RADIOACTIVE

RadioActive (2008) is an artists collaborative events project, based around a portable pirate radio station. A variety of artist-led programs were broadcast from an FM transmittor and streamed on the internet, while events and performances that included a geigercam operator, table tennis and the ‘Zusammen Choir’ were played out.

In June 2008, the project was invited to the Homo Ludens Festival in Warsaw, Poland. However such was the signal strength of local broadcast radio, the RadioActive transmission extended to a maximum of fifteen feet from source, forming a virtual bubble in the courtyard of the Academy of Fine Arts. Individual portable radios were set up on the periphery of this field of invisible noise, but had to be constantly tweaked, with safecracker precision, like a musician tuning his instrument.

The series of radio plays, art theory and conceptual music was under constant siege by the surrounding commercial broadcasts. Maybe this was a repeat of history? During the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, the Polish resistance operated a clandestine radio transmitter called 'Lightning', which broadcast combat reports, appeals for assistance, patriotic poems and songs. In an attempt to undermine these transmissions, the Nazis used their own Polish radio station to transmit on the same frequency, broadcasting false information and false orders.

Radio is at its most free when it is indeed underground, when it is used by pirate stations, who then operate like the Polish freedom fighters in the sewers under Warsaw.