PhD Radio After Radio: Redefining Radio Art in the light of new media technology though Expanded Practice

 

My practice-based PhD. research on radio art titled Radio After Radio: Redefining radio art in the light of new media technology through expanded practice was completed at University of the Arts London 2015, at CRiSAP (Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice). Author Margaret A Hall. ( Magz Hall).

The practice based research explored the rich history of radio as an artistic medium and the relationship between the artist and wireless technology, broadcast, microcast and narrowcast emphasising the role of the artist as a mediator between broadcast institutions and micro stations and a listening public. It considers how radio art might be defined in relation to sound art, music and media art, mapping the shifting parameters of radio art in the digital era prompting a consideration of how radio has moved from the shared ‘live’ event to one consumed ‘on demand’ by a fragmented audience. I researched a century of international practice along with case studies.

I examined five reoccuring types of radio art—appropriation, transmission, activism, soundscape and performance—bringing together different practitioners and artistic approaches, I developed a framework that highlights it fluid nature and researcheda and interviewed a example case study artist for each type.

1. Appropriation

Core Concept: Reclaiming, hacking, and repurposing obsolete or existing consumer technologies, institutional audio, or mass media content. How it manifests: Recontextualising archival broadcasts, found recordings, and “readymades” to disrupt traditional narratives and subvert standard broadcast conventions.

2. Transmission

Core Concept: Treating the physical act of broadcasting, electromagnetic signals, and the spectrum ether itself as the core artistic medium and material. How it manifests: Utilizing micro-broadcasts, temporary unlicensed radio interventions, and site-specific airwave installations that emphasize how signals travel through space and interface with receivers.

3. Activism

Core Concept: Using the airwaves as a tactical tool for social critique, community organizing, environmental advocacy, and resisting institutional or corporate control of communication. How it manifests: Establishing illegal or “pirate” radio streams, community-led broadcasts, and tactical audio interventions that directly engage citizens in civic spaces.

4. Soundscape

Core Concept: Capturing, composing, and re-broadcasting environmental, industrial, or overlooked acoustic ecology. Blending field recordings, acoustic journalism, and deep listening practices into radio programming to shift the listener’s awareness toward their external auditory environments.

5. Performance

Core Concept: Engaging the radio apparatus as a live, temporal instrument for real-time acoustic generation, experimental drama, and bodily interaction. How it manifests: Creating live radiophonic plays, sound poetry improv, physical interventions on mic, and telematic, real-time audio exchanges between performers and public spaces.

My Practice

I explored the implications of digital transition through my own radio art practice, focusing upon the productive tensions which characterise the artist’s engagement with wireless radio technology, specifically between the autonomous potentialities offered by the reappropriation of obsolete technology and the new infrastructures and networks promised by the exponential development of new media.

I worked around the framework of FM and analogue ‘Switch Off ‘ I used this as an umbrella for series of fictive trace station, radio art works, which offered possible futures for FM radio long after it has been abandoned by sanctioned broadcasters.

These were Radio Mind (2011), Numbers(2012), Lone Broadcast (2012), Sound Station(2012), Babble Station (2012), Commercial Breaks(2012), Radio Jam (2013), Radio Recall (2013) and Spiritual Radio(2014) they are documented on this blog alongside current related works Tree Radio (2015) Dream Vessels (2016) Transmissions Spores (2016) which came directly out of this research and took forward my expanded practice using transmission with hand built transmitters. Each of my trace stations employed differing types of radio art practice to recall its past uses and focus on its future. The works were conducted via broadcast actions, interventions, installations, micro broadcasts, Radio Arts workshops, interviews and a symposia.

Read it at https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/id/eprint/8748/

PhD Overview

Chapter One: Histories

• Historical Mapping: Here, I take the reader on an extensive media archaeology through a century of international audio, literature, and telecommunication experiments across Italy, Russia, France, Mexico, Germany, the USA, Ireland, Amsterdam, Japan, Poland, Canada, Austria, Cuba and Australia to show where my five typologies were born. I hand the reader the radical, early twentieth-century manifestos of the Italian Futurists and Russian Constructivists, who first claimed the wireless spectrum as their own, alongside the early Mexican wireless sound poetry of Estridentista poet Luis Quintanilla (writing as Kyn Taniya), whose 1926 work was directly inspired by early Mexican radio broadcasts.
• Expanding the Horizon: I then guide the reader across the Atlantic to explore foundational Canadian radio art history, where I highlight the pioneering texts edited by Dan Lander and Micah Lexier—such as Sound by Artists (1990)—and unpack Lander’s extensive 1990s theoretical writings as critical pillars for defining experimental Canadian audio performance and sound sculpture.
• Signal & Spectrum: To show the reader how early broadcast structures dictated signal boundaries, I examine technical engineering innovations like the BBC’s early “Dramatic Control” panels. Finally, I lead the reader toward the emergence of Transmission as a pure art form by unpacking Max Neuhaus’s dynamic Radio Events, Tetsuo Kogawa’s “Micro FM” movement in Japan, and the work of Polish artist Wojciech Bruszewski, whose Radio Ruins of Art—an ongoing analogue art radio licence granted in Poland—functions as a deep philosophical discourse on infinity born out of his lived experience under Polish martial law.

Chapter Two: Public Radio, UK Community Radio and the Internet

• 2.1 Introduction: I map the political friction between state broadcasting and alternative spaces, tracking post-war laboratories like France’s Club d’Essai (RTF), the UK’s BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and Poland’s PRES, contrasting them with Germany’s rigid WDR. The vital role of supportive public service radio, channels like the ABC and Austria’s ORF for its long-running Kunstradio – Radiokunst strand which funds international radio artists.
• 2.2 Community Arts Radio in UK History: Resonance FM, Sound Art Radio, Radiophenia and others.
• 2.3 Scope for UK Artists: I look at the creative space left for British sound creators, examining community radio in the UK
• 2.4 Funding: I examine the material conditions and financial frameworks available to practitioners, tracking how international funding models impact the sustainability of dedicated artists’ radio stations across the UK, Ireland, and Canada.
• 2.5 Transparency and Editorial Concerns: I examine regulatory boundaries and hidden editorial constraints, assessing the friction between an artist’s desire for uninhibited sonic expression and the rigid compliance mandates enforced by traditional broadcast regulators.
• 2.6 Wider Sector Issues: I analyse broader structural crises and political limitations across the radio sector, looking back to the historical precedent of the Italian Free Radio Movement (Radio Libere) which broke state spectrum monopolies.
• 2.7 The Internet: I consider how web-streaming, digital archiving, and net-radio models dismantle traditional geographical transmission footprints, shifting radio from a collective, localised broadcast event into a fragmented online audio space.
• 2.8 Transmission Arts: I conclude by evaluating the transmission arts movement, mapping how artists treat the convergence of physical airwaves, web nodes, and electromagnetic space as a fluid, expanded medium.

Chapter Three: Defining Radio Art

• Theoretical Framework: In this pivotal text, I move deep into the conceptual parameters of the medium. I explicitly map out how radio art operates in direct relation to—yet remains distinct from—the established borders of sound art, electronic music, and broader media art.
• The Paradigm Shift: I guide the reader through a rigorous breakdown of the digital era’s shifting parameters, unpacking the philosophical and creative implications of moving radio away from a raw, collective, localised broadcast event into the modern era of fragmented streaming.

Chapter Four: Case Studies

• Field Research: Here, I test the five core typologies against extensive qualitative interviews with prominent modern sound practitioners.
• The Practitioners: I demonstrate exactly how radio art fluidly expands out of standard radio receivers and into physical galleries and civic architecture by mapping my categories directly to these five case studies who I interviewed :
  • Vicki Bennett (People Like Us) to illustrate Appropriation
  • Anna Friz to illustrate Transmission
  • LIGNA (the German media collective) to illustrate Activism
  • Hildegard Westerkamp to illustrate Soundscape
  • Gregory Whitehead to illustrate Performance
• Practice: I also tie this back to my own practice, I share how my background with independent, UK-based audio hubs like Resonance FM and Radio Arts provided the real-world framework for evaluating these discipline-blurring shifts.

Chapter Five: Practice Review, Critique, and Analysis

• The Portfolio: In this final chapter, I present a rigorous review, critique, and structural analysis of the studio-based portfolio that fulfils my practice-led PhD research.
• The Culmination: I show the reader how all five of my theoretical types converge into my own radio art outputs.

Chapter Five’s synthesis of the full suite of eight speculative, fictional FM “trace stations” that formed my exhibition portfolio. This breakdown outlines how all eight of these distinct trace stations anchor my five core typologies:

1. Radio Mind

• The Work: This station maps the overlapping thresholds of communication technologies, early twentieth-century Protestantism, seafaring pirate cults, and telepathy. It features black static “bird radios” trapped in physical fishing nets, modified vintage 1920s receivers, and cloaked roaming missionaries broadcasting looped tracks.
• The Categories: Performance & Transmission — It treats the airwaves as a live, temporal stage, weaving text from historic avant-garde manifestos and psychic scripts into an unstable, multi-frequency performance.

2. Numbers

• The Work: A direct homage to shortwave numbers stations active since the Cold War. It imagines a future where numbers stations shift to the vacant terrestrial FM dial, used by outlawed political movements, gangs, and rogue agents to send coded cryptograms. The soundscape features DIY surround-sound micro-broadcasts encoded with activist tweets from the Occupy movement.
• The Categories: Activism & Appropriation — It subverts the clinical, surveillance architecture of shortwave spy broadcasting to serve as a tactical, micro-frequency tool for modern public resistance.

3. Radio Recall

• The Work: A community-centric archive built using a growing collection of vintage, readymade radio receivers. It broadcasts localised oral histories, capturing people’s personal radio memories alongside structured incidental soundscapes sourced from MW, LW, and SW static bands.
• The Categories: Soundscape & Appropriation — It turns standard consumer technology into an archive of radiophonic memory, capturing the changing auditory footprint of community tech before it disappears.

4. Lone Broadcast

• The Work: A highly minimalist, conceptual transmission piece first exhibited at the Old Lookout Gallery in Broadstairs and in Barcelona. It focuses on isolation, capturing the solitary, unguided nature of an automated signal transmitting endlessly out into an empty or vacated airspace.
• The Category: Transmission — It emphasises the pure material mechanics of a signal cutting through the spectrum, drawing attention to the poetics of a lonely transmission with no guaranteed receiver.

5. Sound Station

• This station focuses entirely on pure audio soundscape broadcast experimentation and abstract text, moving completely away from corporate, linear programming formats. It plays with raw noise, frequencies, and unformatted sound art.
• The Category: Performance — It employs the radio apparatus as a live, temporal instrument for real-time acoustic generation.

6. Babble Station

• A site-specific piece created using localised community recording workshops. It features an abstracted audio tapestry composed entirely out of the multi-layered vocal babble, coos, and non-linear language fragments of babies and toddlers.
• The Categories: Soundscape & Performance — It treats pre-linguistic human sound as an acoustic ecology, subverting the standard authoritative, speaking voice typically mandated by institutional broadcasters.

7. Commercial Break

• A tactical subversion of the corporate capitalism that dominates modern commercial radio. It takes the familiar structures, jingles, and hyper-edited pacing of radio advertisements and strips away the consumer products, leaving behind a jarring, rhythmic critique of media commercialisation.
• The Categories: Appropriation & Activism — It hijacks and hacks institutional mass-media audio structures, turning the language of corporate advertising against itself to defend public spectrum autonomy.

8. Radio Jam

• A live broadcast network interaction first realised at venues like the V22 Gallery in London. It relies on real-time feedback loops, signal interference, and participatory live audio generation to disrupt clear broadcast lines.
• The Categories: Activism & Transmission — It treats signal jamming and spectrum friction not as technical errors, but as active creative materials, physically occupying space on the dial to resist centralised signal control.

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A Distinctive Contribution to Radio Art Research

Margaret A. Hall’s ( Magz Hall’s ) doctoral thesis, Radio After Radio: Redefining Radio Art in the Light of New Media Technology Through Expanded Practice (2015), makes a distinctive contribution to radio-art research by bringing together international histories of experimental radio, UK broadcasting practice, critical theory and sustained artistic experimentation. Rather than treating radio art as a narrowly defined genre or as sound art transmitted through a broadcast channel, Hall approaches it as a historically rich, technologically evolving and interdisciplinary field of creative practice.

One of the thesis’s greatest strengths is its historical breadth. Hall connects British broadcasting traditions and experimental practices with international developments in radiophonic art, free radio, micro-broadcasting, transmission art and avant-garde experimentation. This creates a nuanced account of radio art as a field shaped by artists, institutions, technologies and alternative networks of communication. Her research does not simply document what radio artists have done; it investigates how particular practices emerged, what possibilities they opened up and why their significance continues to matter.

Hall’s five facets of radio art—appropriation, transmission, activism, soundscape and performance—provide a particularly engaging way of understanding this diversity. By bringing together different practitioners and artistic approaches, she develops a framework that makes the complexity of radio art legible without reducing it to a single definition. Radio becomes a medium through which artists can appropriate existing technologies, challenge systems of communication, intervene in public life, explore acoustic environments and create performative encounters with listeners.

The thesis is especially compelling in its treatment of expanded practice. Hall investigates what happens when radio moves beyond conventional broadcasting into installations, live performance, public interventions and experimental uses of analogue and digital technologies. Her work challenges the assumption that radio’s identity depends upon established broadcast infrastructures or familiar programme formats. Instead, radio emerges as a flexible artistic medium whose boundaries can be continually reconsidered through creative practice.

This argument is grounded in Hall’s own artistic research. Her Switch Off project, with its fictional trace stations and speculative engagement with the future of FM broadcasting, explores how technological change can become a catalyst for artistic invention. The possible disappearance or transformation of an established broadcasting system becomes an opportunity to ask broader questions about cultural memory, technological obsolescence, access to the spectrum and the future of radio as an artistic resource. Hall’s practice therefore does more than illustrate her theoretical claims: it actively tests them.

Another important dimension of the thesis is its attention to the relationship between radio’s historical traditions and its contemporary possibilities. By connecting earlier experiments with new media technologies, Hall resists a simplistic narrative in which digital innovation automatically supersedes analogue broadcasting. Instead, she demonstrates the continuing creative potential of older technologies and the importance of understanding radio art through overlapping histories, practices and technical systems. Her research is consequently relevant not only to radio studies, but also to sound art, media archaeology, performance studies and interdisciplinary artistic research.

What makes Radio After Radio particularly distinctive is the relationship it establishes between historical scholarship and artistic experimentation. Hall combines the recovery and interpretation of radio-art histories with a practice-based investigation into how the medium might develop. The result is a thesis that is simultaneously historical, critical and speculative: it asks what radio art has been, how it operates and what it might become.