Pieces of Sound: German Experimental Radio by Daniel Gilfillan (review)

Pieces of Sound: German Experimental Radio constitutes an admirable contribution to the development of our critical vocabulary by advancing a convincing argument about what constitutes experimental art. By delimiting its object of study as specifically experimental radio, Daniel Gilfillan’s fascinating study attains an illuminating precision in its explication of artistic projects that, over the course of the twentieth century, made use of a common technology: the radio apparatus, as it appeared in its various manifestations as transmitter, receiver, or both. Here Gilfillan makes an important distinction: experimentation, rather than being (for instance) simply another name for technological inventiveness, is the specifically artistic engagement with radio. For much of the twentieth century, to broadcast has always been a political act, since the (in)ability to do so has always been dictated by official policy over who owns the airwaves and who makes the electromagnetic spectrum available for public and/or private use.

The common thread of the transgressions laid out by Gilfillan, from the 1920s to the 2000s, is a tendency to resist the univocal impositions of one-way transmission as permitted by sovereign authority. Experimental radio attempts to reintroduce the interactive and reflective dimension of the radio as a fleeting encounter between isolated voices and positions (whereas radio has, historically, been solidified into a means of transmitting one monumental signal to privately owned receivers that would seem to permit only passive listening). As Gilfillan develops his argument and moves toward a discussion of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century radio, it becomes increasingly clear that transgressive experimentation is linked to a decentered, autonomous, grassroots social organization. The experimenters described by Gilfillan consistently strive to uncover radio’s repressed potential for a non–hierarchically structured, polyphonic communication that goes beyond the consumption of monumental broadcasts.

In the first chapter, Gilfillan presents readers with Atau Tanaka’s multimedia art project Wiretapping the Beast (2002), which he sees as a crystallization of the ambitions of the radio artists described in the preceding chapter. Wiretapping the Beast, as internet-based experimental radio art supported by the broadcaster Südwestrundfunk, worked both as an instantiation of and a commentary on cybernetics, giving online users the chance to create and feed a virtual beast, that was created on-screen as a graphical and sonic collage of user-supplied texts and images. This experiment, while beginning in the internet, also involved a live performance in Japan as well as a sound-only radio broadcast.

From this turn-of-the-millennium rebus, Gilfillan moves on to a fascinating discussion of the theoretical texts and experimental broadcasts of Hans Flesch from the 1920s as well as the works of Wilhelm Bischoff and Friedrich Wolf, who were together interested in a technology-specific radio art that would involve more than broadcasting music and literature. Each of these experiments finds a distinct way of questioning the passive consumerism encouraged by the radio receiver as a mere transmitter, encouraging listeners to reflect on the conventions and expectations that make typical entertainment broadcasts function (for instance, Bischoff’s work includes hyperbolic headlines that lampoon the widespread obsession with extreme misfortune and extreme athletic ability). Had Pieces of Sound been longer, it would have been exciting to hear more detailed accounts of these works, which were accessed through meticulous archival research. Since the better part of the chapter is devoted to situation, the reader may be left with enduring curiosity about the aesthetic qualities of these broadcasts, even after Gilfillan’s summaries.

Two final chapters probe experiments that have sought to employ radio for the construction of an alternative public sphere. In chapter 3, Gilfillan provides a sympathetic portrayal of Bertolt Brecht’s theory of a critical and pedagogical radio, which has been dismissed by Friedrich Kittler as a naive failure to understand radio’s essential link to warfare due to its origins as a military technology. Gilfillan legitimates Brecht’s unrealized theories by showing how Alfred Andersch’s own postwar radio broadcasts sought to make radio...