Russian Signals

Allen S. Weiss Phantasmic Radio has in the preface this fine set of enumerations:

There is no single entity that constitutes "radio"; rather, there exits a multitude of radios. Radiophony is a heterogeneous domain, on the levels of its apparatus, its practice, its forms, and its utopias. A brief, and necessarily incomplete, sketch of some possibilities of non-mainstream concepts of radio will give an idea of this diversity: F.T. Marinetti: "wireless imagination" and futurist radio; Velmir Khlebnikov: revolutionary utopia and the fusion of mankind; Leon Trotsky: revolutionary radio; Dziga Vertoz: agitprop and the "Radio-Eye"; Bertolt Brecht: interactive radio and public communication; Rudolf Arnheim: radiophonic specificity and the critique of visual imagination; Upton Sinclair: telepathy and mental radio; Glenn Gould: studio perfectionism and "contrapuntal radio"; William Burroughs: cut-ups and the destruction of communication; Marshall McLuhan: the primitive extension of the central nervous system; and the labyrinthine radio narratives of Hörspiel; the diversity of community radios; free radio; guerilla radio; pirate radio; radical radio.

It is this passage that makes me wish for a comparative study of Khlebnikov and McLuhan. Just imagine what that might sound like

And so for day 562
27.06.2008