2008
Re-Inventing Radio: Aspects of Radio as Art
In his essay "Inventing and Re-Inventing Radio" (2008), Dieter Daniels identifies Max Neuhaus as the pioneer who transformed radio from a one-way transmission medium into a two-way musical instrument.
Daniels focuses on Neuhaus’s landmark work Public Supply (1966) to illustrate the "re-invention" of the medium:
Daniels explains how Neuhaus bypassed the traditional "broadcast" model. By using the telephone network to bring sounds into the station and the radio transmitter to send them out, Neuhaus created a real-time, closed-circuit feedback loop involving the entire city.
Radio is typically a "frontal" medium (one sender, many receivers). Daniels argues that Neuhaus "re-invented" it as a distributed network, where the distinction between the performer (the artist) and the audience (the callers) was erased.
The essay highlights how Neuhaus used radio to create a "virtual architecture". Because the sound was happening simultaneously across the broadcast area but was generated by callers from diverse locations, it created a unified "sonic space" that existed only over the airwaves.
Daniels positions Neuhaus as a visionary who anticipated digital networking and interactive media. He suggests that Public Supply was a precursor to modern "social media" or networked audio, long before the technology for such interaction was digitized.