The exhibition ‘Die Pfeile des Wilden Apollo’ (an exhibition of the art collections in cooperation with the Exhibit Gallery at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna) explores the transition from the Enlightenment to early Romanticism through the central role of music as a vehicle for spiritual experience and national mysticism: sounds of an early folk movement, Nordic drone scapes as an expression of a new national mysticism, bardic singing and the sounds of cosmic forces.

The video work magnetic fan fiction (The Case of Miss – –) by Liese Schmidt responds to four portraits of so-called ‘clairvoyants’ shown in the exhibition, who are under the influence of a mesmeristic treatment. The work weaves together medical, spiritualist and media-technological narratives into a speculative story of mental transmission, in which primarily female, childlike and colonised bodies appear as transmitters and receivers of thoughts, diagnoses and cosmic visions. In a fictional extension of this narrative, the so-called ‘radio pill’ is hacked to send a patient’s thoughts back into the past. The result is a ‘magnetic fan fiction’ that makes a paranoid inner world audible via invisible frequencies.

The ‘radio pill’ had an inspiring effect on the Vienna Radia Collective and prompted Fabi Lux and Karl H. Schönswetter to develop the idea of a radio station travelling through the body.

Radiopille

with contributions by Liese Schmidt, Fabi Lux and Karl H. Schönswetter