bottom image: raumlabor and neuroTransmitter

Excerpt from broadcast, originally aired Fall 2006
Munich, Germany

Ground Control

In the center of three regions in the south of Munich: Giesing, Stadelheim, and Neuharlaching resides an area formerly known as McGraw Kaserne. On the corner of Soyerhof Strasse and Auzinger Strasse stands a building that was said to once hold local Gestapo Headquarters. Then, after WWII it became a US Military control center, later converted into the campus of the University of Maryland in Munich. The structure still exists with a shadowy marking of one former designation, yet now is run by the State of Bavaria and functions as a storage facility for the Munich Opera House.

The constant shifting of the building’s regional use can be further mapped out in terms of the geo-political moments that once controlled its function. This can also be said of the airspace and airwaves surrounding the neighborhood (which, post war, primarily housed English-speaking citizens and soldiers from the Unites States). It was due to this presence and Cold War maneuvering that the US military found it necessary to form AFN (American Forces Network), a radio broadcast station devoted to transmitting a combination of propaganda and popular culture as content on a daily basis. It is also said that AFN-Munich was the first American radio station in Germany. Whether first or not, the US military understood the apparatus of radio communication and controlling what permeated the air.

Not all within the American sector were interested in AFN, and on a couple of occasions, students at the University of Maryland Munich campus started their own underground radio stations in response to the lack of quality which they said was AFN. These transitory histories interested us, and with Ground Control, our interest was to re-activate the site of McGraw Kaserne as a site of radio-phonic resistance, tapping into the history and presence of the site.