Radio Rethink

This book, which originally appeared as a special issue of TDR/The Drama Review, explores the myriad aesthetic, cultural, and experimental possibilities of radiophony and sound art. Art making and criticism have focused mainly on the visual media. This book, which originally appeared as a special issue of TDR/The Drama Review, explores the myriad aesthetic, cultural, and experimental possibilities of radiophony and sound art. Taking the approach that there is no single entity that constitutes "radio," but rather a multitude of radios, the essays explore various aspects of its apparatus, practice, forms, and utopias. The approaches include historical, political, popular cultural, archeological, semiotic, and feminist. Topics include the formal properties of radiophony, the disembodiment of the radiophonic voice, aesthetic implications of psychopathology, gender differences in broadcast musical voices and in narrative radio, erotic fantasy, and radio as an electronic memento mori. The book includes a new piece by Allen Weiss on the origins of sound recording. Contributors John Corbett, Tony Dove, René Farabet, Richard Foreman, Rev. Dwight Frizzell, Mary Louise Hill, G. X. Jupitter-Larsen, Douglas Kahn, Terri Kapsalis, Alexandra L. M. Keller, Lou Mallozzi, Jay Mandeville, Christof Migone, Joe Milutis, Kaye Mortley, Mark S. Roberts, Susan Stone, Allen S. Weiss, Gregory Whitehead, David Williams, Ellen Zweig

A cultural history of German radio broascasting from the 1930s until the present day.

This book explores how academia seeks to systematize the changes taking place in radio in its adaptation to the digital era. The individual chapters here investigate the most important issues currently under study by researchers in the medium of radio, tackling such key questions as the future of the radio spectrum, the new commercial radio business models, the function of community radio stations, and the development of university radio stations, amongst others. As such, this volume is integral to an understanding of the compound dimensions of the sound and radio media research currently being carried out in countries as varied as the United Kingdom, Spain, Poland, Finland, Portugal, Brazil and Argentina.

“Intelligent, poignant, and engaging, Radio offers readings of a remediated form of radio—Mowitt’s subject matter is not really radio as a medium or the history of that medium, but rather the impact the wireless dissemination of voice across radio networks had on modern conceptions of community. This presupposes a view of radio that goes beyond narrow historical facticity and also avoids the sometimes narrowly sociological readings offered by media studies in the US. A welcome addition to the field of radio studies.” — Sven Spieker, author of The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy “John Mowitt's Radio: Essays in Bad Reception is an innovative study of transnational, historical dimensions of broadcast culture. Broad and deep in encompassing a century of cultural theory, the book contributes to a new understanding of radio by treating it in an original and stimulating manner for a wider audience of scholars and students in cultural studies, media studies, communication, and the history of technology. Mowitt tunes into the polyphonous lineage of radio transmissions, and the programs received go far beyond commonplaces of a mass medium of seduction and manipulation.” —Peter Krapp, author of Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture