Infrastructures of Solidarity, Infrastructures of Totalitarism

Alfredo Thiermann
2023
Poster talk

Between 11 September 1973 and 11 March 1990, the silenced voices of many were dissolved into electromagnetic waves so they could be transmitted and heard in Chile. For sixteen years, the broadcasting house of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) – the Funkhaus in Nalepastrasse in Berlin– broadcast, every day, a radio programme with information, music, and news from Berlin to Chile. Hundreds of Chilean exiles and cultural and political figures passed through the Funkhaus to talk back to their distant country. Broadcast at night, ‘Chile al Día’ was listened to attentively and secretly from the beginning to the end of the dictatorship. Far from being an ephemeral phenomenon, the desire for global hegemony over the production and transmission of information through radio demanded large infrastructures and sophisticated buildings that were conceived as technical wonders as much as political agents. In this presentation, those buildings are analyzed and the programme is contextualised within the broader set of conflicts and political disputes that characterized the Cold War and still haunt us in the present.

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Alfredo Thiermann
2023
Poster talk

Abstract

Official source

https://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/310665?ln=en

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The Cold War was a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc. The term cold war is used because there was no large-scale fighting directly between the two superpowers, but they each supported opposing sides in major regional conflicts known as proxy wars. The conflict was based on the ideological and geopolitical struggle for global influence by these two superpowers, following their roles as the Allies of World War II that led to victory against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in 1945.

Radio

Radio is the technology of signaling and communicating using radio waves. Radio waves are electromagnetic waves of frequency between 3 hertz (Hz) and 3,000 gigahertz (GHz). They are generated by an electronic device called a transmitter connected to an antenna which radiates the waves, and received by another antenna connected to a radio receiver. Radio is widely used in modern technology, in radio communication, radar, radio navigation, remote control, remote sensing, and other applications.

Second Cold War

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