Daniel Gilfillan, Arizona State University

Destabilizing Globalization through Experimental Radio:
The Example of Gordan Paunovi? and Kunstradio

On the evening of April 29, 1999, NATO Operation “Allied Force” began its 37th day of air operations in response to the conflict in Kosovo with “the single most intense period of attacks over Belgrade” – the fourth aerial bombing of Belgrade in the 20th-century and the first on the European continent since World War II. That same evening in Vienna, from 10:15 to 11:55 p.m., Kunstradio, a program on the Ö1 cultural channel of the ORF, broadcast a live mix by radio artist Gordon Paunovi? – 100 minutes in support of the free voice of Radio B92 in Belgrade. In this 100-minute broadcast, two cities, Vienna and Belgrade, inextricably linked through their common geographical, cultural, economic and historic ties to the Danube, are brought together through a convergence of information networks. The outcome is a soundscape, an audio montage, which opens lines of communication to various points (personal diaries, ambient sound, cultural performances) that compose the Belgrade city fabric at this specific spatiotemporal moment – April 1999.

Frederic Jameson, in the preface to the edited volume The Cultures of Globalization casts globalization within the horizons of communication and economics, stating: “the concept of globalization reflects the sense of an immense enlargement of world communication, as well as […] of a world market” (xi). This paper explores the web of issues foregrounded by Paunovi?’s radio art piece and by the Kunstradio program’s role in its broadcast. Specifically, the global media event prompted by the NATO response to the Kosovo conflict in spring 1999 overlooks and diminishes the local experience of that event. Missing are the haunting sounds of air raid sirens, and the rationalized stories from those entrenched in Belgrade’s cityscape, which detail the slow process of coping with the impending loss of one’s home, one’s city, one’s identity. Paunovi?’s combination of tracks from archived music productions, voice overlays, essay commentaries, and live Internet feeds, helps to trace these moments of identity displacement, while simultaneously challenging the dominant telecommunications paradigms representative of the convergent systems of globalization. At the center of the piece are voiced excerpts from two diaries, one by Jasmina Tesanovic, a 45-year-old writer and filmmaker, and the other by Slobodan Markovic, a 21-year-old computer science student at the University of Belgrade. These two accounts offer eyewitness testimony to the war in Belgrade, rationalized observations of the impending chaos percolating around them. On March 31, 1999 Tesanovic writes: “Fear has entered in my mind: I don't know if I dare think what I do, I cannot cope with reality: is it possible that we are all sacrificed for somebody's lack of political judgment, or worse, madness. I am censoring my thoughts afraid to think in personal tones, afraid to be heard, judged and executed. The conflict is escalating, the atrocities are daily happenings.”

The collaboration between Paunovi? and Kunstradio to draw attention to these “other voices” not captured by the global media network, highlights as well an engaged use of tactical media, an idea of media that seeks in some way to appropriate the more traditional channels of media as relays of power, and use them as relays for dissent and disruption. With war torn Belgrade and her daily struggles as the geopolitical epicenter, Paunovi? leaves larger issues of importance on a continental and global level fundamentally unspoken: the social and economic impact of the opening of Eastern Europe, the issues of a common European identity with the creation of a unified Europe. Yet, in hindsight, it is difficult not to weave these very issues into the social, political and cultural commentary that “Other Voices” produces. The sounds of displacement – rumors of atrocities in Serbo-Croatian, the fear of a disembodied identity that forms the heart of the broadcast’s two electronic diaries, the constant air raid sirens that creep into the background of the listener’s minds, the impossibility of anti-Milosevic protest – make the realities of this war audible, recordable and traceable, and transpose local experience, local identification with the war, onto the European and global imagination. In the end, what the global media network has described as the Kosovo conflict or the war in Yugoslavia, becomes instead part of each listener’s identity, “eine humanitäre Katastrophe.”

NATO spokesman, Jamie Shea, in his morning briefing of April 30, 1999. URL: <http://www.nato.int/kosovo/press/b990430b.htm>. Accessed 02.13.2004.

Jameson, Fredric and Masao Miyoshi, eds. The Cultures of Globalization. London: Duke UP, 1998.