image source: Publisher

Publisher Note

Recently, there has been a revived interest in the medium of radio, which can be attributed to the extended range of network-based services. Most important in this context is the world-wide availability of high-quality streaming, the abolishing of monopolies, or at least the unproblematic and easy access to technologies and infrastructures as well as concessions and licences. After all its years of existence, and despite momentous technological chances, radio still displays its characteristic directness, a characteristic already pointed out by Rudolf Arnheim and Bertolt Brecht and later by Marshall McLuhan.
Currently, there is an abundance of art radio projects, practically all of them initiated and executed by people with no professional training in the medium. They, as well as their projects, have their roots in actionistic pirate radios, sound art, music and sound experiments, new media and net art, software and hardware hacking, activism, circuit bending etc. The form of these projects their mode of social organisation and the expectation that the profileration of machine arrangements make possible new technological articulations likely to generate innovative assemblings, decentring the hegemony of the actual mass media. A common key element in the creation in media or post-media assemblage is that of the production of subjectivity, which can be seen as a micropolicitcal phenomenon.
In this context, the collective and self-organized project LapTopRadio explored the possibilities and the limits of an irregularly, unexpectedly and sporadically broadcasting internet radio in the perspective of fine arts with a specific approach—the studio followed the participants, musicians and events, and not the other way round. It thereby created a new basis with a as yet hardly known potential, which the project intended to probe. This was made possible thanks to the co-operation of all the participants and co-producers, speakers, interviewers and authors of the texts of this publication.