Transmission Borderadio – A Radio Play in 3 Acts
Conceptual inquiries about ownership of the airwaves by Sisters Akousmatica
Border_Radio is a conceptual inquiry about ownership of the airwaves. Originally commissioned as a video and ‘radio play’ script for Donner forme a l’ether Espace Multimedia Gatner (France), the project is an on-going mode of exploration through performance lectures, an evolving radio play script on our public etherpad, a series of sound works that expand and contract on the original script, and public consultation.
The Border_Radio play is written in three acts: Phonic atolls ~ Spectrum Auction ~ Decolonising Wavelengths. Each act represents an unfolding conceptual space, exploring questions about sovereignty, ownership, transmission law and international treaties, history and potentialities. Through this on-going, long form process we wish to pick away at the edges of transmission legitimacy, to try to understand how we can better engage and collaborate with electromagnetic forces beyond the colonialist paradigm.
Original Script
Act I: Phonic atolls
A person speaks: Radio waves transcend borders. What is the nationality of a radio wave? Does it change as it travels the world? Invisible waves moving across invisible borders.
Waves are waves are waves are waves
Trying to touch it: is that frequency warm, or prickly?
This radio wave was born on the line between sand and water, between rocks and air, 5 millimeters above the surface, or 50 km under the horizon.
How can what we cannot see be owned?
A voice [quietly, quickly]: Une onde les préserve.
Un spectre les relie.
Elles ondulent sans se croiser, formes fermées sur elles-mêmes, centrées sur les forces centrifuges, elles taillent leurs chemins dans les airs denses d’un monde étouffé.
Who decides the invisible limits?
Geographic power
When the sea reclaims the atoll, who will receive the radio messages?
Radio is not of the earth.
Radio is its own network of being.
Act 2: Spectrum Auction
[Voiceover] Human profit through natural resources is a common practice.
Spectrum auctions are bids on ephemeral, natural frequencies: Auctioning the moon. Selling stars. Selling water. Selling the right to access air.
Nature has rights.
What is nature’s spectrum of freedom?
Comment ce que nous ne pouvons pas voir peut-il être possédé?
Qui établit les limites invisibles?
The right to transmit signals is assigned to those who can afford it.
Spectrum resources are characterised as scarce.
Beauty contests for electromagnetic forces
Caveat emptor
[Voiceover]
What is it to subvert the supply and demand for signal allocation?
Dark web, black market
_Pirate radio_
ambiguous terrain
The legal framework for airspace is that which is used for the ordinary enjoyment of the land: Bernstein of Leigh (Baron) v Skyviews & General Ltd (1978) QB 479
It does not extend to airplanes
Or satellites
Therefore, one could extrapolate, it does not extend to Earth-Moon-Earth propagation. Once the airwaves reach the cruising altitude of a passenger plane are they no longer subject to the laws of the land from whence they were generated?
liberté atmosphérique
De combien de signaux avons-nous besoin pour faire exploser l’air?
Act 3: Decolonising Wavelengths
A voice: [whispering] unstable media for unstable futures
In 1894 Guglielmo Giovanni Maria Marconi, the 1st Marquis of Marconi was busy demonstrating the power of radio waves for his mother. In Australia the push for federalism was in full swing, and the genocide and oppression of Australia’s first nations people had been underway for nearly one hundred years. It was around the time of Australian federation that New Zealand became the first country to licence it’s airwaves, in order to protect government revenue.
Avoid interferences
low-powered voices
crackle
hisspopnoise
But what can be heard in the in-between?
[inaudible]
The Wireless Telegraphy Act was enacted in Australia in 1905, the first radio licence granted in 1921.
How can we own radio waves that exist on stolen land?
Sovereignty was never ceded.