Kunstverein, Amsterdam 6 October 2023 In their time at the Werkplaats Typografie, the master program at ArtEZ, Valentijn Goethals and Ine Meganck started Phantom Radio, a pirate radio station. Ivo Blackwood and Malva Askerup interviewed them on the occasion of the opening of ‘A Museum for Everyone’ at Kunstverein, Amsterdam, about the radio station, student projects, and what publishing meant to them. Virginie gossiped a little bit about the project starting illegally in the basement at Werkplaats – how did it all start? It was in the attic actually. It started because the building has a really strange shape, and we were interested in the history of the building. It appeared to be an old radio distribution centre from World War II. First and Second World War, I think. Yeah, and then we also had this teacher, Paul Elliman, who made already Phantom Radio shows, but he never broadcasted them, he just wrote possible shows down, in a book, ‘Wonder Years’, which was also combined with work from the students. It was like a proposal… It was like a proposal for a radio station at the school. And well, personally, I was very interested in invisibility, like, spaces that are invisible somehow, and [VG] are also very interested in making platforms, or creating platforms for people to work in or work at, and so we thought, maybe we should do this together, because also he’s very good in the technical aspect of these things. So then we started thinking about where we should do it, where we should build it, it’s also very illegal, or back then it was very illegal. It’s still illegal. But back then there was also a telecom company in Amersfoort, and they were driving around with cars to look for antennas, to put them down. In Belgium, you cannot imagine something like this happening. But in the Netherlands there’s just a very rich history of pirate radio. So probably that’s still on the to do list of the company. But it’s questionable how much people with internet still care about doing illegal transmissions. But officially that’s indeed their job to, next to other things, track down illegal broadcasts. But we actually also liked that somehow, or we played with that effect. So, yeah, we were looking for the perfect spot. And then we found that there was an attic above the kitchen. We were not really aware of that. There was a little square that you could open, and it’s strange because if you look from the outside, it’s a single-floor building, but there’s a little bit that’s a two-floor building. Like you have a little tower. But nobody questioned what’s in there. Even the coordinators, they were like: hmm, oh, I didn’t know that! So that’s where we made the radio studio. And we really played with that. Like, for example, if you entered the room, you didn’t see anything. All the equipment was hidden in a secret shelf, so you had to pull it out. Another rule was that you could only broadcast one show per day for thirty-nine minutes, because the telecom company was a thirty-nine minute drive, from Amersfoort to Arnhem. And we needed an irregular schedule because also we were talking to the school of course… Like, ‘can you do that?’ And they were like: do whatever you want, but don’t get us into trouble. We looked at the regulations, but just in general, you cannot broadcast on the FM spectrum, or it cannot leave the building, but we had no technical clue about how to control how far we were transmitting. We had to just find limitations around those rules. So, thirty-nine minutes means that even if someone complains that someone is taking over their radio, or that there are strange sounds coming out of their radio, then even if the telecom company starts driving to us then it’s gone by the time they arrive. But if we would transmit every day at eight o’clock, then they would be at eight o’clock in Arnhem. So the second rule was to have an irregular schedule. And it was a game also. It’s always nice to create these rules, to play with them as well. And it was also something with the antenna. Yeah, you had to pull it up, so it was lying flat on the roof, and then there was a cord and you had to pull it up. Yeah, and the higher it goes, the better the signal is, but if it went too high then you would also see it from the street. We were also just interested to see what happens when graphic designers translate the medium of graphic design to the radio. We were talking about it in the car on the way here, that we never actually made shows ourselves, we were really just interested in this secret space, and also this platform that you make, and sometimes curate. You create this key to a hidden space. It’s very easy to do that if you know how to do it, but nobody knows how to do it. But yeah if you know, it’s easy. And also because we are gradually moving as people to digital radio, so this space will be empty, which is very interesting. It’s literally *space*, that’s all around us, it’s just a different spectrum than light, or a different kind of radiation. It’s constantly present, but there’s no way of tapping in until you have a receiver. And then everybody knows that with a radio receiver that you can tap into the spectrum, and it started with Marconi, and it got heavily privatised because of the potential, and then at the same time it became illegal to transmit yourself. But if you go to Alibaba, or just anywhere, and you google ‘FM transmitter’, for one hundred euros, you have a good one. We’re not using something more fancy here. You can build them yourself as well. You can just plug it in and you are in that space. It feels also a bit scary at that time, whenever we have a microphone and it’s in front of you, you’re almost scared to say something because you’re taking over another radio, because… The spectrum is full. Right now, we live in a moment between analog and digital radio. Every car you buy has digital radio now, but it still will take ten or twenty years until everybody transmits digital. So that means that all the analog radios are still there, at least the big ones. So there is no space. So every time you do an illegal transmission, you take space from somebody else. So the best place is in between two radio stations, this little bit of noise, because then the signal also doesn’t fight. You have big national radio stations with very powerful signals, and Phantom Radio is like this little signal fighting against it, but on a close radius around where we are currently sitting, we are the strongest signal. If the big radio station would stop existing, then our signal would travel a lot further, because the signals just push each other. But it’s also a bit scary, because when you’re in this in-between space, you’re not annoying anybody, but you don’t know who’s listening. And that was the case in Werkplaats when people made contributions, and actually there were a lot of systems of how people contributed, and it became a… just because Werkplaats is such a small building, even the clock became a project, the library, the kitchen had a project. It also had a lot of students from abroad, so nobody knew somebody also in this small Arnhem place. So it was also why everything that was there, you would use it. But nobody cared then. Sometimes somebody put a lot of energy in and was working for weeks on their radio show, and then they transmit it, but we never knew if anybody ever heard it. Because we were listening ourselves, but the thing is of course, that maybe hundreds or thousands of people have the potential to hear it, but you have to know where it is. That’s also the nice thing. We were testing it today, 91.0MhZ, there’s actually just music playing, no idea which radio station it is. But that’s also a bit scary, because you were testing the mic today with just random talking, but that means that maybe someone in the shop further in the street could hear this. And also when we were talking to the baby in, like, baby language even… and they don’t know who we are. It’s a ghost situation. And that, we thought, was fascinating. And then maybe also that when we started this we wanted to transmit as far as possible so that we would have a public, but then when we were graduating from the Werkplaats, we wanted to show of course what we did at the school, but since it was a secret we thought: what should we do now? Yeah, we worked on it for two years, and then we had the graduation show, and it was like, it’s illegal. Yeah, if we show this, then we also like are talking against ourselves. But then we came up with this idea of narrowcasting, where you transmit only in a small area. Which is also… the cheapest transmitters are just not so good so they actually just go ten, twenty metres. Because the show was in de Ateliers in Amsterdam, so then we just transmitted in that building, and we also built a little room for our radio station, which was the size of a small elevator, because we thought: you don’t need anything else. We also found a door on the street, because actually it was existing out of a door, super small. Then people during the exhibition could enter the room and make radio. And transmit in the exhibition. What’s nice about that, we thought, is that normally we know radio as something that comes to us, at your home, and you get content… But here, we do it the other way round, where with narrowcasting, you actually have to come to the place to hear. Which is like the inversed way, which we also really like. And it just brings people together. Like tonight, I don’t know if people will show up, I mean, you guys already shows up, but it’s strange that you have to go to radio, and radio doesn’t come to you. And then still because we started it more than ten years ago, and also we left the platform there, and just the equipment, and students were using it. I don’t know, it’s not that we are the owners of that project, and then someone made a digital radio out of it, and there’s an Instagram page for it. It’s really interesting to play with this space, with this ghost thing, especially with graphic designers where we know our audience most of the time, and this is kind of just, putting it out there, you don’t know who the receiver is. What would you broadcast? We were also thinking about this today in the car, but both of us, we did projects, but every time we did a project it was like… We broadcasted silence. [laughs] You had this transplant of another space in Belgium in the middle of nowhere that just got transmitted as a Phantom project in Antwerp in the city centre, and the project I did with it, because we never really do stuff ourselves, was just transmitting, putting on the transmitter, and not putting a microphone or a recorder or anything with it, you just create like this carrier weight which is just an empty signal pushing or fighting against other radio stations. So the idea that this space has been empty since the beginning of time, then in the 1800s, Marconi discovers radio and starts broadcasting on the little amount of space that’s available, and it never got silenced after that. And it’s also a problem, if it’s silence on the radio in your car and you think that there’s nothing happening, you feel already the panic in the radio station, like something’s gone wrong. And knowing that this is just a temporary moment and just part of one time, I think that’s what we’re interested in. But then maybe we’re also not so interested in [doing our own shows]. Because the idea that it’s there, that we created this platform… It has a lot of potential. Yeah and also always somehow people keep inviting us to do something with it. Maybe that’s the link to graphic design, or publishing or something. Because it’s a bit the same, you also work for a client, and somehow you provide something. It’s actually kind of an exhibition space also. And we provide the exhibition infrastructure, or we are the publisher of the work, or the, yeah, and there’s a certain shared ownership of that space. Because we just have the key to this place. Because if we are not there there’s also no show. Like, being here today, we said yes, but at the same time, it would be cheaper or easier for them if they would go to Alibaba and just buy the transmitter. There’s a little bit of magic around it. We were teaching at the radio school in Brussels [laughs]. Which was actually kind of funny somehow, because that’s a school that really teaches students to make commercial radio, and some of these students are now actually working on the radio that we started. But our approach was more like: what else can you do with radio? Not like, talking talking, playing music, like what we are used to, but what else can you do on there? And then we guided the projects of course. And then the exhibition got cancelled because the school got cancelled because it realised we were broadcasting illegally. It was too scared. Anyway, that’s also kind of the joke somehow. Perfect exhibition of the project, maybe! So somehow these limitations are also very much the project. Yeah somehow, and also it was sort of the way we both work. That’s probably what Armand [Mevis] teaches at the Werkplaats. Yeah, also, the more limitations, the more I like to design. Because you can look for: ah, what can I do? Imagine you have a client who has all the money in the world! And then you won’t find possibilities. Because now, you have limitations, you have to come up with solutions. And that’s the thing, everybody can do digital radio, you can transmit on YouTube or whatever. But the fact that you can always do it doesn’t generate reasons to do it. These limitations, I personally get very interested, it’s like, what can we do with that, and how can we make it work? In that way it’s probably also why Phantom Radio was accepted as a very proper proposal, and got added as an extra infrastructure to the school, so now it’s not only a graphic design school with a library and a printer and ping-pong table, but also with a radio studio. Sometimes that’s also quite nice, that we notice that some years it gets really active because people know about the project, but there have been years where there’s nothing happening as well, because no one ever says there’s a hole in the ceiling! Because every year they have new students and I think we get very fascinated by the idea that once we saw the hole, and we climbed up there, that was the most exciting moment of the two years, like: what’s in this room? How does it look? So imagine if somebody in a couple of years is just like, hey, what’s in there? And finds this transmitter, and all these things we made, and can activate it again. A hidden treasure in the attic. Yes, indeed. We hid a lot of treasures in the building. [laughs] We also teach at another art school in Ghent, also there the students made work and we transmitted it in a loop. It’s the perfect exercise for the students. We hang [the transmitter] next to the internet equipment of the school so people were really cleaning it, and they didn’t know! And then at a certain moment they change internet cables and stuff and then they also took it out. But that’s actually also nice, because that’s the life of this thing. Because indeed imagine that in ten, twenty years, whatever, as long as the machine keeps on working, as long as it has power, the transmitter and the media player runs on. So imagine you’re entering the school, playing with a radio and you discover this work, this show, and you can never track down where it comes from. But yeah, then the ICT person was probably like, what is this? I like that. And now, maybe today, the last thing we did with it, was we made a portable radio studio, which is now in a suitcase. And that’s actually the idea that you can take your suitcase, plug it in, and make radio. And the idea is also very local. Although it tries to reach out, it’s quite crazy how if you drive from Belgium to France, or to the Netherlands, it’s quite amazing how good the reception is within the country. But as soon as you leave it makes no sense anymore, and the signal disappears super fast. The fact that this radio doesn’t worry about borders, it can go wherever, we thought that was fascinating as well. So what is your project? At the moment, the plan is to set a temporary school newspaper office in the library one evening a week where people can come in, and it’s peer-led workshops in the library after hours. And then the school newspaper is published twice this year and it documents what happens in the office. Nice. Really nice, and the radio could be related to that? We have mushroom radio, do you know it? It’s a student-led radio show. But it’s digital radio, right? It’s nice that you think about audience and who you are speaking to. Maybe we are just scared of people. Nobody listens. Can you tell us a bit about how the project has changed over the years? Started within the school, and now it seems to be this traveling thing, where there points between this? Yes, within the school always kept existing because we left it there. But sometimes we receive an email like, “Can you tell us something about the radio, because we want to take it over.” Which is also nice. There was also this idea of having a permenant place in Ghent because that is where we live. Where we had a space also. We had a space called 019, and by coincidence, that space was called 019 and it had nothing to do with Phantom Radio. It’s the opposite of 91.0. Our frequency. So it was too beautiful. Actually, the opening of 019 started with a transmission on their radio station but then the idea was also to have a permanent house for it but we never did anything accept at the opening. But we do have a plan. But we don’t know if it will… We have been taking about it for years. We just talk about it! But it would be nice if there was a loop also, somebody talking about artworks inside the building, and then you could just drive there and put on the radio, or park your car and take your radio. The relationship to cars is very important because the building is on the ring around the city and nobody actually knows what the building is and what the program is. But people constantly get stuck in traffic in front of it, so we started making flags and billboards with artists, so the outside becomes the exhibition space. So in that way, with Phantom radio, it would be perfect. Everybody in Belgium listens to Studio Brussels, the biggest radio station, so if we would transmit on that, as soon as you enter the street of 019, you just hear something and then drive away and hear music again. That has a lot of potential, but we just did not do it yet. But that is maybe something we should do still. So we wait until people send those emails. Which again is interesting, that it has this continuity. And of course, what we also liked about this whole thing was also designing the space, an identity for it. Which we never did. Yes, we made a poster. It creates potential for doing stuff. We also did flags. And also outside there is also the sign on the traffic pole. It actually comes from, a thing with Arnhem that is fascinating, you probably have it in The Hague as well, first Monday of the month at eleven or twelve, there is a siren. And for us, this was super exotic, coming from Belgium. What is this thing? This is so strange! But this came into existence with the fasciation about the siren, so if you google ‘siren’, just how they look, you often have when the siren goes off, “tune in to”, a certain radio frequency. Because that is a sign which they have in Americans sirens, if you hear this, go to this frequency, and it will be the national, telling what happens, like “take shelter”. Because radio, you can’t destroy it because it’s invisible. If there would be a giant explosion, radio frequency’s would keep on being there, so it’s the safest way of communicating in case of trouble. We noticed the sirens in The Netherlands were anonymous, there was no signs saying what to do, because it just goes off and maybe people just know what to do. So we added these fake street signs to a pole in Arnhem ten or eleven years ago saying, “if the siren goes off, listen to 91.0.” And then that was our time slot to make sure that there was always a radio broadcasting happening. Because if somebody passes by and the siren goes off, it’s a little bit a bigger chance but it’s also like, how can you make graphic design or how can you translate, although it has nothing to do with graphic design, but how can you then translate it again to print, to communication without it saying, “hey, we are doing this”, what you are actually doing. So it’s a strange dance, but the nice thing is that the sign is still there, because it just looks very real. And they also clean it. And Hanna, who runs Kunstverein, was also in Arnhem and she knew about the sign project said, “maybe we should just add a sign here on the street again?” Because just saying, screaming, “this is the student who did this, and it’s a illegal project”, it’s just stupid. Also in the school in Brussels where we teach, the radio school, we also changed secretly the doormats of the school. It said, on 91.0, there is something happening. Is it the one on 019 website saying, “There is phantoms in this building”? Yes, it does not say the frequency, just that there is something behind this point. It’s all a bit the same thing, we look for things that are a bit hidden but still communicates. To play with this character again. But we don’t know if the doormat is still there. We have to check. There are lots of things that are kind of parasitic to something else that rely on the structure of something else maybe. Yes, something else. That’s also just a good reason to play. Have fun. How does it exist today, here in the building at Kunstverein? It’s one week where people can subscribe to do a show. And here we don’t about legality. It’s not our responsibility. The building is open also for one week. So you can, if you would like to have a show, it’s also open in the night. You can get the key, you can come in and you can broadcast. It’s based on Christopher Darcangelo. He passed away a long time ago. He chained himself to the MoMA museum at certain moments. He had the statement that the museum should be open for a certain amount of time and maybe it was actually a week, that all the windows should be open and that people can bring their work and hang it on the walls, that it would be a museum for everyone. It would also include a similar radio station that would be in the museum, it could be transmitted on TV, it would be on the radio. And Kunstverein is publishing a book on his work, and wanted to, because his show was actually chained to the building, but they cut the chain and they just threw him out. And it’s only later that people actually thought of him as an interesting artist with interesting ideas. But since they are making this book, they also wanted to execute one of his ideas. But it’s too difficult. The idea of just letting everything be possible. It is a problem in a building which is not your building and who knows what’s going to happen. But they wanted to at least realise the radio station there. So whatever is being said is now being transmitted. And we hosted them and provided the platform. And the platform is the suitcase because you were doing this research project at the Academy in Antwerp to make a portable radio, to create this extension again. It works so well at the Werkplaats, why is it not every school has this? This radio equipment or a radio studio. And also at the school, I was first looking for a space, but then again because it’s illegal, they like “no, you can actually not use the space.” It became something you can rent or something. If you want to use it, you can contact us. It’s great. It’s also nice that people forget about it again. And actually, it should be stored at the school in the rental department. Conceptually most beautiful, but then of course, we need to first make a good manual. For instance, if the antennas are not good connected and start a fire. But in the end, I would say it’s open source. Of course not open source, nobody is officially allowed to do it, but it’s so easy to do it. It’s so interesting, It’s opening a door in your head, thinking about who has access to space and hijacking the space around 019, like this invisible exhibition or something. That is exactly what we like about it. I never thought of the flags on 019 as this kind of publishing project. But you’re starting at the point of the captive audience, of the people in the cars and then you kind of play with these. It started with the billboards maybe. The flags were first. But if people would have entered to what we were doing inside, there would have been no need to do the flags. It’s still problematic. People still don’t find the entrance. It also makes you think, a newspaper, how can you play with that format. We are interested in publishing and rethinking publishing as well. This is also for us a publishing thing, it just does not have a rhythm. The only thing is that I’m a bit scared of, we have this box with a lot of transmitters. It arrived in an envelope with beautiful Chinese things on there, and it still works, it’s probably the most stable one that is why I brought it here, in case the other don’t work, this always works. You just put it in and antenna and it transmits, it just needs power. But if they ever stop making these, you can’t find this anymore, it stops as well for us, because we are not technically strong enough to build something stable ourselves. And since this is a dying medium, I wonder, will it also die? Apparently in America, it’s very popular in conservative places. Because that’s the way now how some of those conservative spaces spread their words. And they found this medium back again. So in America now, it is a really a big thing. It’s so cheap to transmit. It’s a radio from 5€ in the supermarket and you can receive all. The transmitters that we have downstairs we just bought because they looked cool originally. We didn’t need something special. But even with this one you can even listen to aeroplanes that fly over and if they talk, it even receives it. So it’s quite crazy how there is a whole world of signals that are just not being communicated or we are just not aware of. It’s kind of a magic idea. We should have done this interview on the radio. I’m thinking about if it gets in the wrong hands, it’s also some kind of responsibility, right? It it always, and you can’t control it. We have this book of Dutch pirates. That is the whole reason why it’s illegal of course, because you can very easily without control do it. And there was this amazing situation, ten years ago that there was this antenna, you can still find it because we recently googled it, somewhere in The Netherlands that you see them very well from the highway, that collapsed. It was used by sky radio, a big radio station, and it meant that sky radio did not broadcast for a while in that area of the country. And very soon after the tower collapsed, it went back online and the radio started broadcasting again, and people just thought nothing happened but it was actually private radio stations taking it over and taking that they were sky radio, like changing small thing like odd playlists and making fake news and all of this. They pirated that specific radio station and used the original jingles and everything. Such a machinating idea and it’s so easy to trick people. And that’s of course probably the whole war of the worlds story, it was also radio play. If you’re tuned in on the right time, it was like, “hey, we are going to tell a story about aliens. Have fun. It takes an hour.” But if you tune in 5 minutes later, and you missed that, you hear that aliens are taking over the world. So, a lot of potential. And that is the same with flags. We did some black and white flags a couple of years ago, a series that we made and two of them were taken by the police because they thought it looked like it could be something terrorist related. And it was in time of the whole ISIS situation, and it was actually a peace flag. But it’s very easily how radio, or flags or graphic design quite a powerful thing, communication in general.