Opening this weekend: the largest radio art festival in the world!! I am one of the five curators for the Radio Revolten International Radio Art Festival in Halle (Saale) Germany, running for the month of October 2016. Together with artistic director Knut Aufermann, and co-curators Sarah Washington, Ralf Wendt, and Elisabeth Zimmermann, we have the pleasure of welcoming more than 70 artists from 17 countries to Halle (Saale) to present 30 days of contemporary radio art at 15 locations around the city in the form of performances, installations, concerts and live radio broadcasts. Daily events take place in the Radio Revolten Club, located close to the city market square. Next door at Radio Revolten Central, visitors will experience art installations dealing with transmission in all its guises.
I have been particularly consumed by the curation and installation of the contemporary art exhibit Das Grosse Rauschen: The Metamorphosis of Radio Art, which features Steve Bates (ca/qc), DinahBird and Jean-Philippe Renoult (fr), Golo Föllmer and friends (de), Fernando Godoy M and Rodrigo Ríos Zunino (cl), Jeff Kolar (us), Emmanuel Madan (ca/qc), Sally Ann McIntyre (nz), Kristen Roos (ca), with Maia Urstad (no) installed in the Stadtmuseum Halle as part of the “Unsichtbar Welle” historical installation. These artists are working across the electro-magnetic spectrum with ultra-high frequency transmissions, with baby monitors, with radio silences or repurposing razor wire as antenna, creating in kinetic sculpture, exploded radio art, and site-specific interventions.
We are also transmitting 24 hours a day on Radio Revolten Radio, on the FM frequency 99.3 MHz in Halle, reaching further afield on the AM (middlewave) frequency 1575 kHz, and serving a worldwide audience via the festival livestream. 35 radio stations around the world will integrate parts of Radio Revolten Radio into their own programming, including Resonance FM, Radio Zero, members of the Radia network, and Wave Farm/WGXC Hudson Valley NY. Remarkable events will surprise Halle throughout the month of October 2016: from towers to castles to gardens, radio will blossom into art.
Finally, I am presenting a new piece of my own entitled The Envelope of the Hour in the Roter Turm. This location is a jewel of the a site, being a 600-year-old clock tower in the market square here in Halle, which is the crossroads of farmer’s market, Oktoberfest, and the streetcar exchange. At night it feels like being inside of a microphone, and during the day the wind and city rushes through the windows. The piece is from my atomic clock series, and is a multi-channel sound installation made from audio manipulations of the radio broadcast of the atomic clock and sounds of the bells, exploring the sonic resonance, suspension, drift and decay of atomic and mechanical clock time. The work was supported by the Arts Research Institute of the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Radio Revolten would be nothing without the incredible rock-solid base of organizing, blood, sweat, and glee embodied by Radio Corax, a free-radio station and the pride of Halle.
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