Radio Before Radio - a history
Is it possible, as Brecht proposed and some still feel today, that radio was an invention that no one had called for? Where cinema had the allegory of Plato’s Cave, was there really no fantasy that prefigured the advent of radio? After all, in the 17th century Cyrano de Bergerac was already dreaming of mechanical books that “talked”.The era of the Enlightenment experimented with the creation of artificial voices in both fiction and science, in doing so it presented the idea of detached sounds and invisible voices creating psycho-aesthetic force fields long before the technical invention of the radio apparatus. This response is a historical expedition through the times of radio before radio.
Brigitte Felderer, curator and lecturer at the Universität für angewandte Kunst, Vienna. Many years of research on the history, creation and representability of the voice. Felderer curated the exhibition "Phonorama" at the ZKM in 2005 and "The Sound of Art" (Museum der Moderne, Salzburg in 2008). Lives and works in Vienna.