Being There / Being Then. Rhetoric and Poetics of Tele-Presence from Art Radio to Radio-Art

This essay identifies different conceptualizations of tele-presence in the discourses around radio as a mass and an artistic medium. I will first refer to the historical discourses on radio and early “art radio” to argue that broadcasting in its formative years elicited imagination of the world as resounding space. Rhetorics of presence across physical distances were alternatively conceptualized as “you are there” (i.e., being transported in another place) or “it is here” (i.e., bringing places and people into the media user’s environment). Secondly, I will focus on properly said radio-art of the late twentieth century: I will deal with Murray Schafer’s and Bill Fontana’s art works to explain how they took up similar rhetorics of tele-presence and reconfigured them in a “poetic of re-presencing” (i.e., “it is now” and “being then”).