CAC x Trigger | Narrowcasting: Building a Temporary TV Station

Narrowcasting is not simply a smaller version of broadcasting. The concept can be traced back to J. C. R. Licklider’s visions of future media systems in the 1960s. Today, in an age where pixels can be endlessly replicated without losing quality and algorithms enable precise global distribution, we are living inside the illusion of “infinite connectivity.” Signals have become transparent, while media infrastructures disappear beneath smooth and seamless interfaces. The material process of transmission itself is increasingly sealed away inside the black boxes of platforms.

Unlike platform logics that pursue limitless circulation and scale, narrowcasting is more concerned with a sense of presence emerging through proximity. In the world of analog media, signals are not abstract data moving frictionlessly through empty space. They decay, drift, encounter physical obstacles, and carry noise, static, feedback, and distortion. It is precisely through this unstable and rough condition that the material and embodied dimensions of transmission begin to reappear. Media no longer functions simply as a seamless delivery channel, but reveals itself once again as electronics, radio waves, and physical space.

As the third session of the Signal Cultures workshop series by Chronus Art Center (CAC), this workshop at trigger revisits the classic designs of Japanese radio art pioneer and media activist Tetsuo Kogawa. Led by Dennis de Bel, participants will solder a simple micro signal transmitter by hand, breaking down seemingly vast and invisible media infrastructures into electronic components that can once again be directly touched and intervened in. The device originates from Kogawa’s Mini-FM experiments in the 1980s, where ultra low-power radio signals were used to create hyper-local communities within only a few hundred meters, transforming broadcasting from a tool of mass communication into a social and material practice grounded in neighboring space.

In the final part of the workshop, participants will collectively construct a temporary hyper-local analog broadcasting environment. Videos and images brought by participants will be narrowcast live onto an indoor CRT television, forming a collaborative offline analog livestream. Different images will overlap, interfere, and mutate through physical transmission, while the signal itself becomes something visible and materially present.

In collaboration with Trigger! Shanghai. Trigger is an experimental music space that started in 2023, focusing on discovering and promoting all kinds of fresh and radical sounds. Everything that happens here is very interesting. Follow them to receive event information!