radio-Canada Montreal has dropped out of the Ars Acustica Group. On the other hand, it is due to the long collaboration of Canadian artist-run spaces and campus/community radios with Kunstradio that networked radio-art projects have become an important interface between radio-art production in the public national radio, independent radio, and with independent art production in general.

AF: What are some of the issues at stake in documenting and representing large, dispersed telecommunications projects such as Arts Birthday or Horizontal Radio?

Heidi Grundmann: Mostly, these issues circle around the impossibility of documenting such networked projects in any traditional way, even the ones recently developed for media-art and media-art installations. To begin with, dispersed telecommunication projects represent a very basic challenge as far as the collecting of documentary material from all the nodes is concerned. Even if there are hours and hours of audio- and videotape, pages of descriptions, etc. collected, how can they be evaluated in any meaningful way? Such projects are simply impossible to repeat and to preserve; even simulations of obsolete technology would not help to recreate the network and the processes of exchange, production and distribution within it. It is not possible to experience them in their simultaneous entirety even while they unfold because they can only be experienced in versions, even by the participating artist themselves. Documentation of network projects mostly resides in the private memories of all those who experienced them – from those who were their initiators to those who just happened to come upon them by chance at one network node or another.

But how do we get hold of these memories of fugitive processes and unique constellations and make art-historical sense of them? Some of these projects marked very important changes not only in our perception/definition of the work-of-art and the role of artists and all the other participants in network projects, but also in the much more general changes of production/distribution and even of living in a digitized, networked society. Having been an eyewitness to some of these projects myself, it is my conviction that in the act of initiating and realizing them, artists often detected some of the implications of the changes from an industrial society to a post-industrial society. It could also be said that artists not only detected these changes but also often found images for them while many experts inside the broadcasting institutions – and even media-theoreticians – were still trapped in conflicting paradigms.

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Notes
1. Whitehead, Gregory. “Holes in the Head: Theatre Operations for the Body in Pieces.” Radio Rethink: Art, Sound and Transmission. Augaitis, Daina and Dan Lander, eds. (Banff: Walter Philips Gallery, 1994). pp. 150.
2. Eric Gidney, “The Artist’s Use of Telecommunications,” in Art + Telecommunication. Heidi Grundmann, ed. (Vancouver: Western Front, 1984), 16.
3. Documentation can be found in the Kunstradio archives (http://kunstradio.at) and the Western Front archives (www.front.bc.ca).
4. A co-production between Transit, ORF Kunstradio, Ars Electronica 95 and the EBU (European Broadcasting Union) that originated with ORF Kunstradio. Documentation: http://thing.at/orfkunstradio/HORRAD/horrad.htm
5. Ibid.
6. Robert Adrian X, “Communicating,” in Art + Telecommunication, 80.