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

186 • islands of resistance
commentary. Burroughs introduces the idea of using store bought
tape recorders in ways that may not have been thought of by their
manufacturers, and placing them in public spaces, in effect repurposing
them and waking them up.
I have a similar approach to the radios I use in my micro-radio
broadcasts, which have been placed in a variety of public spaces. These
radios, however, speak more of the past and present states of the media
and telematic communication spaces, in addition to the ever-changing
consumer market for readymade objects. I purchase them at secondhand
stores (Value Village, Saint Vincent De Paul and the Salvation
Army), seeing these places as repositories for consumer objects, somewhere
between the home and the landfill. Gathering from these spaces
is a comment on the flow of consumer items between Canada and the
countries that create them. A hypothetical map of this flow would
illustrate that a radio could be made in Japan in 1985 using components
built in Taiwan, shipped to Canada, and sold in an electronics
section of a department store. This radio could then be acquired at a
second hand store between 2005 and 2009, possibly in a different city
than it was first purchased, and possibly having gone through several
changes of ownership. The total amount of land and sea covered by
the radio is astounding (two or three continents) as well as the total
amount of fossil fuels used to ship it, and the human labour used to
create it. The radios that I use in my broadcasts are objects that contain
this history, and are on the verge of becoming obsolete in the face
of the new possibilities of telematic technologies.
Since we still have “The Electronic Revolution” open on my laptop,
let’s pull up another tab and go to Tetsuo Kogawa’s website Polymorphous
Space, and download “A Micro Radio Manifesto.” 10 Kogawa’s
manifesto leads to an understanding of micro broadcasting that speaks
of ecology and scale, through the use of pre-existing media technologies
on a microscopic level. The listener must travel to these transmissions,
rather than with larger more pervasive radio frequencies that
only travel to the listener. In this sense, the Micro-Radio Project creates
a space around a small transmission, in which the receivers of the
broadcast are also active travellers to the transmission space. This creates
a temporary community of listeners, and asks questions about the
spaces that make up our aural urban environment.
While we’re thinking of repurposing media, let’s grab another magazine
from my bookshelf, a photocopy of a Scientific American from