"Radio Not"

"Radio Not" is a short (1000 words) text that functions as the introduction to Alana Pagnutti's "Reception: The Radio-Works of Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage".

The introduction takes a broad account of the kinds of practices John Cage adopted in relation to engaging with radio (whether as medium, as device or as critical problematic to be approached in the same way a paleolithic person might depict a mammoth on a cave wall to ward off its evil). Cage's more conventional radio works are related to the programmes he produced for a local station as a teenager; several works by and on Cage are addressed as are Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard (rarely referenced with respect to Cage).

A distinctive feature of the introduction is that it deploys a number of textual strategies to govern its production. These strategies are not revealed to the reader. Some related to constraints on writing that Cage himself used - such as mesostics - others function differently, controlling, for example, the number of words in a paragraph, the number of letters in each word in a paragraph, the sequence of words of different lengths.