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

174 • islands of resistance
to the otherwise disenchanted radio landscape. In this fiction, the
radios themselves are cast as dreamers, their uneasy sleep filled with
static-y landscapes and stuttering secret texts, as they imagine the network,
however small or however diffuse, of which they might be part.
The Automated Prayer Machine
Returning to the scale of early street radio interventions, what social
relations are implied if the circuit of transmission shrinks to the space
of a performance venue, where receivers mingle out in the audience,
and the broadcast antenna is clearly visible next to electronics and
instruments? Brandon LaBelle notes the close relations of transmission
towers to other towers associated with political, religious, and
military power or magic:
As a formal language, the tower expresses an ongoing relation of
earth and heaven, operating to channel correspondence and communications,
between man and god, between church and society, and
between enemies, demarcating time and space while monumentalizing
historical events. 10
What happens when transmission comes down off the tower to
human scale, and seeks to express mere mortal desires? One possibility
is micro-radio: modestly subversive, no longer mysterious or
remote, but still able to generate something magical.
In 2004, with Annabelle Chvostek, I created a piece entitled The
Automated Prayer Machine, 11 conceived in response to the growing
sense of foreboding and despair over world events, and as an antidote
to the escalation in media hysteria and increasingly sensationalistic
news reporting that encourages apathy and fear rather than any kind
of productive or positive action. The winter of 2003/04 seemed particularly
dark in this respect, as the US-led invasion of Iraq dominated the
news, while enormous international rallies for peace received relatively
little attention, and did nothing to stop the actions of the Bush administration.
Inspired in part by the transmission properties of a prayer
wheel, where wind, water, human, or even electronically powered
wheels are believed to activate a written prayer or mantra, Chvostek
and I proposed a shift from apathy into empathy, and from indifference
to compassion by recasting radio receivers from squawkboxes to