Pit | datscharadio

Garden Reading Hour

By: Pit

08-09-2012

Uncategorized

The Reading Hour

Customary broadcast time: Mon 26th August -Fr. 31st August, 11-12 am. Exception: Sat. 25th August, 1-2 pm.

The Reading Hour is dedicated to a blend of prose, observations, meditations, poetry, specialist literature, radio play, interview and improvisation. The texts are read/spoken by their original authors, in some cases though, of course, they were recited by our Datscha-Radio speakers. A big effort was made to search for the most suitable music: Do you already know how many songs exist in the context of “morels” or “radishes”? What kind of track is suitable for a treatise on “gardening ants”?

The greatest part of the Reading Hours is rendered in German. For poetic and musical reasons though, they can still be recommended.

Reading Hour 1: Die Pilzstunde [The Mushroom Hour]

Sa. 25. August 13-14 h und 22-23 h auf reboot.fm
With texts by Wladimir Solouchin, Gabi Schaffner, Gustav Schenk, Knut Hamsun, Friedrich Nietzsche, Silvia Plath, John Cage, and mushroom hunting-video sounds from the Internet. Read by: Ulrike Stöhring, Matthias Scheliga, Michaela Schimun and Gabi Schaffner. Lots of music too.

Reading Hour 2: Rattengarten [Rat Garden]

So. 26. August, 11-12 h
After the same-titled story by Ulrike Stöhring. The second story by her is “Lippenblütler heilen den Kopf [Lamiaceae heal your mind]”. Supplemented by passages from “Geheimnisse des Küchengartens [Secrets of the kitchen garden]”, “Phänomene der Inneren Topografie [Phenomena of the Inner Topography]”, prose by H.C. Artmann, and poems by Bettina von Arnim, Theodor Storm, Heinrich Heine, Hans Christian Morgenstern and Georg Trakl. Read by: Ulrike Stöhring, Matthias Scheliga, Michaela Schimun and Gabi Schaffner.

Reading Hour 3: Wo die Seele aufblüht. [Where the Soul Unfolds] Doris Bewernitz’s live reading at Datscha-Radio

Mo. 27. August, 11-12 h
Where the Soul Unfolds – Why a Garden Makes You Happy. The title is deceiving, the book’s cover likewise. Bewernitz’ stories are neither placable nor esoteric. But finely observed descriptions of the garden world and its inhabitants… be it humans or animals.

Di. 28. August, 11-12 h
Reading Hour 4: Mirrors of Infinity – Garden and Radio Architecture (en)

A Talk with Allen S. Weiss and Pit Schultz
Allen Weiss’s analysis offers new insight into the major gardens of this period: Vaux-le-Vicomte, Chantilly, and Versailles.

From the Meditations of Descartes and Pascal’s Penss, to the intrigues of court politics, Weiss reveals in his book “Mirrors of Infinity” how the structure of these gardens reflects—sometimes literally—the power of Louis XIV, the relationship between God, King, sun, and infinity, and the new science of optics.
In terms of radio architecture, this talk touches on intriguing parallels between garden and broadcasting concepts. Highly interesting!

Mi. 29. August, 11-12 h
Reading Hour 5: Mit Alexander von Humboldt in den Garten der Natur [Into the Garden of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt]

Ms Kuni and Ms Schaffner leaf through the great Humboldt: Taxonomies, gymnosperns and angiosperms, convivial and less convivial trees, the poesis in the counting of plants and more… Supplemented by a chapter from Christian Grunert’s gardening book on the value of mallows in the garden and the phenomenon of the firebugs sitting on them (and on the hollyhock, Alcea, which also belongs into the family of the Malvaceae).

Do. 30. August, 11-12 h
Reading Hour 6: Epikur und Ameisen [Epicurus and the Ants]

The titels suggests some sort of surrealism, but in contemplation of the fact that “agricultural ant tribes” actually exist, a certain contiguity shines out.

“Graben, pflanzen, schneiden, pflücken, gießen, grillen, trinken,essen, plaudern, flirten, im Schatten oder in der Sonne dösen und vieles andere mehr gehören zu den Tätigkeiten im Garten, die es noch lange geben wird. Aber eine ganz wesentliche und einst sogar charakteristische Beschäftigung ist inzwischen seltener geworden und vielleicht auch schon ausgestorben. Das ist das Philosophieren im Garten.”

Dietmar Becker wrote a brilliant treatise dealing with the garden philosophy of Epicurus (published in adF 381 II/2007). Maurice Maeterlinck has written a book on “The life of the Ants” and there describes three tribes of the so called “gardening ants”. There are humans… and there are ants. Both gardeners. Plus: the Persian poet Rumi! The combination leaves many questions unanswered. That’s how it should be.
Both texts read by Matthias Scheliga; the Rumi poems read by Michaela Schimun.

Music: Brian Eno, Steve Reich und Faramarz Payvar.

Vegetal Radia – A pictorial soundscape–Berlin/Tokyo – Tetsuo Kogawa

By: Pit

26-08-2012

Uncategorized

There has been talks about the new german style in gardening, besides prairie gardening, recreating a desert hortensic culture in a middle european climate , the zen stone garden is very much “in style”. the concept of location and place in japanese culture has been philosophized by the Heidegger scholar Kitaro Nishida, i have been asked Tetsuo Kogawa to interprete his relevance for mini fm broadcasting projects such as Datscharadio, which happens in a east german garden turned into a artist run garden.

In an email conversation from 9/19/08 Tetsuo Kogawa wrote:

>>Rethinking about Nishida: Every text has possibilities to think it further, think it over the original, and even to misunderstand. As you know, Nishida’s “basho” is his notion on his metaphysics. He tried to connect his metaphysics with some ideas of Zen (especially of Taisetsu Suzuki—he is much more interesting than Nishida and also influenced John Cage) and Japanese Buddhism. But I have to say that as long as you read Nishida’s Japanese texts they are written very esoterically. This is very different from Heidegger. As Erasmus Schoefer (Die Sprache Heideggers) brilliantly argued, Heidegger’s language is ‘logical’ (in Husserl’s term it should be in “transcendental logic” not “formal logic” though). Nishida is not like this. His texts are pretentious. Also, there is a problem of Japanese language. It is totally different from German. Basically it is ambiguous. In this sense, the translation is only one interpretation of his text.

Also, you are talking about quite concrete topics of radio and the internet. Nishida certainly argues about techniques but he was totally deaf about what’s happening in the technology today. He was a man of old idealism. You could reinterpret him but for a reader who reads his texts in Japanese, every reinterpretation over the translation is misunderstanding. By the way, Haruki Murakami becomes an international novelist due to the “mistranslation”:)

Semiologically, you can use his texts freely. In fact, many new ideas derived from a kind of mistranslation from Greek texts of the philosophers.

On his political commitment to the Japanese right-wing, he had no sense of politics. Again, this is very different from Heidegger who was so cunning that he quickly gave up his commitment to the Nazi party when he realized what it was. Adorno doubts his “Kehre” but it would be true that he had a sense of politics.<<

Mistranslation might be indeed the source of many hortensic adaptions in ongoing gardening trends.

Tetsuo Kogawa is a pioneer in D.I.Y. micro fm movement, using micro fm transmitters as artistic musical instruments with his live performances and building of radio transmitters in workshops, his open hardware circuits have been built all over the world to make analogue micro radio a form of art.

he has suggested:

>> I am now thinking that in order to keep the minimal interactivity I will pick up some of the pictures of the garden (flowers and trees) and convert them to the sounds. These sounds will be automatically broadcast to the net that you will use for your program.<<