anna friz

In March 2013 I working in Israel/Palestine with Elle Flanders and Tamira Sawatzky of Toronto-based Public Studio on their newest film installation, What Isn’t There. The piece comes from nearly 20 years of photographing and filming on the sites of former Palestinian villages in Israel, an exploration of the politicized landscape in all its beauty, banality, and absurdity. The installation had its premiere in Toronto on May 22, 2013 in a one-night outdoor presentation, and consists of four channel video, accompanied by stereo sound (which visitors listen to on wireless headphones). It’s a powerful piece, which truly immerses visitors due to the design and scale of the screens, the intimate sound, and very formal yet generous presentation of the subject. I’m super pleased to be part of the team, composing and designing the sound.

Public Studio never rests, so we’re busy at our terminals working on a commission for Ryerson University, another audio/visual work called Drone Wedding. Wedding industrial complex meets military industrial complex, war meets the everyday under a familiar sky…. I wish I could say such an idea were a farce, but too often drone strikes abroad have targeted innocent civilian gatherings like weddings and parties. Drone Wedding will be up and running for the fall semester, from September 17-December 19, 2014 on the Ryerson University New Media Wall, in downtown Toronto, Canada.

No Comments | In: installation, news | tags: anna friz, Drone Wedding, Public Studio, Ryerson New Media Wall, shameless self-promotion, What Isn't There. | #

I began working with Elle Flanders and Tamira Sawatzky aka Public Studio in 2011, when I composed music and did sound design/installation for their multi-channel film work Road Movie. The piece explores the segregated road system in the West Bank, with perspectives from Israelis and Palestinians. Recently I’ve been working on the sound for Public Studio’s current long-running project What Isn’t There, documenting the Palestinian villages of 1948, from which their Arab inhabitants were displaced and exiled. This latest installment in Public Studio’s 15-year process with the villages is a multi-channel film installation featuring 14 villages.

Up until last week, I had never traveled to Israel/Palestine, and so had been learning about the area through various books, news and editorial media and through immersion in the sound recordings from Public Studio’s location shoots so far. Last week I finally went there myself, to take the Public Studio deluxe tour of the West Bank, record sound at some village sites, and to try to parse the long history of conquests that is writ large on the landscape, from Roman ruins to Marmaluke fortresses to Palestinian olive groves to Bedouin encampments to Israeli army bases, checkpoints, and walled-in settlements.

Suba, a Palestinian village built on the ruins of a Crusader fort

Tamira and I take a beak to sample some tart green almonds off the tree…

The current situation is quite literally inscribed on the land, revealing that this is now a battle that is largely being fought by pervasive, insidious construction and control of infrastructure, where the one with the biggest walls, the fastest roads, and control of the checkpoints wins. On the hilltops in Palestine, the radio communications towers are the one of first indications that an illegal Israeli settlement is coming, bringing walls and soldiers and strangely Santa Fe style-suburban homes with them.

Meanwhile, time seems to stand still, in a way, in the hazy hills around Nablus or Ramallah, where lemon trees and olive groves flourish in the terraced hills, drivers are fearless, people are kind and hostly, and the dust blows forward and the dust blows back.

No Comments | In: installation, news, research | tags: anna friz, Elle Flanders, Public Studio, Public Tours, Tamira Sawatzky, What Isn't There. | #

Tonight is the opening of my new installation and performance entitled White Night, created within the frame of my City at Night theme during a 2-month residency with KC Tobačna 001 and radioCONA here in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

* Opening at 19:00 at KC Tobačna 001 gallery, Tobačna ulica 1, Ljubljana
* RadioCONA broadcast on 88.8FM begins at 19:16
* Performance in the gallery at 20:00-ish

Later on, Brane Zorman and I do a live set for 2 FM frequencies, using the radioCONA temporary frequency (88.8FM) and the airwaves of Radio Študent (89.3FM) here in Ljubljana. For those of you listening locally, make sure to have 2 radios on at home, one for each station, to hear the full effect!

Here’s a little description of White Night
Radiophonic installation and performance

Since the advent of artificial illumination, the nocturnal urban space is increasingly described by its lighting. The shape and contour of the built environment is outlined by streetlighting, highlighted by mobile car and transport lights, and by lights left blazing in the windows of office towers and store fronts, or recreating daylight over subdivisions, parking lots and sports fields. The stars recede and the sky grows blank from the strength of light pollution, a process accentuated by the typical fog in Ljubljana in winter: no sun, no stars, only diffuse light in a white sky drawn close to the ground.

The ubiquitous infrastructure of the electrical grid powers most nocturnal activity, and its surplus is ticks, static, and hums transmitted by many nodes: buildings, devices, lights, and lines; by damp electrical wires, power stations, connection boxes, irate refrigerators, and ungrounded home entertainment systems alike. Electrical and spectral communication grids overlap and exceed the official city limits, and in these electro-magnetic fields invisible creatures sing on a pale night made indistinct by fog.

Created while in residence at Tobačna 001 and with radioCONA; travel funding gratefully received from the Canada Council for the Arts, Media Art division.
Thank you to Irena Pivka and Vlado G. Repnik.

No Comments | In: installation, news, performances, transmission | tags: anna friz, City at Night, radio art, radio installation, radioCONA, Tobacna 001, transmission art, White Night. | #

Two NRRF: B Radio episodes from earlier this summer, Voyage to the Forbidden Planet and Landfall on the Forbidden Planet are being rebroadcast as part of the LAK Festival for Nordic Sound Art in Copenhagen, DK September 26-29, 2013. Curated and produced by Jan Høgh Stricker and Kasper Vang as part of their 24-hour radio program Avantgarde FM II.

LAK Festival of Nordic Sound Art presents new Nordic, experimental sound art in raw and urbane settings. In 2013, LAK focuses on how sound art is used as a laboratory to explore new forms of sound and new ways to listen to the world.

NRRF: B Radio is a collaborative effort to make unlicensed neighborhood radio art. NRRF mashes b-list genres with radio art to structure the improvisational nature of the shows. It’s live radio, streamed, with special guests and live audience. The core group consists of Jonny Farrow, Anna Friz, Steve Germana, Jeff Kolar, and Peter Speer with Sarah Knudtson (documentation).

No Comments | In: installation, news, transmission | tags: B Radio, LAK festival, NRRF. | #

I have a site-specific installation up this weekend in Berlin as part of the conference Digitale Sinneskulturen des Radios/Multisensual Radio Culture.

21./22. JUNI 2013
STUDIO P4 | Nalepastraße 18-50 | 12459 Berlin

Studio Time is a new piece which adapts compositional elements from For the time being (2010) and What the cuckoo knows (2013), two recent pieces of mine exploring aspects of radio and timekeeping. This family of works considers the fallibility and musicality of broadcast clocks. Studio Time uses incidences of official time signals (such as UTC broadcast on shortwave radio, the National Research Council time signal heard on Canadian public radio, and clock tower bells heard at noon on Finnish and Dutch radio stations), as well as sounds from domestic analogue striking clocks, particularly cuckoo clocks. The installation was created for the conference on the site of the former studios of the DDR Funkhaus, now a recording studio and venue. The studio is preserved in its original design, and Studio Time occupies four voice-over isolation booths adjacent to a main studio. Each booth has a different part of the piece: two single channel pieces are heard over a mono speaker in each of two booths, a set of headphones plays a stereo piece in the third booth, and a mono radio transmits a composition in the fourth booth.

Thanks to Emmanuel Madan for setting things up for me in absentia. He’s exhibiting an installation exploring mechanical induction and bodily capacitance at the conference as well, entitled Lueurs.

Digitale Sinneskulturen des Radios is presented by Masterstudiengang Online Radio, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg mit Breitband, Deutschlandradio Kultur und Experimentelles Radio, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.

No Comments | In: installation, news | tags: anna friz, emmanuel madan, radio art, radio sinne, studio time, transmission art. | #

Usually when more than one sound installation moves into a gallery space, it’s an instant competition where the loudest wins the day. This Saturday, myself and Coppice (Joseph Kramer and Noé Cuéllar) seek to prove otherwise. We are installing two different sound-based installations that intentionally overlap, interested to see what they produce in conversation with one another. We’ll be performing within/with them as well, each taking a turn to add to the sonic environment.

I was excited from the first time I heard of Chicago-based Coppice, as they are also focused on free reeds and electronics, unstable systems, and spatialized, often quiet sounds.  Here’s what we’re up to:

Anna Friz/ Coppice   Saturday May 25, 2013     TriTriangle   Third Floor, 1550 N. Milwaukee Ave  Chicago    Installation open 6-11pm.  Performance around 9pm.

Anna Friz: Nocturne

An intimate atmosphere of transmission inside a multi-channel array of radio receivers and micro-watt transmitters, suspended and dispersed throughout the space. The radios express nighttime respirations, radio-synthesis, and uneasy dreams. The larger array is joined by three table-top custom radio/tape players built by Hyde Park inventor George Kagan.

Nocturne will overlap in installation and performance with A Vinculum Variation by Coppice, engaging in conversation with the elements of the shared sonic landscape and the live instruments of all three performers. Anna plays free reeds, electronics, and cassettes.

Coppice: A Vinculum Variation

This presentation expands the performed-installation practice of the duo to invite conversation with adjacent sonic work.  The multichannel installation and performance accommodates motifs and materials from Vinculum, an ongoing project since 2010.  Technically, the work relies on a custom-built inductive mixing table, formerly utilized in Copse (2010).  The table redistributes the sounds of the Vinculum archive as they are played back through small speakers resting at different locations on its surface.  The installation will be elaborated in performance by the reorientation of the speakers on the table and live material related to Vinculum.

No Comments | In: installation, news, performances | tags: anna friz, Coppice, radio art, sound installation, TriTriangle. | #

I’ve packed up my radios, and taken them on the road to Valparaiso Chile, for installation and performance at the Tsonami Festival de Arte Sonoro 2012. Many thanks to the whole Tsonami team here, for putting on a really generous event with a great community spirit!

Respire is remounted here as a 3-frequency piece, located in the corridor of the lower access to Ascensor El Peral (there are many ascensors here, which are a kind of outdoor elevator that make it easier to scale the steep hills of Valpo). The radios sway in the Pacific breeze, and chuff and stutter at one another as the fog rolls in to town in the evening. More photos to come soon, but here are a couple from the install, where I had help from an excellent group of installers, including Claudia, Paula (a bit blurry in action in the bottom photo) and head tech for the festival Rodrigo Ríos Zunino:

The piece is open daily November 26 – December 2, 2012, 10h-14h, 16h-22h.

I played the opening night of the festival at the Parque Cultural Valparaiso on Tuesday November 27, 20h. In addition to two stereo pairs of speakers, I also fired up the big transmitter to send to 20 radios suspended over the audience. Two more techie Rodrigos hung them all with the help of a shopping cart…. not pictured is the imperious little black and white feral cat who also followed them around.

Also this week, a new radio piece (50 minutes) unifying some of all the radio and timekeeping projects I’ve been working on for the past two years. It’s called Collecting clocks and losing time, and aired on Monday November 26 at 23h on Radio Valentín Letelier here in Valparaiso on 97.3FM/ 940AM. Here’s a little description:

Once upon a time there was a house on the countryside which housed a hundred clocks. Once upon a time the clocks in every house ran on their own time, and all the trains and hotels and shops had their own time. Once upon a time the time was made universal, divided into zones, and propagated around the globe: it was known as Mean Time. Once upon a time there were microwaves fired at a cesium-12 isotope, and the rate of electron loss dictated the most standardized time of all. Still there were digital devices that did not understand which time zone they lived in. Still everyone was late. Still the clocks began to slowly drag the seconds and minutes and hours behind them. Once upon a time the clocks burned in a fire. Now there are only five that remain.

Finally, I’m joining 3 other artists from the festival to give a short talk on Thursday, November 29, 17h, also at the Parque Cultural Valparaiso; mine perhaps predictably about radio, radio art, and everyday practice.

No Comments | In: installation, news, performances | tags: anna friz, radio art, radio installation, transmission art, Tsonami Festival de Arte Sonoro. | #

I have a new piece showing in Vancouver for the month of November, curated by Peter Courtemanche for An Audio Gallery, which is located at Lucky’s on Main Street.

It’s a 7-channel piece about collecting clocks and losing time, inspired by my late father’s love of cuckoo clocks. I’ve also been composing some radio works using the cuckoo clocks, so expect more cuckoo-cluck in the future.

Once upon a time there was a boy and his younger brother. They were visiting family on the countryside. One day they walked down the lane, past a field and a pasture, until they came to a little house. Inside lived an old lady, and her name was Mrs. Dane. When she opened the door and invited the two boys in, they discovered that her house was far from quiet. Inside the drawing room they saw that her walls were filled with clocks, all sorts of clocks, from floor to ceiling. The boy was especially drawn to the many cuckoo clocks that sang the time every half an hour. Where do they all come from, he asked her, and how do you wind them all? Oh they found me, she said, and sometimes it takes me the whole day to find the time. The boy never forgot Mrs. Dane and her house full of clocks. When he grew up and made his own way in the world, he traveled to a country with deep forests and high mountains, where cuckoo clocks made their home. He found them nesting in the trees, and he collected as many clocks as he could carry to bring home. Some flew away, some traveled by ship, and some were lost in a fire, but he kept as many as he could, and hung them on the walls in his drawing room. When he was an old man, there were just five left. He didn’t mind that the clocks would drift across the day. Their ticking kept him company, and lulled him to sleep at night.

Come and hear/see, Monday – Saturday 12h-18h, Sunday 12h-17h.

Lucky’s  3972 Main Street, Vancouver, British Columbia

Showing until December 9.

Special thanks to Peter Courtemanche for technical assistance.

Hard to tell in this grainy photo, but the lampshade is made of pink feathers.

No Comments | In: installation, news | tags: an audio gallery, anna friz, cuckoo clocks, Five Times (less a hundred), Lucky's, shameless self-promotion, sound installation. | #

For those of you living close to Vienna, Austria, you can catch the second iteration of the Joy Channel (by me and Emmanuel Madan) at the Institute für Medienarchäologie Sound Galerie, during their current program Intime Räume/ Intimate Spaces in 5.1

The show is up from September 29, 2012 to January 17, 2013, at the Klosterhof Hainburg, Austria.

Guest curator and Kunstradio producer Elisabeth Zimmermann explains the whole program:

The point of departure for this series is the 5.1 radio art piece “Intimate Space” that was created by Andrea Sodomka in 2009 and which explores the themes of distance, communication, and intimacy on a poetic level. Broadcasting in 5.1 surround sound – not only pre-produced, but also live – has been technically feasible in Austria since 2004, when ORF – the first public radio station in Europe to broadcast live in the 5.1 format – aired the Kunstradio project Re-Inventing Radio on its Long Night of Radio Art. In 2005 Kunstradio invited the Swiss artist and sound architect Andres Bosshard to hold a workshop for artists. It took place at Studio RP4 at the Funkhaus station in Vienna, where back in 1990 the RP4 workshop had given artists access to the whole range of possibilities introduced by the then new Studio RP4 – digital radio-play studio. By the end of the 5.1 workshop Andres Bosshard had created “Zwischen Antares und Altair”, a piece in which he incorporated sounds one doesn’t usually hear, e.g. the warm-up exercises of a singer. Another piece that is based on private sounds and statements recorded by chance is “Sirenen, intim” by writer and director Lucas Cejpek. Whereas recording for “Sirenen, intim” also took place at Studio RP4 during the ORF radio-play production of “Sirenen” in 2005, for her piece “A Space of Translation” the Berlin-based visual artist Ines Lechleitner had no choice but to use a microphone hidden beneath her veil to record conversations and sounds in public space in Teheran in 2008. Fascinated by the Chinese culture of public spitting, the Colombian artist and filmmaker Margarita Jimeno plays with our aversion to spitting in “SPIT RADIO – Or the Road to Spitiskan”. By taking the perspective of a hostage, the German author Birgit Kempker exposes listeners to a completely different taboo in “Papa, short version”. The Austrian author and radio artist Peter Pessl carries us off to an inner sound landscape enhanced by recordings from Tibet, Nepal, and North India in “Re-Inventing Tibet”. And in their fictitious sci-fi radio art program “The Joy Channel” the Canadian artists Anna Friz and Emmanuel Madan concoct a world that tries to directly manipulate peoples’ feelings using experimental radio transmissions.

No Comments | In: installation, news | tags: anna friz, emmanuel madan, IMA, Intimate Spaces 5.1, Kunstradio, radio art, shameless self-promotion, the joy channel. | #

Probably. So listen to this while wearing a nice cold shirt straight from the fridge (do not listen to electronic gadgets in the cold bath):

Measure the time taken— three pieces (2 new ones, and 1 older one I made with Eric Leonardson) created as part of my ongoing exploration about the perception and standardization of time through time keeping and recording, and radio. They explore the continuous, irregular present, suspended and stretched through habit and drift, and measured against the Futurist dream of time overcome. Published in issue 22 of No More Potlucks, a bilingual online and print on demand journal of politics, art and culture.

photo: Tom Blanchard

For those of you in Winnipeg, you can mosey on down to Plug-In Institute of Contemporary Art and catch Road Movie, installed until August 19, 2012. It’s a wonderful piece, conceived and directed by Elle Flanders and Tamira Sawatzky aka Public Studio. My contribution was the film soundtrack and the sound installation design.

As for new work, I’m currently researching and experimenting with more time-related pieces under the working titles “One minute from now” and  “Zero Hour”, as well as slowly compiling an album’s worth of material to make available in the winter, and doing some writing about transmission art. Lots of travel coming up in the next year: Tsonami festival in Valparaiso Chile (Nov 2012), another short residency at ORF Kunstradio, Vienna (Dec 2012), performing in Evalyn Parry’s SPIN in Vancouver (April 2013), Heart as Arena on tour in Québec (end of April 2013), and a residency courtesy of Radio CONA in Ljubljana, Slovenia (Nov-Dec 2013).

No Comments | In: installation, news | tags: anna friz, no more potlucks, Road Movie, shameless self-promotion, sound design, what's that noise?. | #