Only 10 years later, in 1980, the post-hippie rock industry had become one of the repressive aspects of capitalism's media machine. The democratic 'spectacle' had been enhanced by modern subconscious manipulation techniques derived from advertisement, the rise of 'telegenic' politicians such as Reagan to power and new techniques of opinion polling. In the early 1980ies centrist German political parties had reached a compromise over the liberalisation of democratic media. The deal foresaw the running of privately owned radio and TV in post-war West Germany for the first time. In exchange for that the left got so called Open Channels, something like a state sponsored (albeit on low level) community or citizen TV and radio. But those Open Channels were structured in such a way that they did not offer any real opportunity for dissenting voices and a different aesthetics. Apart from the positive aspect that some ethnic minorities gained access to a window into the media landscape the programmes only illustrated Enzensberger's dictum that, "the programs that the isolated amateurs mount are always only bad, outdated copies of what he in any case receives." (Enzensberger 1970/1996, p.71)
In 1985 I started to work as a media artist and I was at the same time writing a lot of poetry and fiction. In one of the fragments that I wrote at the time I formulated my criticism of the media landscape of the mid 1980ies. In that story fragment the media mainstream consisted of a state-business duopoly which exerted a near total mind control on the people. It was fought by two underground guerrilla media outfits. One was called Radio Subcom, a mobile radio station which broadcast counter-propaganda -- all the things the mainstream didn't want you to know; the other outfit was the much more radical and secretive O.T. (untitled). The name was the message. O.T. would not get involved with counter propaganda. It's only message was the black screen, it's only aim was to disrupt the broadcasts of the media mainstream in the hope that any prolonged black-out of the 'system-media' could trigger a revolution. As time would show, the more reformist agenda of Radio Subcom would survive (and maybe get compromised) whereas O.T. just vanished.
At that time I started working with the musician Urs Blaser alias Oil Blo and the graphic artist Antonia Neubacher. In 1986/87 Oil Blo converted an old Mercedes Hanomag into a mobile platform for media practice. The loading bay of the small truck got seperated into two parts. The back part remained loading bay and was carrying our special PA sound system. In the small middle compartment he installed a system of instrument racks which housed a small audiovisual studio. It had just enough space for a small video editing suite on Sony Betamax, an Atari, a mixer, some special effect machines and two skinny artists. Blaser's van became the physical hardware structure for the fictitional Radio Subcom. Thus, Neubacher designed a text based logo which was written in big white letters from bottom to top on one of the sides of the van. From then on Blaser, Neubacher and me formed the core of Subcom which could, for bigger projects, expand to up to 30 people.
With this van we travelled the roads of Europe as, what I would call in hindsight, a mobile tactical media unit. We saw ourselves as an interface mediating between the European underground and subcultural movements and the bourgeois media avantgarde sometimes also called media art. We declared that we intended to bring an 'artistic dimension' to the new paradigm of information. "Networking, co-ordination, the immaterial art of communication, the qualitative improvement of the stream of data" were our explicit goals (Subcom Dossier, 1988). Our early work between 1987 and 1988 had been dominated by a remix aesthetics. The sound sample, or what we called the 'cliché' was at the centre of our work. We understood the media mainstream as a totally reified and alienating environment. So we took samples from it and thought that by cutting it up and remixing and recontextualizing it we gave it new meaning.
But after our mobilisation through the van a new way of working emerged. Our idea about mobility was not influenced by romantic notions of the postmodern intellectual as a nomad. It was more practical, about being able to be mobile and to keep being able to be a fully functioning media unit. We could go around places, make field recordings, and then settle down somewhere for a couple of weeks to produce radio programmes which we distributed via pirates and legal free radio stations in Europe such as Radio 100 in Amsterdam, Radio 100 Berlin, Radio Lora, Radio Dreyeckland. We could also drive onto a derelict industrial estate or a squat or a social centre, unpack the sound system, put up the video projector and make an audiovisual performance, or a party, or both, within a few hours of arriving.
Moving around Europe with the slow pace of the old truck from squat to arts festival and back again, allowed us to experience the deep transformation of the political and social life of Europe from the sharp end. Around that time the mainstream media narration was about the transformation from an industrial society to an information society. But under this pre-text the power elites were trying to squash alternative and autonomous political movements. The spectre of RAF terrorism was used to clamp down on politically active scenes in Germany. The context, as we understood it then, was that the creation of the European Union was equal to building a corporate Europe, cleaned up, where the politically undesireable had either been locked up or made to hyde. This was the time, leading up to the Maastricht Treatment, when under our eyes fortress Europe became a reality. Travelling with a battered old van allowed us to gain insights into layers of those emerging control structures which we otherwise wouldn't have had.1
As by the end of the 1980ies the last 'open living spaces where alternative life styles could be tried out,' were closed down or battled for survival, the van was in a way like a sensor/probe, picking up the political movements of the day on the street level. The postmodern vagueness of the mid-80ies gave way to a new political clarity about the sharp divisions that were created in the New Europe. Moving around, recording and transporting messages from place to place was what we called 'physical networking'. Part of that was also to look for collaboration partners within the cultural avantgarde of the squatters and underground movements.
In 1987 we were introduced to Heidi Grundmann. In 1988 she commissioned us together with Julie Lazar from MOMA L.A. to produce our first radio art piece "Europe Report 1". The work was the synthesis of the mobile life-style and a new concept inspired by it. The remixing agenda was pushed to the background and we developed the concept of 'authentic' recordings as opposed to media clichés. In Europe Report I we painted a scenario where the fictitional New European Security Forces in their Star Wars uniforms cleansed the streets while bio-fuel trains glided noiselessly through the large business innnovation park that Europe had become. Europe Report 2 In Between Cities was based on a two-week stay in a Milan Squat where we got much more aware of the urgency of the immigration question with hundreds of people Sans Papiers at the time squatting churches in Paris and council buildings in Milan which were then arsoned. Berlusconi media fuelled hatred of immigrants and then somebody put the actual fuel and lit it. The middle class and the mainstream media had successfully isolated themselves from such events and it was the role of underground media like Subcom to carry that message. We were an Indymedia before the time.
Our goal was to create a living archive of authentic recordings as a source for real-time composition. The idea was to have a digital database with our recordings, sliced into digestable pieces, annotated and key-worded, so that it would be easy to use and draw on for making programmes. Establishing such a framework for long term archiving as a tool for real-time editing and composition was a major conceptual project, and more important to us than the individual programmes which we produced. It was related to our understanding that real radio art could never be satisfied with having a slot on state sponsored media, however benevolent the editor, but must, conceptually at least, always seek to create models for autonomous free radio stations.
Under this headline message we shared some other concerns which were of a more particularly aesthetic nature. Subcom tried to create a new radio aesthetics by experimenting with a mix of low- and hi-tech. We firmly believed that it was better to work with technology which we knew and controlled rather than high tech which was beyond our means. This was partly a political argument about DIY technology, partly stemming from aesthetic concerns ablout craftmanship. We thought that an artist needed to be able to control the means of production and know them from the inside out. Thus, Blo built his amplification and speaker system himself, using old valve amplifiers and self-built speakers. This low-tech approach was matched by the early use of DAT technology and binaural microphones which allowed us to go into micro sound and stealth recording (using the earphone microphones and a small DAT hidden in a holster inside a jacket). Another important part of Subcom's radio philosophy was that we considered ourselves to be sonic environmentalists who tried to counter the pollution of the acoustic environment by traffic and the mass media.
At around 1991 we started our own mailbox with the help of a computer security expert from Frankfurt. We had developed a system that could be accessed via Atari Portfolio computer, an early breast pocket size computer for which an obscure Dutch company produced an acoustic coupler. With the bus we did what we called physical networking. The mailbox allowed Subcom agents to roam Europe and phone in reports from public phone boxes with acoustic couplers and the Portfolio. At that time we also had added an Amiga for real-time computer graphics and we used it for VJ-ing at free squatter parties as well as art events. We had created ourselves a working situation in which we owned and controlled most of the tools of production and we combined those to weave together physical/analogue and digital networks. Not content with this at around 1992 we got very ambitious and started project Stubnitz art-space-ship which became an entire story of its own. Subcom somehow melted into the Stubnitz and ceased to exist 1993.