Healdsburg’s role in ‘Radio Benjamin’

Healdsburg High School art teacher Linus Lancaster is collaborating with two other instructors to create a stand-alone working radio station/art installation that will be part of a November display at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Terry Pagni, who teaches the Construction and Sustainability Academy, and engineering teacher Bryan Davis have joined Lancaster to create the movable structure for a conference held at the institute.

Healdsburg High School students in their three programs are building a “circular tent structure” of canvas and wood. Twelve student-built radios, fabricated by Davis’ engineering students and Lancaster’s art students, will demonstrate the student’s work around the perimeter of the structure. An interactive display includes a video projector and three radios capable of transmission.

Art students will print the outside canvas with images and words taken from German philosopher Walter Benjamin’s work. More than two dozen students are involved with the project.

The installation is part of a conference hosted by the Art Institute and City Light Books held in conjunction with the release of the book “Radio Benjamin.” Both the book and conference, “Haunted Reflections/Radio Free Benjamin,” are about Benjamin’s philosophical and technology work.

Benjamin was a Jewish Marxist who lived in exile in Switzerland and France for most of his adult life. He was a conscientious objector during WWI, and when he was refused admittance into Spain in 1940, he chose death over torture at the hands of the Nazis.

He also used cutting edge radio technology to broadcast his work in art, literature and the “philosophy of technology” in the 1920s and 1930s. There is a resurgence of scholarly interest in Benjamin’s work.

Students also will create a short film documenting the building process and the exhibit. Lancaster is seeking other venues interested in exhibiting the radio station.

The $4,500 project costs were underwritten by the Voigt Family Sculpture Foundation and the Hotel Healdsburg Fund, through the Healdsburg Education Foundation.

The working radio station will be open to the public during the conference, from 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Nov. 5-Nov. 9. A reception will be held at the Institute, 800 Chestnut St. San Francisco at noon Nov. 8. Admission is free.

Contact Healdsburg ?correspondent Ann Carranza at healdsburg.towns@?gmail.com.