Radio Otherwise

On Tuesday 31.8.2021 from 12:00 until 19:30 (CET) we broadcast the second edition of our special program Radio Otherwise organized by Kate Donovan and Monai de Paula Antunes, together with other radio enthusiasts and special guests. We will stream live from Floating University Berlin, the event can be heard on 88,4 FM Berlin / 90,7 FM Potsdam and here on our webradio.

From 19:30 on, Niko de Paula Lefort hosts his show Aural Maps live from KM28, covering the Karlrecords showcase, which we trace aural cartographies while broadcasting three artists with recent or upcoming releases on Berlin's Karlrecords perform in trio formation: Aidan Baker (guitar, effects), Ale Hop (guitar, electronics) & Audrey Chen (voice, electronics).

Radio Otherwise Together with a wide network of radio enthusiasts, Kate Donovan and Monai de Paula Antunes explore the plurality of experiences involved in radio-making in connection to ecological thinking. Radio Otherwise is an ongoing artistic research project motivated by the many knots which art, knowledge-making/sharing and communication encounter.

Thinking and doing radio otherwise means focussing beyond purely anthropogenic transmissions, recognising relationality within the spectrum of more-than-human radio ecologies: the sun's rays, lightning strikes, meteors, the radio memories held in soil from radioactive pollutants. It also means to research and reflect upon alternative histories and forms of radio-making through its complex materialities and multifarious aural traditions; special attention is paid to the spatial qualities of radio and radio-making, from experimenting with nomadic outdoor studios, building small-scale transmission ecologies (Friz), to observing how the frequency spectrum is occupied in place of rich biodiversity (Krause).

Radio Otherwise promotes radio's emancipatory potential, inspired by pirate, free and community radios, as well as the MiniFM movement (Kogawa), and supported by decolonial and feminist literature and practices. It recognises the recent turn towards bioacoustics and the connected practices of listening as ways to re-connect with 'nature'. But the power dynamics of listening can be just as violent as those of 'the gaze'. Radio Otherwise brings listening together in a constellation with ecologies and cybernetics, in an attempt to carefully and critically move beyond the human/nature dichotomy, to deal with messy boundary-crossings in order to recognise situated relationalities with/in place; we seek dialogical relations with environments, through the development of 'media' as well knowledge sharing/making processes, encouraged by the boundlessness of radio's artistic and cultural expressions. In this way, listening and radio-making can also be methods to sit with uncomfortable relationalities, the relentlessness of the Anthropocene.