The art of radio, or the “invisible architectures” of listening: Helen Thorington and the poetry of partial connections

This paper investigates how the American artist Helen Thorington uses radio art to create a democratic and invisible listening space, into which listeners can enter, “if they want.” In this hybrid space, in which reality is haunted by fiction and fiction by reality, the experience of listening makes a new political experience of literature possible, in which each voice creates an echo, in its disembodied materiality, in the world itself, and finds a frequency at which it can be heard.