In 2023, radio in Germany will be 100 years old. To mark this anniversary, the project "Listening to the World - 100 Years of Radio" has now been launched as a cooperation between the Professorship "Experimental Radio" at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, the Goethe-Institut, Deutschlandfunk Kultur and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of World Cultures).
In Germany, Berliner Funk Stunde A.G. begins regular broadcasting on 29 October 1923. The first German radio play follows almost a year later. In 1924, the first radio dramas also start broadcasting from London and Paris, heralding the birth of radio art. This double anniversary - 100 years of radio and 100 years of radio art - should be an occasion to explore the historical connection between radio and globalisation and to explore international, partly unknown archives and histories of radiophony.
Hardly any cultural technique has had such a lasting influence on our coexistence as radio listening. Radio unites peoples and creates identity, but it is also used for propaganda purposes and as an instrument of espionage and power. It has been a medium of globalisation from the beginning and plays a key role in colonial history. We want to explore this in more detail and put the listeners at the centre.
Every region of the world has its own stories of listening and unlistening, of gathering and dividing communities around the radio. But because radio waves do not stop at national borders, these stories are interconnected in many ways. The project would like to explore the regional differences in the four-part series of events "The Bauhaus.Listening.Workshop" on different continents: in South America, Southeast Asia and Southern Africa, among others, artists, researchers, media professionals and listeners from the respective regions will address various questions about listening as a cultural technique in its diversity and its transcultural interconnections. The first workshop is planned for March 2023 in Montevideo, Uruguay.
The workshop and research results will be collected on a new knowledge platform, the "Transcultural Listening Map", and will in turn provide the source material for a podcast series on Deutschlandfunk Kultur and for productions by the participating countries. The Haus der Kulturen der Welt House of World Cultures) in Berlin is planning two events in October 2023 and 2024 to mark the anniversary of "100 Years of Radio", in which artistic and discursive positions will be presented around the project.