[ITALIAN NEW LEFT – SOCIAL MEDIA AVANT LA LETTRE] Appello di Radio Alice a tutti coloro per i quali la libertà di informazione non è solo libertà per i borghesi di insultare i proletari [Radio Alice's appeal to all those for whom freedom of information is not just freedom for the bourgeoisie to insult the proletariat].

Bologna, Radio Alice, March 1977. Single leaf, printed to recto, measuring 34.5 × 24.7 cm. With slight traces of folding; slight edge wear, else good or better. Item #55053

Very rare leaflet by the important left-wing autonomous radio station “Alice” on the occasion of the escalation that took place between the station and the police in March 1977, after the station had been in existence for about a year. The radio project had emerged from the Bolognese magazine “A/traverso” at a time when the site of Europe's oldest university had a communist city government. What characterized the group above all was its experimental interest in the development of new technical possibilities in communication. A/traverso” was already thinking about the paths that the electronic revolution would pave. Umberto Eco wrote in an article about the radio project, among other things: “But one can hardly resist the temptation to see in Radio Alice the last scion in the line of avant-gardes to discover new means of expression in order to realize what one no longer finds, at least at this creative level, either in collections of poetry or in experimental novels.”

The end of the state monopoly on radio was fundamental to the radio project. Unlike the numerous other radio stations that were founded at the time, which were either established as mouthpieces for political organizations or as advertising vehicles for the entertainment industry, Radio Alice experimented with the medium and its possibilities. Eco saw “a revolution in the technology of journalism” at work in the practice of the Bolognese group. What is taken for granted today in the new media was already being attempted in a radical way with “Radio Alice”, namely to make the relationship between sender and receiver interchangeable via telephone and radio. The station did not intervene, did not select the callers, but broadcast every telephone contribution uncensored and uncorrected. The possibilities of live transmission were radically exploited. Even the police operation that took place on the station's rooms was broadcast live. In a sense, the “outside world” was supposed to constantly take over the radio. (Cf. Klemens Gruber, Radio Alice. Eine kleine Gruppe zwischen Himmel und Erde, in: Kunstforum, vol. 116, 1991, pp. 218-224.)

As of March 2025, OCLC lists only one copy worldwide, in North America.

Price: €500.00

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