Art and Time | Media

WS 25 – 26 AIRING DIFFERENCES II

Airing Differences | Breaking Silences | Listening with Insomnia

The project REGARDING PAIN | Radio RTPO emerged from students of our studio as a contribution to the Academy of Fine Arts’ annual Rundgang in January 2025. Students transformed the teaching pavilion on Semperdepot’s first floor into a temporary radio station, producing and broadcasting a six-hour live show throughout the building and beyond. Responding to our term‘s theme ‘On Violence,’ this project used Susan Sontag’s seminal text “Regarding the Pain of Others” as a framework to examine how media mediates our perception of others’ suffering. This exploration aimed to create a counterpoint to our image-saturated culture by prioritizing sonic experience over visual consumption.

Building on this foundation, our upcoming term will delve into both historical and contemporary radio cultures, exploring the tensions and connections between analog and digital forms, between the past and present of radio. In an era dominated by visual media, we deliberately shift our focus—closing our eyes while perking up our ears. This reorientation invites us to engage with the complex dimensions of sonic experience: we shift our attention to speaking and listening, to stuttering and sensing, to recordings and erasures, to sonic evidences, to silences, interruptions and continuities, and we will examine the physical and metaphorical aspects of transmissions—waves, signals, patterns, and disruptions. This exploration connects to radio’s rich cultural history while acknowledging its continued relevance in our digital landscape.

Radio cultures have historically served as vital channels for artistic experimentation, political resistance, and (feminist) community building. From the early avant-garde radio plays of the 1920s to pirate radio stations challenging state control, from community radio initiatives amplifying marginalized voices to contemporary podcasting revolutionizing media distribution, radio has consistently evolved while maintaining its intimate connection to the human voice and ear. By engaging with radio as both medium and metaphor, we will question how sonic transmissions shape our understanding of distance and proximity, presence and absence, isolation and connection—themes that resonate deeply in this increasingly virtual world.

In the winter semester 2025, we are collaborating with the local station Radio ORANGE 94.0, Vienna’s largest independent radio station in german speaking countries. An introduction will cover the origins and political significance of Radio ORANGE: from the activism and spirit of Vienna’s pirate radio scene, which led to the fall of the public broadcasting monopoly following a 1993 European Court of Justice ruling, to the founding of the “Association for the Promotion and Support of Free Local Non-Commercial Radio Projects” and the legal realization of a Free Radio for the city of Vienna as a counterbalance to public and private commercial media. Together, we will organize a workshop focusing on content-related and technical aspects of radio production, with the goal of providing students with the knowledge and skills needed to develop their own radio contributions. Within the framework of this cooperation, student contributions created during the ongoing semester project will receive airtime on ORANGE 94.0. Furthermore, a live radio station is planned for the Academy Tour 2026, which will broadcast live from the Semperdepot on ORANGE 94.0.

READING LIST

  • The Routledge Companion to Radio and Podcast Studies – Edited By Mia Lindgren, Jason Loviglio
  • Radio’s New Wave. Global Sound in the Digital Era – Edited By Jason Loviglio, Michele Hilmes
  • Women and Radio Airing Differences – Edited By Caroline Mitchell
  • Free Radio. The Electronic Civil Disobedience – By Lawrence Soley
  • Radio Activism: Breaking the Silence and Empowering Women – Edited By Annette Rimmer

ESSAYS

  • [Javnost – The Public 1998-jan vol. 5 iss. 2] Mitchell, Caroline – Women’s (Community) Radio as a Feminist Public Sphere (1998)
  • [Journal of Radio Studies 2000-nov vol. 7 iss. 2] Mitchell, Caroline A. – _Short-Term Bursts of Inspiration__ The Development of British Women’s Alternative Radio (2000)
  • Bertolt Brecht, Radio as a Means of Communication  
  • Bertolt Brecht, Der Rundfunk als Kommunikationsapparat. Rede über die Funktion des Rundfunks.
  • Annabelle Lacroix, Listening with Insomnia
  • Kate Lacey, Listening in the Digital Age, in: Radio’s New Wave. Global Sound in the Digital Era
  • The Origins of Free Radio (Chapter 2) + Pirate Radio: The Early Rebellion (Chapter 5), both in: Free Radio. The Electronic Civic Disobedience
  • Christine Ehrick, Ethereal Gender: Thoughts on the History of Radio and Women’s voices, in: The Routledge Companion to Radio and Podcast Studies
  • Josh Shepperd, Understanding radio archives: coalitional historiography and sound memory work, in: The Routledge Companion to Radio and Podcast Studies
  • Richard Berry, What is a podcast? Mapping the technical, cultural, and sonic boundaries between
    radio and podcasting, in: The Routledge Companion to Radio and Podcast Studies
  • Dario Llinares, ‘Podcast studies’ and its techno- social discourses, in: The Routledge Companion to Radio and Podcast Studies
  • Bell Hooks, Marginality as Site of Resistance
  • Angela Davis, Blame it on the Blues. Bessie Smith, Gertrude “Ma” Rainey and the Politics of Blues Protest

FILMS + INSTALLATIONS

  • Born in Flames – Lizzie Borden 1983, 80 min. 
  • Live From Palestine – Rashid Masharawi 2001, 57 min.
  • Working Slowly (Lavorare con lentezza) – Gudio Chiesa, 2004
  • Orient(N)ations – Fareed Armaly, 2004 
  • Orphée 1990 – Fareed Armaly (1990 – 2025)
  • No False Echoes – Wendelien van Oldenborgh 2008, 30 min.
  • La maison de la radio – Nicolas Philibert, 2013, 103 min. 
  • Delia Derbyshire – The Myths and the Legendary Tapes, Caroline Catz 2021, 90 min. 
  • Sculptress of Sound – The Lost Works of Delia Derbyshire, BBC Channel 4 Documentary, 2018, 15
  • Haven – James Newitt 2023, 35 min.  min.

AUDIO