What some might see as an anachronistic medium and technology represents for others a space for alternative and radical creative infrastructures, set apart from many of the frames and constraints of commercial and online media spaces.

Understood as a vast and expansive field, these four articles are a reflection of our personal encounters with radio as practised by its artists, eccentrics and accidental innovators. This instalment looks at radio situationism, where the medium’s conventions are détourned.

[Read Part 1: Radio Fabulism here and Part 2: Realism here]

Experimental radio often responds to its environment: hijacking commercial radio tropes, appropriating generic formats, infiltrating mainstream radio and, perhaps, everyday life. This tendency could be termed situationist; it makes art out of the social situation of radio, whilst also engaging in those practices of ‘détournement’ developed by Guy Debord’s art movement. To détourn means to divert; taking the familiar and sending it off somewhere unexpected. Radio situationism is a tactical media methodology of decoys and camouflage, offering trojan-horse simulacra that want to take us in.

Its most canonical granddaddy is, obviously, Orson Welles and his War Of The Worlds (1938) which allegedly sparked mass panic due to being mistaken for a genuine newscast of alien invasion (or so the story goes). While these circumstances are undoubtedly exaggerated, it was evidently Welles’s intention to frame the transmission as ‘real’. The emergency newscast interrupts a fictional popular music programme, a conceit trading on the believability of the radio-everyday it reroutes. Today we might be canny to dirty tricks like this, but one can only assume early listeners were more innocent.

Since Welles, this strategy of blurring the line between radio-art and radio-reality has proven an enduring approach. Chris Morris’s seminal radio work in the 90s is a key reference point, with Blue Jam, The Chris Morris Music Show, and On The Hour all viciously toying with the signifiers and limits of normie radio-space. Across the Atlantic, Negativland have ploughed a loosely comparable furrow with albums such as Jam Con ‘84 and founding member Don Joyce’s long-running radio programme Over The Edge on KPFA. Both Morris and Negativland are radio situationists for their creative repurposing of tropes, their fascination with the everyday, and, not least, for their commitment to the bit.

They are also a little prone to characteristically late-20th-century preoccupations with artifice and irony. Don Joyce’s solo piece Advertising Secrets (1991) is emblematic in this regard, with its satirical mashup of "slogans, aphorisms, jingles, clichés, and theme songs” (Apple 2021) articulating a paradigmatically of-its-time statement. Indeed, work from the era retaining contemporary currency tends to be the less self-consciously clever. British conceptual artist Rod Summers’s Sad News (1991) is uncomplicated to the point of genius-idiocy in its hijacking of a BBC news broadcast. Repeatedly inserting the statement “I’m sad, very sad at the end of the newsreader’s every sentence, Summers’s piece undercuts its own Fluxus formalism with pure ridiculousness; all the while, skirting the more self-indulgent excesses of pomo-baroque.

Also détourning the news, since 1972 Robert Whitman’s Local Report has been restaged a number of times in a variety of radio contexts. The premise is simple: thirty people, assigned to different locations within a given locale, call in to the radio station at five minute intervals with descriptions of whatever they happen to be witnessing at that time. These incoming calls are played out live on air. The end result: a chance-based, multi-perspectival radio happening that hijacks the news format as creative springboard. This is radio convention as found ‘object’, with everyday broadcasting rituals transformed into artistic source material. Like Local Report, Judy Dunaway’s Duo For Radio Stations (1992) takes a quotidian sonic frame (small town commercial radio clichés) and reroutes it into a space for aleatory events and improvisation. Following a standard format for early 80s US local radio, the piece features a live talk show, jingles and faux commercials; simultaneously, 14 improvising musicians skronk their way through a live soundtrack featuring Dunaway on balloon (yes, as in, a rubber balloon). It’s completely nuts and joyous, going some way to prove that radio détournement is more than just ironic jingles – although it has those too.

Talking of jingles: if you have a minute, delve into this archive of UK pirate radio jingles from the 1960s which riff on the mainstream conventions of the time. Going one step further than most radio artists, these radio situationists hijacked not only signifiers but the airwaves themselves. Also taking the jingle as a vessel to be commandeered, co-author Neil Luck’s Drivetime Underground (2016) on Resonance FM featured a veritable bevy composed by himself. Resituating commercial radio convention as both catalyst and object of critique, these and Drivetime Underground in general constitute a masterful exercise in ostranenie, unveiling a deep strangeness at the heart of the familiar.

Radio situationism is an appropriative practice; a magpie minor-artform that nicks stuff from normal life and refashions it in weird new ways. This can encompass all manner of anarcho-prankery (like Chris Morris’s falsely announcing the death of Tory politician Michael Heseltine on his Radio 1 show) but also quasi-utopian visionings of new ways the world might be. Artist radio stations are one area this latter tendency sometimes emerges, with ‘the radio station’ itself becoming an object to be détourned and reimagined.

Wojciech Bruszewski and Kahlen Wolf’s Radio Ruins Of Art (1988-1993) was a DIY radio station that broadcast for five years, transmitting an endless philosophical conversation built of randomly ordered statements. While miles away from Negativland-esque culture jamming, Radio Ruins’s intrusion into radio-space is perhaps no less provocative – its admittedly low-key disruption like a gnomic glitch in the operating system of the everyday. Since 1994, Irish visual artist Garrett Phelan has also staged a number of temporary radio stations-as-artworks, blurring the line between infrastructure and content. Like Bruszhewski and Wolf’s piece, these are often cryptic: 2006’s Black Brain Radio broadcast a stream of abstract text on 89.9FM for a month in the Dublin area, completely subverting ideas about what a radio station is (and, presumably, freaking out a few unsuspecting Dubliners in the process).

More recently, Nicolas Jaar’s tentacular Network (2015-) began life as a proposal for a BBC radio play but quickly grew into a online project of 99 fictitious radio shows looping continuously, the user able to scan and sift through stations dedicated to baffling quasi-commercial genres and subjects like “Hardcore Ambient”, “The Tennis Underground”, “SEX RADIO”, or “Science Needs a Clown”. Network has manifested as broadcasts, website, a book of station posters, sound installations, and branded apparel; a slick infrastructure built on radiophonic quicksand.

These are just a few projects that have probed radio’s context and social conventions. This can entail excavation of tropes and cliches, but also includes approaches that appropriate its basic infrastructures as objects trouvées for creative subversion. All take the situation of radio as a starting point; leading from which, uncharted destinations still await discovery.

World Service and The Wire will present Strange Transmissions: The World Of Experimental Radio live at London’s Cafe Oto and on Resonance Extra on 18 July.