kunstfunk: a telecommunication project for slow scan tv and amateur radio, vienna secession, june 13-17, 1984.

a project for the wiener festwochen'84 by BLIX (robert adrian, helmut mark, zelko wiener, karl kubacek, gerhard taschler)

excerpt from - "electronic space" by robert adrian, kunstforum #103 (im netz der systeme), cologne 1989 In 1984 the BLIX group in Vienna organised "KunstFunk", a one week project for the Wiener Festwochen'84 using amateur radio. The attractions were clear: radio transmission is free, a world-wide network exists, all media available for telephone are used by radio amateurs, and, in principle, amateur radio is a model for the way modern communications technology can be used by private individuals and groups. In practice however it is also a model of the way a communications medium becomes industrialised. Information and entertainment monopolies very quickly took control and radio became a mass medium and the experimenters who had created radio as a 2-way interactive medium were squeezed into smaller and narrower channels and increasingly restricted in the kind of material they could exchange. By the mid-1920's radio had become, along with film, the forerunner of what we now call the entertainment industry. In a sense Kunst-Funk was a sentimental attempt to experience what radio might have been like if it had not become a centralised mass-medium. But the strict licensing regulations and restrictions on content (e.g. no meaningful information aside from name, adress, call-letters and discussion of equipment - and radio amateurs are regularly monitored and prosecutions for infringments can result in confiscation of equipment or worse) have resulted in a ghetto mentality by radio amateurs which makes them extremely suspicious of outsiders and frightened of coming into conflict with the authorities by trying anything new - such as working with artists. It is also likely that the regulations, which put emphasis on the purely technical, discourage anyone who might be interested in the less technical aspects of the medium - such as projects by artists.