ORGANIZATION
Radio Alice
The free pirate radio station Berardi co-founded in Bologna in 1976 — a landmark of the Italian Autonomia movement's experiments in media, communication, and alternative subjectivity, and the practical origin of his decades-long investigation of the politics of semiosis.
Radio Alice, which broadcast from a small apartment in Bologna from February 1976 until police shut it down in March 1977, was one of the most radical experiments in participatory media that the twentieth century produced. It allowed listeners to call in, to speak without mediation, to broadcast their voices directly — a deliberate refusal of the one-way broadcasting model that had defined mass media since radio's invention. It was political and poetic simultaneously, refusing to separate the aesthetic from the militant, treating communication itself as the primary site of political struggle. For Berardi, who was one of its founders and a central animating figure, Radio Alice was the practical laboratory in which he learned what it meant to treat language, media, and subjectivity as the battleground of a new kind of capitalism.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The station's methods were unprecedented. Calls from listeners were placed directly on air without screening or