Strolling is a kind of reading of the street, where peo-
10
WALKING
with the structures of public radio: he had wanted the “speech” of the northern white-tailed bumblebee that he explored in his piece bombus terrestris to set in during the evening news—“but I wasn’t allowed to”. I invited Hartmut to a morning walk through the greenhouses in Halle’s Botanical Garden, which were permeated by the waves of his sound works during Radio Revolten. We have a conversation live on air—while walking, standing, looking. A conversation that suddenly becomes concentrated, the voices leaning into each other and forgetting the surroundings while the ambient noises provide pleasant evidence that we are not in the studio—and then I look up and discover the mimosas and the room opens up again, sneaking back into our conversation; from the “touch-me-nots” we come to the cotton salad that burns the tongue, and from there to the mushrooms that were a means of survival for Geerken as a child. The extension of the radio studio to the “outside” provides a conversational situation—downright banal in its everydayness—that allows a spontaneous back and forth of topics and paths, led naturally by my interests while also leaving space for the sounds of the environment (the unexpected appearance of bird warbles) as well as allowing broadcast time to be led by chance and permitting us to be quiet now and then without an alarming silence immediately breaking out in your radio. How would it sound if the inadvertent discoverings of the flâneur were used consistently as a narrative strategy for the auditive (real-time) medium of radio? Around 1930, the writer Franz Hessel brought the art of flâneuring from Paris to Berlin. In aimless wanderings, Hessel turns the big city into text. En passant he reads the urban, yet not for the sake of the surroundings, but for reading and writing. In the self-alienation, the counter-movement, the chance of the wandering gaze captures signs that Hessel reassembles in his “Picture-book in Words” .17 17. cf.
ple’s faces, displays, shop windows and café terraces, trams, cars and trees turn into many equal letters that form words, sentences and pages of a continuously renewing book.18
On foot Hessel discovers in unintentional deconstruction a form of collage, as William S. Burroughs even more radically imagined thirty years later a text production method: “The Cut-Up Method”.19
ibid. 18. Franz Hessel. Spazieren in Berlin. Ein Lehrbuch der Kunst in Berlin spazieren zu gehn. Ganz nah dem Zauber der Stadt von dem sie selbst kaum weiß. Ein Bilderbuch in Worten. London, Berlin, New York, Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2012. p. 156. 19. William S. Burroughs. 1963. “The Cut Up Method”, in The Moderns. An Anthology of New Writing in America. Leroi Jones, ed. New York: Corinth Books, pp. 345-348. 20. Ibid. p. 346.
You cannot will spontaneity. But you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors. [...] Take a page of text, cut it into four parts, and reorder the four parts. [...] Cut-ups are for everyone. Anybody can make cut-ups. It is experimental in the sense of being something to do.20 Voices from the studio comment on our on-the-road broadcast in the final hour of Radio Revolten:
If you have used any electronic devices in the past thirty days, please switch them off now. The live streams from the city space are complemented by voices from the studio. Anna Friz, Jan Langhammer and Elisabeth Zimmermann form another level as “producers” in the studio space. With fingers on 160