Introduction

Scapes

Undoubtedly the most well-known theory of scapes comes from Arjun Appadurai, who built a framework for modern global cultural flows on that suffix. He pinpointed five dimensions—ethnoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes, and ideoscapes—as interconnected in this model, “not objectively given relations… [but] deeply perspectival constructs, inflected by the historical, linguistic, and political situatedness of different actors” which are “the building blocks of imagined worlds, that is, the multiple worlds that are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe” (1996, 33). Certainly, each of the scapes Appadurai pinpoints comes into play in thinking through radio. Further, it is possible to understand the radioscape as a dimension in and of itself that foregrounds radio in studying the relationships that form imagined worlds.

In the realm of multimodal art, Edwin van der Heide has used the term radioscape in much this way, as the title of a 2004 piece in which radio served as a framing device and interactive tool. Participants in Radioscape navigated public space in Amsterdam carrying handheld radio receivers to interact with various sounds that Van der Heide disseminated throughout the area, in which he strategically placed radio wave transmitters. In a statement on the project, he explained that in doing so, “the space thus becomes almost tangible, allowing the participant to explore and remember positions and transitions. It is intuitive to navigate and reveals itself easily, while complex enough to require ongoing exploration” (2013, 16). Engaging the radioscape, for Van der Heide, means listening to radio signals with attention to not only time but space. Radio’s invisible presence, as the installation reminds us, is inextricable from both.

Carolyn Birdsall understands Van der Heide’s Radioscape as an intervention into sound-based tourism in Amsterdam, “generating user agency with mobile listening activity” in a setting “concerned with sound, space, and questions of (listener) interactivity” (2013, 126). This agentive potential is crucial to the scape framing. Continuing to discuss scapes as building blocks of imagined worlds, Appadurai writes of the so-called modern world that “many persons on the globe live in such imagined worlds (and not just in imagined communities) and thus are able to contest and sometimes even subvert the imagined worlds of the official mind and of the entrepreneurial mentality that surround them” (1996, 33). By focusing on agency, Radioscape makes space for such subversions.

I note Van der Heide’s piece here because it illustrates, albeit in a singular and deliberate spatiotemporal context, the implications of the small-r radioscape as I imagine it in the Appaduraian sense: radio-forward worldbuilding that happens on imaginative levels in relation to and always interconnected with other cultural flows. The radioscape includes radio stations, operators, broadcasts, and listeners, but it also stretches outward, bleeding into the networks and hegemonies that shape the narratives and by extension the counter-narratives that fuel media including but not limited to terrestrial radio. Its sonic, spatial, and social contours shape and are shaped by—at the risk of overstating it—everything else in the world. For radio research, it makes for an unwieldy object of study but a useful starting point, offering a backdrop in which radio is significant, dynamic, and vital today.

In addition to being cumbersome, the scapes model has other limitations. Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús writes that it “has allowed scholars to bracket emerging relationships in complex global flows of power” in useful ways, but “nevertheless relies on Andersonian notions of imagined communities, which construct fixed assertions of identity and nation that produce cohesive representational models” (2015, 12). She argues for a more flexible and complex interpretation of scapes not as imagined worlds, but assemblages.