Mathew Kabatoff: On your site Irational.org there are diagrams and
instructions showing how to set up a streaming radio and pirate radio
over the net (http://www.irational.org/radio/radio_guide/). Can you talk
about how this helps disseminate information about radio?

Heath Bunting: That part of the site is maintained by another member of
Irational named Sic. He is an anarchist and a radio engineer. His main
motivation and the position he takes is that most of the information on
the internet about radio components is wrong, and also a waste of time
if you build from those diagrams and instructions. He either recommends
that you buy a professional kit that is already made or you follow his
diagrams, if you really want to. Sic supplies you with the circuits. He
was a military trained engineer, so the stuff you get is very good
quality. There is not much listed on the site but the stuff there is
very good. I think it is the best or one of the best pirate radio
technical sites on the net. He gets more visits on that portion of
Irational than any other Irational project–even more than our fake porn
sites or whatever–so he's doing pretty well.

MK: Do you think that the Internet 2 and better connections to wireless
appliances such as cell phones will make pirate radio more complex?

HB: I think WAP technology could have some significant impact, but I'm
not in the business of predicting the future. The issue is really how
many ears are available and how many wallets are attached to those ears.
It's not about how many frequency slots there are or how many mobile
phones are in circulation. It's how many listeners there are and how
many adverts you can deliver to them. It's also a certain amount true
with FM and it's why those people break those laws. Trouble occurs when
companies get upset with the fact that they are paying 10,000 dollars a
month for a license and half of their listeners are going to the local
pirate, so they insist the police go and shut them down. The same thing
will happen on the net but probably in a different manner, companies
have to insure that there are so many listeners for their investment,
there will be legislation so that if people don't pay the price they
will be shut down. That will probably be the same for WAP technology as
well, but the response from the authorities might not be brute force
police action, it might be through just making the competition
invisible. For instance on the Internet, if you don't pay to be on a
search engine now your site doesn't show up. You're not physically shut
down, just rendered invisible.

MK: Do you think that radio (and net.radio) still values its
historically utopian roots? What about net.art? It too was rather
utopian.

HB: I'm not so optimistic that things won't be shut down, besides you
have to move on to a new areas. For instance I think the Internet is
fairly shut down now and the time for spontaneity is over in certain
areas. I was saying we should move onto biotechnology especially because
the stakes are higher. But actually the nice thing about Radio90 is that
it has been running three years continuously without any legal problems.
It's nice to have something consistent and long-standing. That kind of
goes against my usual practice of being quick and dirty and light and
fast and shutting things down, or having them shut down by other people.
I guess there is a possibility for a bit of both, pragmatism, longevity,
and enthusiasm and utopianism. They both need to be there and inform
each other.

MK: Borrowing the metaphor of "mobility" from radio… Is it necessary
for you to position yourself as being rooted in a fixed location with
fixed resources to be critical of a field such as biotech where the
stakes are much higher? Should this practice be quick and dirty or
consolidated and centered?

HB: There is a great period now of regrouping. I'm not really sure if it
is fortunate or unfortunate but the whole scene is falling apart. I
think it has to do with the millennium. I think everyone was working
towards this big moment when everything would be great. Certainly my
generation was brought up to think that the year 2000 would be glossy
and shiny and exciting. In fact, it wasn't. I think many of those hopes
were manifest in the net art scene or the net community scene. But that
has all fallen apart and there is a general lack of enthusiasm and
sometimes even depression in the underground. Also, all of the practices
and methods that we have used or taught ourselves or where taught, have
been turned on their heads by the fact that we are living in a different
time and a different architecture of time.

The thing with biotech is that it is incredibly urgent, and as I said
the stakes are very very high. You can check your email once every three
days, but you have to eat three times a day. And you have to pay
significantly more than checking your email. The effects of bioegineered
food are also irreversible. You can turn the Internet off but you cannot
ever remove the effects of biotechnology from the environment. I think
people have to get to understand that. There must be new people who
become skilled to oppose those things. To answer your question, do
things have to be quick and dirty or remain centered? I think it is a
combination. For instance I built Superweed at the Banff Centre which is
a fairly settled environment. But I was moving around at the
time, going from one resource to another using a kind of a parasite
model. Hopefully that could be used as an effective method for more
biotech ventures which do require a certain level of expertise and
ingenuity.

Today I just bought a book on foods that you can eat that grow wild in
the English environment. It's an act of training. It's also highly
politicized to go out and obtain food that is not even organic–it's
more, it's higher quality and higher value than organic food. Then I am
going to find these foods and eat them on a regular basis. I see it as
an act of education, a preparation I'd say.

MK: Is there room for different tactics and strategies to oppose things
like biotech? What are the steps taken in the process?

HB: I certainly think that there is plenty of room for different types
of tactics from all kinds of people. I tend to operate in an
individualistic or small collective process. There definitely is room
for mass action. But the first thing will be that dedicated fanatics who
are totally opposed to biotechnology on political or environmental
grounds will agitate continuously and attempt to educate the greater
public. Then there will be scares about the effects of biotech that will
hit the mainstream media. The majority of people will hear about it in
those ways–the fact that some people start to get sick from GM. And
that things are going beyond their control and people get scared about
these huge multi-nationals. So yeah I think there will be waves, but
there will be dedicated hardcore crews working away at it all the time
and they will have their own networks of communication and build their
own infrastructure. They will make interventions into mainstream media
when necessary.

MK: Can you talk about the notion of play. You know…playing music and
just having fun, possibly being radical and subversive at the same time
but also just messing around. It has been referred to as pranksterism
but at the same time it seems not only to be a strategy but a lifestyle.

HB: I think the first thing to say about play is that it's also a
spiritual thing, it's a life thing, and it is also a training thing. For
instance, whenever I have a ticket on the train or the subway I won't
use it, I will pretend I don't have a ticket, and when I don't have a
ticket I will pretend that I do. For the act of play you are
conditioning yourself, you are becoming fit in your mind and your
techniques and your body. There is also the act of pretending and
simulation–pretending not to be what you are is kind of an iconoclastic
act. You are revealing and deconstructing structures around you. I think
you can see that in children. That is what they are doing when they
play.

Play I think is such a part of personal social development and also
there is a political side to it. There are all these mechanisms to try
to turn play or harness play into non dangerous activities: things that
can be controlled; things that can be made profits from. So just to go
out in the street and play in a non-recognizable manner can be a very
subversive act, very liberating. I have experimented with that quite a
lot. Even when I am in Banff, or some place like that, I am in a
mountain environment and I should be wearing the right clothes and doing
the right activities. I try to resist that. I'd rather go out and climb
trees or throw stones…because you are not told especially to climb
trees. Doing things instantaneously with completely the wrong equipment
is quite interesting.

MK: Like what?

HB: Well like if you are wearing a suit and decide suddenly to run down
the street. People find that very disturbing, whereas if you were
wearing jogging shoes it's absolutely fine. Also if you are smartly
dressed and climb a tree or if you are at an age when you shouldn't be
climbing trees people find that quite interesting. Standing still as
sport, if you think of that as play it is actually illegal to stand
still in many countries. And maybe standing still in sports clothes or
other clothes can change the meaning of that non-activity.

MK: Any future projects involving pirate radio or Radio90 coming up?

HB: I have a very delayed project which is the opposite of Radio90. It
is a reception station that would be in London. It would be a net
controlled scanner so you can basically scan and pick up pirate
broadcasts from London and listen to them across the internet. We have
all of the equipment and programs necessary. We are just looking for a
location. I'm probably going to be teaming up with Kate Rich, who is my
wife now, from Bureau of Inverse Technology and see if we can get some
extra muscle into it, to get it operational. That's been delayed for a
year but that would be a good compliment to Radio90. The project would
pick up stations from London and broadcast them to Banff. So you would
be getting your latest pirate style sounds, in Banff, from London, live.

But as I said, I think all the methods and modes of operation for the
past ten years and specifically the Internet methods are fairly…not
all totally redundant, but they have been turned on their heads. The
ones that were seen as primarily important, I think they are totally
insignificant. So I am just playing really, and seeing what comes out of
that play–especially with food and kind of site and physical activities
like skateboarding. I think all these things will come together soon-
ish, in the next couple of years into an invigorated vibrant anti-GM
scene. I'm not sure everyone from the net scene will migrate. I think a
few people made the cross over.

MK: And is Biotech Hobbyist (http://www.irational.org/biotech/) going to
happen again?

HB: Actually Natalie Jeremijenko, who I was collaborating with and who
is the other member of the Bureau of Inverse Technology, is getting a
bit more fired up and will be writing a regular column for Mute
magazine. I think her babies are growing up now and she is a bit more
free to get on with stuff. Fortunately I think Biotech Hobbyist is still
relevant, even though we have been off it for some time, and adding a
bit more content could make quite a good project still. So I am looking
forward to that.

MK: What about gaining access to resources? how much resources do you
need? I am thinking about setting up servers for the receiver project
and gaining access to the space. Is that a problem or is it something to
work on?

HB: Well some things for me are incredibly easy because of the way I
live, and other things are totally impossible. You know I tend to live
in a different way to the usual settled person so some things I can do
almost magically, and other things that people do normally I just can't
do, and that's very hard to discover. So there is no general rule. You
can't generalize about what's required and what's not. For instance
Irational has a server and we are starting to host other organizations,
the Cube in Bristol, and probably the Bureau of Inverse Technology. That
is easy for us to do, I don't need a physical location for that. But to
get this scanner sited and consisted as an individual project is very
difficult. Radio90 really runs because there are four people working to
keep it up, so if I tried to do it by myself or with someone who travels
a lot it would be impossible. So yeah resources are sometimes easy to
come by and sometimes incredibly difficult. I was picking wild berries
the other day…and they were very easy to find and totally
delicious…and then again checking email in that environment is nearly
impossible.

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<a href="/object.rhiz?2132">Read Part One of "Radio Pirate–An Interview
with Heath Bunting."</a>