A Visual History of Making transmitters
By Tetsuo Kogawa

In the earliest stage of our radio transmission, I tried to have a hardware-hacking:transforming ready-made transmitters.

But I gradually understood that this type of attempts didn't work for those
who were less enough knowledge of building electronic circuit and, instead ofit, interested in opening their own radio station by themselves. So I started
looking for a way to do so more easily. This lead me to use a copper-platedboard. This technique made easier to check the circuit visually and to learn
how it works.

I started to make a printed manual for the beginners.

This lead to my on-line manual and I had many users after 1999:
http://anarchy.translocal.jp/radio/micro/howtosolder/howtosolder.html

Through many sessions of workshops, researches and actual experiences, I
succeeded in a standard version of the visual manual on my webpage:

This type of transmitter could cover a couple of miles if it has a adjusted antenna. In
the mean time, the Internet became easier to use. For my concept of microtransmitting, even such a low-power transmitter was considered as too much. To
cover the larger area, one can use the Internet. Micro transmitter should have more
micro function to cover. So I designed a “simplest” model.

In terms of this transition, let me quote my words from my mail answers toAnnmarie Chandler and Norie Neumark (At A Distance, MIT Press, 2006):
I argued that in the age of public access via satellite communication, global communication
would become some-what banal; artists should be concerned instead with the microunit of themedium. The Internet has rapidly developed global communication literally and the exchangeof data has become too easy. This gives us an opportunity to rethink our more micro and local
area of space and time. Radio also allows me to rethink the relationship between art and thebody. High technology can substitute equipment for our body elements. Media art, techno-art,and computer art tend to reduce the bodily involvement in an artistic creation. It is because
technology has been commonly and bureaucratically used in these directions. However,technology has dual aspects: techne (techno-) and logos (-logy). Logos logicizes everything
and eventually establishes logistics. Our modernist way of life and the military system havebecome ever closer to each other. Techne, however, means hand work. Ars (art) is the Latintrans-lation from techne. So technology does not have to be only “high tech” but could also
work on the scale of hand work and at the distance of human limbs. This is a new area for theelectronic arts and perhaps provides an al-ternative to the present way of life.
While mini-FM’s range was walking distance, my present attempts are done within wavinghands distance. By moving my hands over very-low-powered trans-mitters, I can make myhand movements evident as well as the noise/sounds deriving from the interference that myhands and transmitters create. I am interested here in the relationship between hands andairwaves because I think the hand is the minimum integral part of our body. Immanuel Kant
allegedly wrote that “the hand is the outer brain of human being.” The brain is also a part of ourbody and is the most complicated and dense part. So our hands can act for our whole body.

As a critic of radio media, a broadcaster of free radio, a workshop leader of making
one's own DIY transmitter, a public artist using transmitter, and a radioart performer, I
have been trying to deconstruct transmitter and create something new not only in thesocial but also what 'art' should be per se.
Anja Kanngieser keenly summerizes the point in our discussion (parllax, 67, 2013, p.93):
If we understand radio as a device, both therapeutically and organisationally, we can widen
our focus from an economy of value quantified by mass attention, to see value in the micropolitical gesture. This is not to say to become myopic, because radio has long served as animportant mass political communications technology, but to recognise that it does not always
require the loudest of speakers to be antagonistic, or the furthest of transmissions to findcommunication in common.