DC: I’m interested in discussing what seems to be one of the central points in your ideas around radioart – the shift from an idea of ‘broad casting’ onwards to a hypothesis of ‘narrow casting’ and onto a call for a ‘micro’ dimension of transmission. From medium to people, from art radio to radioart, from object to person, from passive reception to event, the question, you write, is not just ‘What is radioart?’ but ‘Who is radioart?’ Throughout your pioneering involvement with micro radio, you have explored such dimension not only as a performer but also across workshops and opening up to a social sphere, yet retaining a strong sense of individual, personal approach. In your interview on the Korean Spots website, you said: ‘Sometimes I found that even if there was no audience, the person who does the broadcasting enjoys themselves and can find themselves feeling involved with an invisible community’. Could we begin by expanding on this idea of ‘invisible community’, how this is articulated in transmission, and across each individual’s experience?
TK: I might have to a bit tidy your questions. First, my shift of the ideas: from broadcasting to narrowcasting to micro-casting refers to the changing situation of medium that surrounded me: in the international level, community/local radio stations increased, free radio and public access stations appeared, and the internet has been opened. These changes revealed the Japanese bias: not so much local radio, few of free radio, none of public access station. My earlier critique of Japanese media environment and my forthcoming activities of transmission were based on this bias. My distinction of “radioart” from “art radio” is a criticism of what “radio art” has been. In spite of the name of “radio art”, it has been provided by the same way of broadcasting, exhibition and distribution as the conventional station and museum has been doing. The difference is exists mere in the content. Every interview has a situational response. In a different situation, I would not use the term “an invisible community”. When I said so, however, I was thinking about Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “The Visible and the Invisible”. “Invisible” relates “unconscious”, “molecular” and “multitude” level of an individual. In my understanding, no one is isolated even if one is alone. Our existence is full of ‘multitude’. In every single individual, dynamic transmission has been already and always working. I could say that everyone has her/his (invisible) community in her/him. Therefore I mentioned about “radio without the audience”. “Radio without the audience” was my strategic idea to clarify what radio is. According to the conventional understanding, radio consists of the set-concepts of “sender” and “receiver”. Such an understanding is completely overcome by the concept of “autopoiesis” of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela and later by the more concrete and undeniable accounts of Niklas Luhmann. Among them, you could add Vilém Flusser.
DC: In the radioart manifesto, you wrote ‘the horizon between “my hands” and “my mind” has become seamless. But I would like to insist that the point would be to forget with my mind rather than my hands’. I’m interested in the meeting – in your practice, and your thought – between recurring references to philosophy and, conversely, a hands-on approach to building transmitters. However, before defining yourself a theorist, or workshop leader, you are a performance artist. Could you say something more about how performing exists somehow as the hinge between your manifold activities, and how being a performer has informed the developments of your thoughts on radio?
TK: Hand-on work existed before my commitment to art and philosophy. In my primary school year, I started to build radio receiver and became familiar with various kinds of radio signals. Then I became more interested in HAM radio and tried to build a transmitter for 20-meter band. Every knowledge was from Japanese journals with interesting articles with nice schematics and how-to of transmitter. As soon as I started HAM radio (there was an kind of free zone for the "pirates"), I got quite a lot of responses. It seems to me that such experiences accustomed me to consider that radio is interactive: not only to passively receive but also to transmit. You might ask me, “Why did you start studying philosophy rather than physics?” I did physics first and then via Heisenberg came to Heidegger who was in fashion at the time and seemed to let me know about the ontological “causa prima”. Meanwhile, John Cage came to Tokyo and introduced the notions of “chance operation”, “silence” and “noise”. Also, underground theaters, experimental movies and the Japanese echoes to FLUUS such as Takehisa Kosugi’s and Yasunao Tone’s experiments of performance fascinated me. But I remained as an audience who was inspired by these milieus and wrote reviews and articles. My first social expression was a book blending philosophy and art/literary criticism. It’s difficult to describe by a few sentences how I became involved in showing my performance. My stay in New York gave me an impact. In the late 70s, New York, rethink of performance art was flourishing and new type of performance using audio-visual devices (that was later called “media art”) appeared. Also, inspired by the Italian movement of Autonomia and free radio, I started my modest attempt of free radio in Japan. What was better, a new wave of performance art (post-Butho) started in the early 80s in Tokyo and I worked as a theoretician first and then as a performer later. I did it because there were few artists who used the update electronics at the time. I tried to test my own concepts in my performance works. But at the time I was not conscious of myself as a radio artist. My performance activity (which was mainly on electronics, though) and my radio activity (broadcasting, organizing transmitter workshop and rethinking our works) were going side by side. But I gradually realized that my manifold activities should be put together in “radio art”.
DC: At one point in your essay on micro radio, you mention a condition of transmitting ‘in exile’. Would you consider transmission in relation to the place where it originates? To which extent is the place that originates transmission relevant today – or shall we think of transmission as a networked event, joining both the person who transmits and those who hear, or ultimately joining the person who transmits with their own selves and their history as ‘active receivers’? Shall we consider a shift from place to people in motion, each one carrying within a multitude of places – to quote Vilém Flusser, ‘taking up residence in homelessness’? How is the spirit of a place / of a person retained in transmission? What is the material of radioart? And how do all of the above relate to your ideas of ‘deconstructing broadcast’?
TK: I don’t think that I used “originate”. You may allow me to paraphrase it to “work”. I didn’t talk about the original place of transmission. As you have in mind, electronic medium erases the origin. It is the technology of reproducing. In the age of technological reproduction, we all become “homeless”. Maybe the “home” must exist inside the body or in a part of our body. Hands might be the minimum survival of our body. As you know, Vilém Flusser wrote that even our hands are now minimized into the typing fingers (digits). Our body is “handlos” (Flusser), minimized and cyborgnized. In this sense, it is not a joke that only “homepage” (of mobile phone in her/his hand) survives the home. So every movement of our body moves in vain. Our hands no more create nor express anything. But our body or our self-consciousness of our body still exists. Our body has no “home” (substance) but is interwoven with tools, rooms, city, and all things. Our body is no more a center of the world but could be pressure point. And every point is different. It has its own singularity. This is the very the reason why I insist in the place where transmission works. Maturana/Varela argued that “the metaphor of the ‘tube’ for communication media” (something generated at a certain point is carried by a ‘tube’ and is delivered to the receiver at the other end) is “basically false”. Communication could be possible when some kind of “structural coupling” occurs. The fact is that in transmission something already-exited in each bodies couple together and they share resonances of their own oscillation.
DC: Finally, a comment on your reply to the question in Korean Spots about Sound Art and Radio Art: ‘I am not only concerned with sound, but also, depending on the system of air waves, how you can control the sound. It is not only about sound, but also about visual images’. This of course opens up to a complex discourse around visual images shaped by sound, and, conversely, on the limitations of ‘sound art ‘as it got defined by the academia in the last decade. There is a strand within so-called sound art, however, that calls for an expansion into other media or, even better, for the leakage, eavesdropping, overlapping of a media into another. Visual images, we might argue, can also be constructed by words, and in this sense I’m interested in the diffusion, the dispersion of media beyond their limits. I think for example of Flusser’s analysis of the shift from text to code, and of how process is seen as form. Could you please expand on the above, and on your notion of visual image as it is constructed across radio art?
TK: First, I would like you to understand that radioart in my sense is inseparable from airwaves. To say simplistically, our body is the form while airwaves are the material. Our body is here while airwaves are everywhere. Different from sounds and visual images, airwaves are not always directly perceivable. The range of airwaves is infinite: even in the conventional classification by the frequency you have VLF, HF, VHF, UHF, SHF, EHF, infrared rays and so on. So, radioart needs some kind of medium to transmit our body and the airwaves, that is the transmitter. Transmitter for radioart transmits otherwise imperceptible signals to the perceptible (audible sounds and visible images). For radioart, sounds and images have not to be coded nor decoded in advance. My radioart performance may bring a form (that could be decoded) as a series of sounds or images but it’s only temporal. They are only the traces of our body’s play with airwaves. They just testify that our my body plays with the airwaves for a while.