SV: Here are a few questions around issues that we would like to touch up on in the interview. The general themes of the book of interviews we are producing are: fm radio vers. digital radio, proposed fm closure. What has FM radio to offer in the age of the internet? What are the social, political, aesthetic and conceptual shifts that happen between FM, digital and internet radio?
TK: In outline, in my feeling, the ongoing "digital radio" seems to be only a transitional patch-up work that tried to catch up with the ongoing technology and the situation of FM radio. FM radio will disappear in future. Use of airwaves will become different. for usual people, higher frequency will be provided. The good examples are WiFi, mobile and various everyday communications. At the moment, over 250 GHz and so on. This means that DIY attempt will be more difficult to build and reconstruct the circuit. If you insist to use your hands (techné) in your artistic activity, new digital technology will be less 'handy'. Thus "artistic" activity would be more dependent on conceptual arrangement and highend technical specialties. SV: We would like to start your interview with a discussion around your work and continue into the conceptual, political and social consequences and aims of your performances and other work. These questions are by no means finalised. I hope you will find them interesting and engaging and that they will form a good starting point for our conversation. In relation to radio art and the radio you have made distinctions; radio as a means of communication, rather than an art form; mini fm as perhaps performance art, but ‘not adequate (as a description) because mini-FM is still radio’. Your performances are of a practical basis of enabling the setting up of mini-FM sites ‘Radio parties’ ‘chaos units’. Would you consider yourself a radio artist? Perhaps you could define the role of a radio artist?
TK: In my various activities in art, I concentrate myself on radioart. In my definition, radioart is an art dealing with airwaves. Airwaves are not necessarily airwaves of radio transmission such as AM, FM, VHF... As the material of art, airwaves are infinite. Also, I think 'radio' as radiation (gerund) rather than wireless communication. SV: Your work treats radio and its social structure, its relation to power and authority, rather than the idea of broadcasting a work on a fully scheduled radio station broadcasting worldwide such as resonance FM. Where do you understand such social structures and authorities to lie with internet radio? Where are the artistic possibilities and necessities of internet radio?
TK: I am interested in the politics that our ongoing technology especially media technology creates and controls. So, I am interested in how media is technologically used. It is so complicated and implicit that we can't use conventional apparatus of (especially dualistic) concepts such as "controller vs controlled" and "sender vs receiver". The internet reveals itself that such a apparatus does not work actually. ISP is not the ruler as well as it not totally generous. We can finally talk about 'micro politics' concretely. As for the artistic possibility of the internet radio, it has to be limited as long as you use ready-made technological basis of the internet radio. There would be many possibilities in the software-base challenge using internet for radio. But the very basis of the technology cannot be changed in its substance. SV: In the UK there has been a decision, though not yet finalized, to cut the FM signal, to go digital. How does this strike you as a policy, and how would this affect the work that you do as an artist using FM so actively? Would you agree with such a decision in relation to electro-magnetic pollution? Is digital cleaner?
TK: Digitalization of FM radio is a "correct" decision as long as radio is mere a means of "communication". I welcome such a cutting because we may find more freer space in it. Already in AM radio band, you can find many vacancy. As for electro-magnetic pollution, I think it has been worse and worse. As late as in the 80s, many scholars argues the danger of high-power transmission. I think that Nicholas H. Steneck (MIT) was right. But the fact is that in the history ecology is too late or ulterior. Also, artist often risks his/her life. Siegfried Zielinski provided one chapter to Johann Wilhelm Ritter (1776-1810) who was an unknown 'radioartist' and put his body in catastrophic danger ('Deep Time of the Media, 2006).
SV: You have talked about your lack of interest in the idea of micro-FM communities connecting together to form a larger whole. How do you see that notion of a fm-community develop in the internet age where on-line radio communities might be small but not local, not able to visit each other or come to the station, but are small local interest groups spread worldwide?
TK: The means and function of 'local' has been changing. Bacically 'local' has a lot to do with 'loco'(here, my body/place and so on). By many ways such as VR and AR technology, we have more virtual locality. However, we have still our body. Virtually our body extends globally while our body works very differently in its locality. Internet radio cannot relay on the conventional community. It should be on the virtual community. But at the same time, it lets us find something different from "community" and "individual".
SV: In your interview with Annmarie Chandler and Norie Neumark: Mini-FM Performing Microscopic Distance, you give a very detailed and interesting account of the development of your own work with mini-fm on the political and social background of Japanese society in the 60s , 70s and particularly the 80s. You make particular reference to ‘banzai collectivity’ and distance. Clearly for you personally as well as in general political terms Mini-FM made a great contribution to break such distances down and to re-evaluate collectivity. How do you see mini-fm free radio to perform such a de-distanciation now. Is there still the political and social need and consequence of Mini-FM, or is there a new function for it?
TK: As you may know, OED includes a new word deriving from Japan: "hikikomori". It is a kind of autistic phenomenon. Generally in Japan, social feeling is no more in "banzai collectivity". People are isolated as an individual. The problem is, however, that the individuality of "hikikomori" person is 'schizophrenic' (in a broad sense with Guattari/Deleuze connotations): this may not mean "isolation" but a living-together with multiple units (for this "ego" and "person" would be not irrelevant).
SV: Do you think the internet as a platform for radio work, and sonic exchange, continues the breakdown of distance and the proliferation of collectivity that Mini-FM set out to create, as is often promised, or is it rather in itself a cultish Banzai medium that recasts a manipulated and artificial homogeneity or indeed fosters the individualisation of an ‘okatu’ listener?
TK: Maybe we need more discussion about this. In my historical understanding, no more "otaku". Now "hikikomori". I think for "hikikomori" person, Mini FM will not work at all. But some of radioart might work for them. SV: You use mini-Fm as a tool for performances. And also talk about the collectivity of such performances, a catalyst to get people performing together. You do mention that you have been thinking of using Wi-Fi hotspots. Could you tell us a bit about this fm-performance-collectivity and do you feel the internet, the network of wireless spots, could facilitate such actions more easily, or in what way would it make the collective performance different?
TK: Certainly, Honor Harger who organized a meeting at Tate Modern found an analogy between Mini FM and Wi-Fi. They could share the similar function as long as the Wi-Fi technology was immature. The condition of Wi-Fi connection was so unreliable that carrying laptop computers on the street could become an interesting performance piece. But the situation has been changed today. SV: Given that you are interested in the mode of transmission, maybe more than in what is actually broadcast, do you understand there to be a difference in listening to DAB radio or to FM radio?
TK: A simple example: It is difficult to understand the contents when the airwave condition is too bad: everything or nothing. In FM radio, the airwave conditions may create and add something that the radio station never expected: they cannot be lump up with "noises". SV: Apart from these themes we would also like to engage a bit into the notion of phenomenological intersubjectivity of listening to FM radio in comparison with listening to streamed radio on-line, and at the site of performance. Bringing in the idea of the analogue radio body vers. the internet streamed radio body.
TK: "Intersubjectivity" is formed when multiple persons share or co-create a body-consciousness that will be useful(in practice) as well as paranoid. The point is how to listen. If you use a similar audio system to listen, there would be not so difference between analogue and digital radio. The listening system is not so different: we still use speakers with cones which directly vibrate our eardrums. If a direct audio system to link sounds and our nerve systems becomes more practical, the situation would be different.
Mail exchange: October 24, 2010