The Radia Network emerged from a series of meetings, clandestine events, late-night club discussions and a lot of e-mail exchanges between cultural radio producers across Europe. As of March 2007,Radia has grown into a network of fifteen cultural radios that produce weekly artists’ broadcasts, organize projects and program the random bit of necessary software. Partner radios come from across eastern and western Europe and extend to North America. The people themselves are a disparate group of artists, programmers and radio enthusiasts who address a broad, engaged public by combining old and new media.

The topics vary and the reasons for forming a network are many, butRadia has become a concrete manifestation of the desire to use radio as an art form. The approaches differ, as do the local contexts – from commissioned radio art works to struggles for frequencies to copyright concerns, all the radios share the goal of an audio space where something different can happen. That difference is also a form in the making – radio sounds different in each city, on each frequency. Taking radio as an art form, claiming that space for creative production in the mediascape and cracking apart the notion of radio is what Radia does. It is producing radio stuff that is hard to describe. Some of it can be labeled radio art or experimental radio or creative radio. The radio stations are of the independent, non-commercial, community, cultural species. They all speak different languages, and this should create interesting problems.