THE RADIO TIMES

The radio takes the deincarnation of the telephone further, fragmenting consciousness in newer and more surprising ways. Where the telephone collapses space yet remains a strictly interpersonal medium, the radio also collapses time, allowing us to listen to the voices of the dead as well as the merely distant.

The radio absorbed recording media such as the phonograph and then the tape recorder to do this, and later also absorbed the telephone to produce the phone-in format. Radio fragments consciousness still further by allowing people in different rooms of a building to listen to different programmes, while people in different cities, even different countries, can tune in to the same broadcast. A listener can move from station to station at will, tuning in to local, national or international radio, to individual enthusiasts around the world, to commercial transport networks, or to the electromagnetic noise of the cosmos.

In addition to voices, the radio fills the air with music, immersing us in an ocean of sound that can become the soundtrack for our lives, a form of incidental music/muzak. Like telephones, radios have become ever more portable, eventually disappearing from view to take up residence inside our ears and the devices, buildings and vehicles we use to live, travel, work and amuse ourselves. We take all this for granted, yet to previous generations this would be indistinguishable from magic.

Where the Phone Book is a more-or-less annual publication, the Radio Times is weekly. Much of its listings information is also available in newspapers or online, free of charge, and therefore seems to have transcended any single publication. The Radio Times is constantly revealing the future yet always about to be consigned to the past, the place where programmes become cultural history, material for future nostalgia/reminiscence programming.

To portray this bewildering yet familiar fragmentation of consciousness I reduced the body and the text to separate bits, identifiable only as fragments rather than a coherent or unified whole. The loss of the sense of time and place is paralleled in the fragmentation of the text and the image of the radio listener as a dismembered body floating in a sea of static. The consequence of being freed in this way is that consciousness is set adrift in time and space, everywhere and nowhere until it returns to the body, as it always must.