"Radiophonics, Noise & Understanding. Towards an Epistemology of Radio Art Using the Example of the Disaster Radio Plays by Andreas Ammer and FM Einheit as Artistic Research"

The radio plays by the German artistic duo Andreas Ammer and FM Einheit have received internationally numerous awards since the beginning of their collaboration in 1993 as well as quite a bit of scholarly attention from researchers all over the world. What in my opinion nevertheless so far has not been perceived and addressed properly is the omnipresence of noises/disturbances in its various forms, especially their disaster radio plays, as well the different reasons of such a peculiar way of working artistically with noises/disturbances. In my presentation I will argue that these noises/disturbances on the one hand echo the aesthetical discourse of the last approx. 400 years as well as aesthetic practices from 100 years of radio art. This philosophical grounding and these practices enable Ammer and Einheit to conduct artistic research on the ever-evolving level of the state of radio art in the age of digital reproducibility. On the other hand, because of the artistic way in which these noises are applied as well as composed in the disaster radio plays, they also grant access to the traumas of Germany’s fatal and brutal history in the 20th century. At the same time, they also offer an artistic remedy in line with Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of art and history. Using the example of the noises/disturbances in the disaster radio plays of Ammer and Einheit, I will discuss the epistemological potential of these specific radio art works.

Short Biography

Ania Mauruschat is a German media studies scholar (aesthetics & ecology, theory & culture) and lecturer, focussing on sound and radio. Trained as a journalist and an editor and educated in the humanities and social sciences in Munich, Germany, she worked from 2002 to 2012 full-time for the press and public radio stations. From 2012 to 2014 she worked as a scientific assistant, lecturer, and project manager at the chair for media aesthetics at the University of Basel (Switzerland). She is a Ph.D. candidate at English Department of the University of Basel and a member of the doctoral program “Epistemologien ästhetischer Praktiken” at the Collegium Helveticum in Zurich, Switzerland. From September 2021 to October 2023 she is a Marie-Curie-Research Fellow of the European Commission at the Sound Studies Lab of the University of Copenhagen, where her project “Sounding Crisis. Sounds and Energies within Climate Change” is hosted. (www.soundingciris.eu)

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