Chapter 4: Radio as Collage Art

Critical Metacommunicative Archival Phenomena 

(De/Re)contextualization 

It is not groundbreaking to point out that archiving practices always include acts of recontextualization, suggesting—perhaps—that acts of decontextualization must have taken place. Adorno feared the destruction of the aura. Benjamin praised it. I look past them to the nuance afforded these acts by Diana Taylor:

“Archival” memory exists as documents, maps, literary texts, letters, archaeological remains, bones, videos, films, CDs, all those items supposedly resistant to change… Archival memory works across distance, over time and space; investigators can go back to reexamine an ancient manuscript, letters find their addresses through time and place, and computer discs at times cough up lost files with the right software… What changes over time is the value, relevance, or meaning of the archive, how the items it contains get interpreted, even embodied. (2003, 19)

Taylor goes on to argue against the myth of the unmediated archive and to present the repertoire, which interacts with the archive, as embracing agency, presence, and performance—aspects that are part of any presentation of archival materials. Collage practices draw attention to similar values of agency and movement. Art critic Lucy Lippard describes the feminist collage aesthetic as “putting things together without divesting them of their own identities… a metaphor for cultural democracy” (1995, 209). Recontextualization, in other words, does not mean an absolute decontextualization, but rather a contextual transportation, which I discuss here as (de/re)contextualization in discussing the movement of the aura away from its origins and toward a new destination while also acknowledging that this is not a complete or finite movement but has a more equivocal relationship to both ends of the supposed spectrum. It is not possible to avoid either facet of (de/re)contextualization in building an archive or mobilizing its items for other uses. It is important to take note of who (in terms of position) uses archival materials and to what ends, to reflect on the nature of the shifts in context and how they impact the knowledge produced by these materials.

The relationship between global dispersion and local utilization of media for expression is especially dynamic in an era of relatively accessible digital technology. Massimo Canevacci discusses the phenomenon of everyday expression through montage as a phenomenon of ubiquity, “imagination mixed to technology” (2012, 256). In the metacommunicational context of the digital-era everyday, he argues, ubiquity “produces an accelerated and horizontal floating process concerning space-time; a fragmented flux of segmented spaces/times is connected, crossed, and assembled within innovative and disturbing references on identity, genre, labor, roots, territory” (254). Spatiotemporal distinctions between people and tools of expression are less stable than ever and yet crucial to understand; the aura is reproducible in that space and time can be conveyed in new combinations and contexts, particularly using digital methods.

For radio, a medium once bound to space and time and now capable of a much more pliable relationship to them, as well as existing alongside/against on-demand streaming services available primarily online, there are productive implications for this understanding of ubiquity. Radio programmers at WFHB use archival materials to present and perform South-Central Indiana in relation to its past and present with new audiences and new values in mind, not destructive to the original context but cognizant of the past and its connection to the present. The news department initiative WFHB Rewind offers some worthwhile examples of such spatiotemporally mobile performances.