"The Art of Radia" Pino Masnata's Unpublished Gloss to the Futurist Radio Manifesto Introduction

Pino Masnata, co-author of the 1933 Futurist Radio Manifesto with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, wrote a second work, "Il Nome Radia," to explain the first.¹ Masnata's gloss securely places the Radio Manifesto within the context of "new" physics—what Kenneth Ford calls "the physics of the very small" and "the physics of the very fast."² The intent, however, is nothing less than to conquer the infinite cosmos with the acoustic art of radio and the exploitation of the electromagnetic spectrum by Futurism's "new man."

Introduction

From 1925 to 1930, the directors of the new Italian Radio service, a triumvirate of top engineers from Fiat, Western Electric and Radiofono (the Marconi Co. Italian subsidiary), devoted a small number of program hours to experimental content focused chiefly on international developments in radio technology and information sharing, education, and music (including electronic music). Futurist radio broadcast was of a different stripe, and rarer still. The Fascist Party (PNF) in 1930 sought to marginalize these interests as so much "dilettantism."³ Then, in May 1933, the Italian visit of Joseph Goebbels to align Italian cultural policy with the centralization doctrine of his Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda had a chilling effect on all apolitical radio experimentation. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, founder of Futurism and a member of the Royal Academy, was on a list of approved speakers vetted by the PNF, though his radio appearances were also limited.

Against this background, Marinetti and Masnata published Manifesto futurista della radio in the Torino Gazzetta del Popolo on September 22, 1933, proposing a completely new radio sensibility resonant with a Futurist poetic on the one hand, and the latest quantum theories of matter and energy on the other. The Radio Manifesto appeared late in the chronology of Futurist manifestos; it was neither the first theoretical discussion of radio in Europe, nor in Italy. Before most countries had broadcast stations, Russian Futurist Velimir Khlebnikov predicted that radio waves would transport color, image, taste and odors in addition to sound. A decade later, Enzo Ferrieri, Artistic Director of Italian Radio, published Italy's first radio manifesto, Radio as a Creative Force, which introduced the seminal idea that the source of radio's true, paradoxical power derives from silence.⁴ Marinetti and Masnata built upon both of these concepts in the quest to conquer time and space, their given mandate from the Second Futurist Congress (Milan, 1933). Futurist focus on the machine turned to the science behind the machine: wave motion and the behavior of sub-atomic particles. The Futurist agenda for the "new man," whose renewed spirit would manifest as an extension of Futurist willpower and the evolution of the senses, moved to a new stage, the electromagnetic spectrum.

The Manifesto denigrates a radio culture spawned by both producer and public; it denounces radio's adherence to realism and dismisses the reliance on studio production and light musical entertainment. Its twenty bullet points prescribe an entirely new radio art, "la radia"—neither cinema nor theater, a radio art independent of government control while fiercely loyal to the Fascist cause. On the one hand, we must shed our expectations of recovering a Futurist radio tied to the broadcast station; on the other, we can only speculate as to what is intended when the Manifesto hints at the dissolution of boundaries between the spiritual and material realms, the transference of thought and matter through vibration, and communication with the past. Cognizant of the difficulties presented by the Manifesto's cryptic twists and turns, Masnata as the Manifesto's principal author penned a 44-page gloss to the Manifesto, alternating between naming the inspirational sources behind the art of radia, and explaining what was meant. The work remained in Marinetti's possession, unpublished.

Masnata's comments adhere to two overarching themes: 1) atomic theory and the electromagnetic spectrum and 2) the free-word style (paroliberismo)—the Futurist literary style that dispenses with syntax to experiment with disjunctive words (parole in libertà), onomatopoeia, signs, symbols, numbers, colors and shapes. Both themes support Masnata's premise: radio...