Franco
Berardi (Bifo)
Felix Guattari
independent
media centres
pirate radio and tv
Inaugurated by the launch of Tele Orfeo in Bologna in June 2002, “street television” is a low-cost participatory model of independent community media. Stations utilize a micro-transmitter to broadcast over unused frequencies within ranges of under a kilometer. Operated by and covering issues of interest to local communities, the “telestreet” movement has since become a network of over 200 neighbourhood television micro-channels across Italy. It was launched as an explicit challenge to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s dominance of the private airwaves and control over the public ones; setting up a telestreet station is open to anyone. As such, the different stations are run by a wide spectrum of groups, including those involved in the struggles of migrants, social centres, trade union organizers, and dozens of neigbourhood groups and associations
The Telestreet movement, despite its astonishing success, has only existed as such since 2002. In December of 2002 Telefabbrica, set up to support FIAT workers in their strike at Termini Imerese, became he first telestreet station to be shut down by Italian police. Its broadcasting range was 150 meters. On February 22 of 2002, twenty-two new channels were launched simultaneously. In September of 2003 Disco Volante, a station run by a collective of disabled people in Ancona with a broadcasting range of 200 meters was shut down. The first national meeting of station operators and media activists was held in Bologna in December of 2002, and since then they have had regular conventions. In September of 2003 TeleAut and SpegnilaTV decrypted a soccer match, the rights to which were owned by Sky Television, and broadcasted it in the Roman neighbourhood of San Lorenzo.
While being an extremely recent practice, the street television movement draws
on a history of experiments with independent media carried out since the seventies
by the “creative wing” of the Italian autonomist movement. In particular,
many of the figures involved in setting up Tele Orfeo in Bologna played a large
part in the pirate radio station Radio Alice, whose launch in Bologna in was
fueled by public disillusionment with the commercial media landscape that was
just then beginning to take shape. As the organizers suggested in a 1977 statement,
communication was central to their radical struggles: “Capital’s
program: communication within itself, neutralization of communication that is
exterior to it. Its tactic: to disconnect communicative relationships from their
objects, desire, power, truth… Communication is subversive: Power knows
this… Our program: Subversion. Its means: Communication. Its content:
Information. (Radio Alice, 1977) Broadcasting with a transmitter retrieved from
an old army tank, Radio Alice chronicled the insurrectional events of 1977 in
Bologna and its politics condemned by both the Italian state and the Italian
Communist Party (the PCI). On the heels of the Radio Alice experience, similar
radio stations sprung up across the peninsula, making Italy the country with
the lowest ratio of radio stations to citizens in the world by 1978. Many of
these stations are still in existence today.
Telestreet
The homepage of the telestreet network in Italy
http://www.radioalice.org/nuovatelestreet/index.php
Mosaico TV
A Street Television Station in Milan
http://www.uiltucslombardia.it/mosaicotv/mosaicotv.htm
Okupem Les Ones!
Barcellona’s Street Television Station
http://www.okupemlesones.org/
Rekombinant
Discussion site dedicated to the self-organization of cognitive labour and media
activism
http://www.rekombinant.org/