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

Repurposed and Reassembled • 185
in 2005 with a three-part broadcast that examined public spaces in
Victoria, British Columbia. Three separate broadcasts took place in a
mall, a parking lot and a community commons garden. The broadcasts
spoke of the aural environment that existed within these spaces,
and how various members of society used these spaces. I used a small
USB transmitter 5 hooked up to my laptop, capable of broadcasting 150
feet. Photocopied invitations to the broadcasts were posted around the
city, and the audience was encouraged to arrive with radios and radio
Walkmans, and to listen on their car radios. The Parking Lot Broadcast
appears in the 2007 publication Radio Territories, along with a
written description of the work. 6
Let’s make a cut here and rewind back in time once more, then go
up to another shelf and take down the book Salt Seller: The Writings
of Marcel Duchamp. 7 This book contains sketches from Duchamp’s
Green Box for a future aural sculpture — a sound painting that the
audience can step into, or as Duchamp sketches, a musical sculpture.
Duchamp also coined the term readymade, and viewed the world in
a similar way to the example I gave earlier — as a potential work of
assemblage. In order to elaborate on this idea, I’ll take down another
book from my shelf: Allen S. Weiss’ Phantasmic Radio. 8 In the essay
“Radio, Phantasms, Phantasmic Radio,” Weiss looks at radio as a phenomenon,
relating it to the process of sound entering our bodies, and
how these sounds are organized according to various themes in our
minds.
Weiss’ ideas are an inspiration for my process in creating sound for
the Micro-Radio Project; I explore the neural process of mixing and
creating sound collage and microscopic sound sculptures on a daily
basis, largely because sound is constantly entering and vibrating
within our bodies. We then transmit and receive these collages to and
from one another. This process relates to Duchamp’s Musical Sculpture,
by examining our method of taking in information and communicating
as a kind of musical sculpture, which we can then use to
create our own assemblage.
From Weiss’ ideas we can rewind in time once more. In order to do
this I’ll head over to my laptop, go online and check out UBU Web
to download an essay called “The Electronic Revolution,” by William
S. Burroughs. 9 In this essay, Burroughs suggests using portable tape
recorders to set up a kind of guerilla media, where his collaged tape
cut-ups would generate street happenings intended as direct social