Chapter 4: Radio as Collage Art

There is a relatedness between the law I practice and art I make, a connection related to second chances. Both are about reaching a hand in and trying to stop what looks like giving up on something.

—Matt Gonzalez, collage artist and public defender, 2023[1]

Collage Logics

As much as radio privileges liveness, it also has an affinity for the notion of the archive. There is a logic to this; as Diana Taylor has written, the archive and the repertoire “have always been important sources of information, both exceeding the limitations of the other, in literate and semi-literate societies” (2003, 21). Still, the idea of archiving sounds meant to be heard in a specific listening area at a specific airtime can seem contradictory to the value of synchronous listening that many of my station colleagues alluded to as key, in their eyes, to the medium. Why archive radio? In what form? To what ends?

One way to address these questions is to understand radio as a medium often based in logics of collage, with programmers putting together preexisting recordings—archival materials, broadly construed—in aesthetically particular ways to create a new work. Certainly, the temporal and experiential aspects between a visual collage on display and a live broadcast are very different, but the foundational notion of making art through thoughtfully selecting and assembling existing materials is apt in theorizing the artistic impulses of community radio programmers (and other radio programmers and producers who arrange station soundscapes) and how they engage with archives. Most radio stations use previously recorded sounds extensively. Music radio programmers in particular stitch together song after song, their choices creating palettes that may be monochromatic or soft gradients or bold and jarring. At times, they bring other recordings—advertisements, public service announcements, testimonials, pre-produced modules, etc.—into the mix.

I open this chapter with a quote from San Francisco-based public defender and artist Matt Gonzalez. Gonzalez has appeared on Pacifica station KPFA in Berkeley many times, both as a guest on various public affairs programs and as a substitute host on long-running talk show Sunday Salon (KPFA n.d.). He is likely better known to most residents of San Francisco in the 2000s for running against Gavin Newsom (later a two-term California governor) in the 2003 San Francisco mayoral election. Backed by the progressive Green Party, Gonzalez placed a close second to Democratic establishment-backed Newsom. I invoke his campaign here in part because of its framing as a grassroots endeavor, especially relative to Newsom’s. In her introduction to an anthology of accounts of the Gonzalez campaign by different staff and volunteers, Nicole Walter insists that Gonzalez’s near-victory “wasn’t accomplished by corporations, big money, or high-paid ex-presidents and ex-presidential candidates.[2] This was due to the efforts of the people” (2004, 9). Gonzalez himself commented similarly during his campaign: “I kind of think it’s part of a larger social movement. I’m just the front guy right now” (Wellman 2003). I read both comments as allusions to collage logics, not only in terms of aesthetics (Gonzalez’s campaign was known for mismatched, handmade buttons and signs) but in terms of multivocality. Fittingly, in his art, Gonzalez focuses on working with what is literally on the ground in arranging collages, much as community radio programmers base their work in recordings and materials that already exist. Of his found material collage art, Gonzalez has said, “I can’t make a color I can’t find” (in Vochatzer 2023). Like Gonzalez, radio programmers center their sets on what they have rather than what they make from scratch. Even with these self-imposed limitations, though, collage is an act of creation. So is radio programming. Community radio, which gives its programmers more agency in choosing their source material, is perhaps prone to more surprising collages than commercial radio, in which programmers are prescribed a much smaller and more specific pool of music to put together, but both, in their ways, creatively rearrange recorded music,[3] the body of which constitutes a kind of colossal, globally dispersed archive.

Writing about some of his sound art with Coco Fusco, Guillermo Gómez-Peña writes about their radiophonic strategies as invoking “the culture of recycling—the idea that an artwork can be continuously recycled, reformatted and recontextualized” (1994, 229) He is speaking not just of the way archival materials are used in a radio performance, but the way that a radio art piece can then itself be reused. In the digital era, when archives and audiences both are in many ways more accessible and widespread than ever, the possibilities for such mobilizations are perhaps greater and more diverse than they have ever been. So, too, are possibilities for radiophonic knowledge production.

Radio technology has long had unique abilities to shape the local knowledge that in turn shapes radio organizations. In the early years of domestic radio, writes Michele Hilmes, “listeners’ tuning in by the tens of thousands to one specific program airing at a specific time created that shared simultaneity of experience crucial to Benedict Anderson’s concept of the modern ‘imagined community’ of nationhood” (2012, 351). The virtual relationships inherent in Anderson’s notion, she goes on to explain, are “based on nothing so tangible as concrete geographic boundaries, common ethnic heritage, or linguistic homogenization, but instead on assumptions, images, feelings, consciousness,” and “it is not only the technical means of communication, but the central narratives, representations, and ‘memories’—and strategic forgetfulness—that they circulate that tie the nation together” (352). Though terrestrial radio audiences may be smaller today, these radiophonic imaginaries of space, place, and belonging are still politically charged. So, too, are archiving practices.

In this chapter, I examine dynamic sets of practices and relations that shape radio archives and consider how they have been mobilized and to what ends, with particular attention to how, as parts of radiophonic collages, they affect imagined communities/community imaginaries. These archives may have a mostly asynchronous relationship to radio broadcasting, such as those made up of apparently static, tangible or virtual sound objects. They may have a more synchronous relationship to radio broadcasting, as is the case in recordings of live, on-air performances in which programmers’ bodies of knowledge—their repertoires, broadly construed—emerge. Often, they share aspects of these different types of relationships, and thus are best thought through as archives, plural, rather than as one discrete archive and then another. These radiophonic sound objects, broadcast events, and the various archival structures in which they are stored are inseparably intertwined. Thinking through the relationships and pluralities at the heart of radio archives and what knowledge emerges from them suggests possibilities for how, in different contexts, these archives can be accessed and repurposed. Considering these possibilities sheds light on deeply rooted questions of representation which inhere when considering archiving as a medium working in proximity and tension to a medium as spatiotemporally bound as radio.

[1] In Vochatzer 2023.

[2] Both former U.S. President Bill Clinton and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore came to San Francisco in person to endorse Newsom.

[3] This is a claim I can only make about platforms with human programmers. In the case of stations that rely heavily on automation, the claim that a process of “creatively rearranging” is taking place would require much deeper investigation into the specifics of the mechanics of automation.