Why is radio such an interesting medium for you?
Karen Werner: Radio is so interesting to me because it is so tangible and accessible. Unlike many contemporary media forms that feel like “black boxes,” radio is something people can understand and even operate themselves. That material and analog quality makes it an ideal space to explore relationality. With radio, you can literally shape the space between sender and receiver. Different signal strengths create different forms of communication: a weak transmitter produces an intimate, close space, while a city-wide signal or an online stream creates very different spatial relationships. I work a lot with these variations. Radio is also a wild medium. It exists naturally—lightning produces radio waves, for example. We can’t hear them without technology, but once translated, they sound like crackling or popcorn. Radio is cosmic and geological; it’s connected to the Earth and the universe. That makes communication feel fragile and tender. Signals are affected by buildings, distance, height—they don’t simply dominate space. I find something deeply human in that vulnerability. This is also why I often set my work in contrast to podcasting. I work mainly with live radio. Radio creates a shared, co-present experience. Podcasting, by contrast, is on demand and privately curated. I’m interested in what we co-create together and who we can become, in real time.
Your background moves between sociology, artistic research, radio art, and performance. Do you experience these as separate disciplines, or as different dialects of the same language?
I enjoy weaving them together. My artistic research is very much about blurring boundaries—between research, art-making, and learning. Radio is particularly powerful here because it’s not intimidating; many people already have a relationship to it, beyond the art world. My background in sociology comes largely from action research, which means stepping into the world to test ideas. That’s actually very close to how I approach artistic research. I’m excited by how these fields strengthen one another when allowed to overlap.
You’ve lived and worked in very different cultural contexts, from the US to Bergen (Norway), and now Salzburg. How have these places shaped your understanding of community and listening?
Moving between places teaches you how to listen differently. For example, when I created a community radio station (Radio Multe) as an artwork in Bergen, Norway, I was advised not to use the word “community,” because there it carries strong religious connotations. In the US, community radio has a completely different history, often linked to universities or activist movements. In Norway, FM radio infrastructure has been shut down, so working with radio there means working in ruins. In Austria, and especially within free radio culture, the radio spectrum is still very alive. These differences deeply affect what “community” on radio can mean. For me, it always comes back to relationality: what role does a heightened way of being together play in a specific context?
Many of your projects create collective or participatory spaces rather than finished objects. What draws you to processes that remain open or ephemeral?
I actually like both finished works and open processes. I’m interested in experiences and encounters—but those can still have clear structures. One project I deeply love involved broadcasting live lullabies every night for sixty nights via FM, AM, and shortwave radio in Bergen. People often listened in bed, falling asleep. Because almost no one owned radios anymore, listeners had to borrow them from the museum. It was intimate, live, and temporary. Now, that same work will be reframed as a ten-day continuous livestream of all the lullaby recordings at Tanzquartier in Vienna in March. So the work shifts form, but it remains carefully structured. I wouldn’t call it unfinished—rather, experiential.
You often describe your work as relational rather than representational. What changes when art is less about showing something and more about being with others?
Radio itself is already relational. The signal is affected by geography, distance, interference, even the cosmos. I love static and interference—not as errors, but as part of communication. I’m also interested in blurring the line between sender and receiver. When I speak, I’m already anticipating listeners, and I become different in relation to them. Identity itself feels fluid. We are co-created in the spaces between us, and radio makes that perceptible.
Since October 2025, you’ve been a professor at the Institute for Open Arts. How does it feel to step into this role—and what kind of professor do you not want to become?
It’s been exciting. The colleagues and students are wonderful, and I love the structure of the PhD program. I don’t want to be a professor who stops learning or claims to have all the answers. Play is incredibly important to me, both in art and education. I want to collaborate across departments and avoid rigid separations between teaching, research, and art-making. Weaving these together feels essential to the future of artistic research.
“Openness” is a word that’s often used lightly. What does openness actually demand—intellectually, emotionally, or ethically—within the Institute for Open Arts?
I think the institute is still defining this, and that’s okay. What I see emerging is a commitment to questioning art’s role in society and engaging with pressing social and cultural questions. Openness also means being willing to work across disciplines, without losing the depth of one’s own practice. Art remains the method and the core. Everything else grows from there.
We live in a time of constant communication and permanent noise. What kind of listening does contemporary society urgently need—and what role can art play in cultivating it?
There’s a growing field of listening as artistic practice. One of my biggest inspirations is the composer Pauline Oliveros, who developed the concept of Deep Listening. She created listening scores that train attention—listening to near sounds, distant sounds, and the spaces between them. Listening becomes a practice of presence. That presence is a profound gift, and art can help cultivate it. Listening can also turn inward—it can be psychological, spiritual, and embodied. When those dimensions enter art-making, art becomes deeply meaningful.
Looking ahead five years: what would tell you that something meaningful has taken place in your work here?
I imagine a campus radio station that that reaches Salzburg and beyond and fosters unusual collaborations across disciplines, rooted in conviviality and play. A space that amplifies community and collaboration within the university and serves as a model for experimental art, research and educational practices. I see the PhD students and faculty flourishing together, generating momentum and contributing meaningfully to the field of artistic research. For the PhD in the Arts program to be celebrated for its contributions to poetic knowledge, collective practices and expanded forms of dissemination. That kind of shared vitality would be a strong sign that something important has happened.
(First published in the Uni-Nachrichten / Salzburger Nachrichten, 14.3.2026)
