- Geoscapes: Interfaces Drawing Worlds
That an interfacial regime could encode the world so as to activate an archaic imagined community, or even to conjure a new one, in no way guarantees that absolutist and fundamentalist cultures will determine the future of the platform. In no way does it prevent it either. Just as for older forms of “ new media, ” such as the transistor radio, which provided a singular voice and explanation for tumultuous political change, the results can be as dramatic as they are contradictory. Such precedents provide models, especially those that demonstrate the role of a motivated imagination, aligned with rote determination, in the mobilization of fabulous media. For example, in the short span from D-Day to decolonization, France was on both sides of transistor radio ’ s power to script and mobilize the national imagination. De Gaulle came to national prominence through his broadcasts to occupied France from London during World War II, giving a semiofficial voice to the occupied nation. By the late 1950s, pirate broadcasts to contraband radios also played a role in the organization of Algerian independence from colonial France. As Franz Fanon relates it, the Voice of Fighting Algeria (VFA) was a pirate radio project set up by relatively disorganized resistance fighters to spread news about the military and cultural struggles of Algerian nationalist forces in response to the press (and public meetings) blackouts imposed by the occupation forces. In lieu of other public venues, the broadcasts contributed to the shape and mobility of the imaginary battalion of resistance for its listeners. <sup>62</sup> The voice of the VFA was even given a role in Gillo Pontecorvo ’ s classic simulationist film, Battle of Algiers, in which street-fighters are shown to stop, listen, or follow the explanatory cues of a nondiegetic and disembodied commander-narrator. <sup>63</sup> In effect, the Algerian public came to order in thinking that there was a strong, effective military resistance in early battles with the French when there was not, largely because the radio Users, already literate in the fantastic narrative, conceived there to be one. While Algerians previously had little interest in the radio receiver device in their homes, the VFA broadcasts allowed for its enthusiastic inclusion. Fanon writes that through the broadcasts, “ the nation’s speech, the nation’s spoken words gave it shape. ” Crowded around receiver sets, listeners actively formulated that voice:
Interface Layer
243