1. Why did you choose radio as a medium/ tool?
The main reason that I chose it for my art and thinking activities was that I had been familiar with listening to it and making it. In my childhood, radio was a new medium and technology not only for communication but also for commercial challenge. At the time (in the late 40s and early 50s), every radio set was a handmade. In Akihabara, Tokyo, this trend led growing hundreds of small shops of radio parts, which dealt with the cheep new parts and used goods from the US military bases. So, it was a thrill to visit such shops for a curious child. My devotion to radio began with building one-tube receiver for listening to the ordinary AM programs. And then I had a challenge to build a short-wave receiver. This led me to build transmitters for short wave pirate transmission.
2. What is the difference between art radio and radio art?
I have been fond of the differentiation of "radio art" and "radioart" (without space). In German, it might be difficult to clarify this difference by "Kunstradio" and "Radiokunst". In my conceptual understanding, "radio art" is one genre of art, in which radio receiver and transmitter are considered as a kind of sound instrument. Even "art radio" is an expression emphasizing the artistic aspect of radio. So both have no difference. On the other hand, my "radioart" was made up for emphasizing the aspect of airwaves of radio. Already by digital operation we can compose every sound that "radio art" or "art radio" has been creating at least as a result. This situation let me clarify the real meaning of radio. Radio exists as long as it is based on airwaves. Radioart is an art to participate in this process of transmitting/receiving airwaves.
3. What is the concept of broadcasting and the differences to narrowcasting?
During my participation in free radio (called as "Mini-FM" later) in the 80s, we have to limit the transmitting scale very narrowly much more narrowly than so-called "local radio." So, I called our radio as "narrowcasting" comparing with the conventional "broadcasting" which considers the service area as "the broader the better". Narrowcasting is not only the size problem but also has a dynamic aspect for the audience to move to the radio station. In order to listen to the program, they had to come closer toward the station (transmitting point) in stead of keeping their distance passively. However, after our experience of such a narrowcasting, I found that whether "broad" or "narrow", the problem was in "casting." As long as we "cast," the receiver is supposed to be passive. So I have started to think about non-casting radio. Sometimes, I called it as "resonance radio", "oscillation radio" and so on. "Radioparty" was one of the attempts based on such a concept. In it, radio transmission/reception not for communication (exchanging voices, sounds and messages) but is a creating medium of invisible partition of airwaves. Carrying your own radio transmitter/receiver to the area, you can change the airwaves condition and directly interfere in the "program."
4. Could you please explain, why you define airwaves as garbage?
This might need much a longer explanation but I should put it briefly. First, "garbage" in my sense is not worthless rubbish. I used it conscious of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno. For Benjamin, "philosophical salvage of scraps" and being a "rag-picker" (he used "chiffonnier" and "Lumpensammler") of leftovers of history was the crucial method of thinking and creating. Although Adorno wrote a seemingly negative passage, "all post-Auschwitz culture, including its urgent critiques, is garbage" (Alle Kluture nach Auschwitz, samt der dringlichen Kritik daran, is Müll.), the difference between Benjamin and Adorno was how to evaluate "technische Reproduzierbarkeit." As a creative re-interpreter of Surrealism, Collage and a thinker of Micrology, Benjamin thought it positively. On the contrary, Adorno partly agreed with him but through his experience of American life in the 30s and 40s, he bored the negative images to the ongoing technology and the future based on it. This might have been true when we think about Trumpism where media becomes a fake, reality has many alternatives and even micromedia generates viral phenomena. However, I think that such negative tendencies derives from the still remaining metaphysics of the origin. When everything is 'technically reproducible' and the origin does not work, will creative activity of human-beings end? I don't think so. It can boost micrological differences, "allotropic variations" that Giles Deleuze 'usurped' from biochemistry and molecular biology. If so, the electromagnetic field is the hipper-reproducible and the very field of "Ewig Wiederkehren" as well as the full of allotropy.
5. Are there also unfolded airwaves?
I interpret airwaves from the perspective of Leibniz-Deleuzian concept of "fold" where such a "allotropy" oscillates and vibrates.
6. Please tell us about your transmitter you created.
I built a lot of and various types of transmitters depending on my needs. But it's not a creation but a plagiarism from Edwin H. Colpitts, Ralph Hartley and many predecessors. And if any originality it would be "the Simplest FM Transmitter." This was designed for letting beginners in their electronic crafting experience and letting them to realize how radio transmission works by their own hand working with a few components. It becomes a tool of communication and even for radioart device. Also my workshop for building this simple model provided a convivial time with other people remotely and physically together.
7. We are very interested in your Radiostation you established. Called Mini FM. Could you please tell us a little bit about this project?
Mini FM started with an outwitting project against the strict policy of the Ministry on the radio transmission. Free radio movement in Italy and France and also pirate radio in Germany exited me to launch the likeness. Technically it was not difficult. I had a few years of beautiful experience of pirate shortwave transmission in the 50s. At the time, there were special bands for pirate HAM radio. I organized a small network of pirate HAM radio with my junior high-school classmates and the older pros. But our 'Utopos' was put an end by my school teacher's "thoughtful" caution that we will be arrested. Certainly it's true. The punishment had been stricter and was still the same even in the 70s. So I had to look for a free radio by some different way from the European model.
In the late 70s, by chance I connected a "legal" toy-type FM transmitter to a regular antenna which located at a tall position. Surprisingly, such a toy covered over 500 meters radius. I was convinced this idea worked for a "legal" radio station.
Again, this was not my original idea. Already among children a kind of playing-radio-broadcasting was popular and various type of tinny FM transmitters were available. The difference was only the fact that they usually did not connect it to a bit "professional" antenna.
At this stage, I was still in the 'casting' media and tried to extend the service area as wider (broader) as possible by linking each small units one by one. At the time, due to the strict policy of the Ministry we could have "free space" on the dial because only one or two FM stations in every city existed.
Skipping many episodes of Mini FM from the early 80s up to the mid 90s, I want to just mention about our important finding. It has something to do with the radioart that I mentioned. It was that in Mini FM the function of transmission is not to deliver messages, and it has an another function--- to 'vibrate' the participants' feeling and even change their unconsciousness. It might have something to do with radiation of airwaves from the transmitter and the antenna. But even if so it will not happen in the form of input-output connection. It will occur just like water surface of repercussion and resonance. Without our own physical participation in transmission (even just holding a microphone), such a thing will never happen.
May 4, 2024, Tokyo