January 21st, 2012
The Joy Channel on the air on WGXC 90.7
map by Glenn Gear
Emmanuel Madan and I are doing a little residency at the free103point9.org Wave Farm in Greene County, New York this week, and as part of our stay we’ll be doing a broadcast this afternoon on WGXC, a full-power community radio station supported by free103, serving Greene and Columbia counties in New York state.
TUNE IN 16h-18h EST (-5 GMT) today, January 21, 2012, or check the station archives.
We’ll be talking about our ongoing project The Joy Channel, and playing some excerpts of old and new material related to the project. Here’s a description to give you a taste:
The Joy Channel is an experimental radio work by Anna Friz and Emmanuel Madan. The piece proposes that the radio of the future will no longer be characterized as a primarily sonic medium, but rather as a means of transmitting emotional or empathic communication. The piece explores tensions between empathic realization and the neurological manipulation of emotions, the interaction between the listeners as active or passive subjects, and the renewed struggle over access to the airwaves. In the year 2147, after nearly 150 years of business as usual (government corruption and privatization, toxic resource extraction and industrial practices, bad weather, civil uprising, earthquakes and pandemic), the nation states of Canada and U.S.A. no longer exist. Approximately 40 million people remain in North America, mainly concentrated on the west and east coasts, and in thinner communities inland. The technique of transmitting emotions over radio frequencies is originally developed as a psychiatric home tele-treatment procedure for long-term depression patients. However, by 2147 corporate broadcasters are also exploiting the technology for its entertainment and behavioural control potential.
This sudden domination of the EM (formerly FM) radio spectrum encroaches upon another, more arcane radiophonic pratice: radio-empathic communion. Wandering in the relative silence of wasted urban and ex-urban spaces in the central continent, small communities of empaths had begun to form and to reach out to one another. They discovered that the FM radio spectrum, largely abandoned during the upheavals that accompanied the population collapse of the late 21st century, was open ground for a type of communication not yet experienced in human history: tele-empathy. These neo-nomads developed the sensitivity to feel one another across greater and greater distances without the use of transmitters or receivers. Their process is rudely interrupted when Hi-Zenith’s standardized emotional broadcasts go live to air from coast to coast.
We’ll be doing some more radio late Sunday night/Monday morning, just in time for the lunar new year! Tune in for the zero hour January 23, midnight EST (-5 GMT), on WGXC.
When not mucking around in the snow with a microphone, I’m toiling away deep in the Nice Little Static Laboratories (possibly in my work pajamas, though rumours are unconfirmed) to produce some sounds for spring. Most pressing: dissertation chapters! And CD projects, including completing one with 