Who is this person? Tetsuo Kogawa is a really very influential figure in underground radio art and media-art theory, with over 30 years of collaboration and connection with some of the most influential artists and thinkers of that period, worldwide[1] .
He's perhaps best known internationally as the founding father of the micro-fm boom in Japan in the 1980s. Inspired by 'Autonomia' movement and their pirate radio stations in 1970's Italy, Kogawa set up Radio Home Run as a resistance to the commodification of subculture; theorising, practically enabeling and kick starting a Japanese boom which saw thousands of tiny radio stations set up and run, by and for communities across the country. They became a space for polymorphous chaos, a kind of chaos found through difference and "order through fluctuations."
What is he doing? Like loads of people at the festival, Tetsuo Kogawa is interested in potential: the potential of radio and broadcasting as an artistic and political medium. Here is a direct quote from him. "Throughout its history, despite efforts by the Futurists in the 1920s, radio has been considered largely a means of communication rather than an art form. Therefore, it is ironic that just as traditional forms of radio are in decline, its possibilities as an art form are reaching extreme potentials. If, as Heidegger[2] suggests, extreme possibilities are reached at the end of something, what then ends with radio? What is radio's "most extreme possibility?"
Why is it interesting? Well, I just think Tetsuo Kogawa is an extremely interesting thinker who applies deeply significant trains of thought to artistic practice as it reflects on, engages with and aspires to change the world. We shouldn't be ashamed to ask for this kind of engagement. I don't really think of Tetsuo as a musician, or sound artist; he is a radio artist, part of which crosses over into performance. Here's two ways he brings radio art into performance.
[1] He's published over 30 books, had a series of interviews with Félix Guttari, has known and collaborated with pioneers of experimental music in Japan from the 50's on (big guns like Yasanao Tone and Takehisa Kosugi and so on)
[2] And here's a direct quote from Heidegger (wrote Being and Time ? a very influential 20th century philosophical work on what being in the world means and sort of discussed very briefly already in this booklet ? see Hermann Nitsch): "We understand the end of something all too easily in the negative sense as a mere stopping, as the lack of constitution, perhaps even as decline and impotence, the end suggests the completion and the place in which the whole of history is gathered in its most extreme possibility."
Barry Esson, the director of Instal in "Instal 09" catalogue, 2009
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