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 second 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.