LIGNA: Radioballett, Leipzig 2003

The independent radio group LIGNA, which has been in existence since 1995, consists of the media theorists and radio artists Ole Frahm, Michael Hünersn and Torsten Michaelsen, who work in the Freien Sender Kombinat (FSK - “Free Broadcaster Combine), a non-commercial, local radio in Hamburg. LIGNA repeatedly designs experimental situations, which aim for the transgression of conventionally attributed competencies and the common fields of application of radio technology or the reactualization of its inherent, but forgotten or ignored potentials. More recent projects primarily address the initially apparently contradictory relationship of the production of dissemination and its mobilization in a mass medium or the creation of temporary public spheres associated with it in public, frequently regulated and surveilled spaces.

One example of this is the “Radio Ballet”. Initiated for the first time in Hamburg in 2002, this “exercise in unnecessary loitering” by hundreds of people assembled at the train station is choreographed through instructions via the headphones of portable radios that the participants carry with them. Directions from the ether thus enable not only the synchronization of gestures ­ partly prohibited at the train station ­ such holding out the hands to beg, but this is also a situationist appropriation of public space. The O.K reconstructs an action of this kind as an installation. While a documentation of the events at the Leipzig train station is displayed on a screen and the room is filled with the concomitant background noise, the original broadcast can be heard via headphones from an in-house radio broadcast and the radios provided.