Andrea Langlois et al - Islands of Resistance - Pirate Radio in Canada

158 • islands of resistance
notes
Ths text was translated from the French by Clara Gabriel.
1. Some ideas here are borrowed from Stephen Wright, and were developed in
his “Vers un art sans oeuvre, sans auteur, sans spectateurs,” in the catalogue of
the XV Biennale of Paris, Éditions Biennale de Paris (2007).
2. Alain Martin Richard, “énoncés généraux-Matériau: manoeuvre,” Inter,
#47, Québec: Éditions intervention (1990), is, in my opinion, the seminal work
that defines the exact characteristics of the maneuver.
3. Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2008).
4. A maneuver often becomes part of an environment and the everyday acts
of being. Although the term qualifies practices that for the most part take place
within urban space, the term here is applied to a certain type of intervention
that uses unlicensed radio broadcasting — in other words, pirate radio — as a
central element of the art initiative intended by the maneuver.
5. Many of the pirate radio practitioners and artists discussed here use pseudonyms
or artist names in order to protect their anonymity.
6. The methodology applied in this essay highlights the junction between
social science publications and a series of interviews conducted between 1992
and 2009 with various operators, radio broadcasters, and artists engaged in
maneuvers and unlicensed broadcasting.
7. A piece by Italian composer Walter Marchetti, a bruitist mass of sound
made up entirely of noise created by the Francoist censorship in order to jam
foreign airwaves throughout the Spanish territory, would have deafened John
Cage for hours following a concert performance. Marchetti’s approach represented
a unique response to the State’s attempt to control the airwaves.
8. Saint-Thomas l’Imposteur (pseudonym used to insure anonymity), personal
interview.
9. French literary term designating ocean, used in my essay “L’empire des
ondes,” in Parallélogramme, vol.16, no. 4, Éditions ANPAC\RACA, Toronto
(1991). The term was reused in 2007 by journalists Aymeric Mantoux and Benoist
Simmat in the title of their study on the French network Radio NRJ.
10. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Mille plateaux : capitalisme et
schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit, 1972).
11. Pouf’s transmitter, FM and mono, was built along the lines of the classic
tube transmitter and produced a 15-watt transmission.
12. Pouf (pseudonym used to insure anonymity), personal interview, June
1992.
13. A drop in electric voltage causes the broadcast frequency to go up to 108
MHz on the radio dial, and a return to voltage causes the broadcast frequency to
drop to the original frequency (about 89.5 MHz).