Evaporation, condensation, sublimation, deposition. Action, activism, control, resistance. How do changes in state involve exchanges of energy? How do changes of matter cause changes of state? State policy regarding land, mining, mineral extraction and its accompanying infrastructures and consumption of raw resources such as fresh water are all brought to bear on the political landscape.
Sonic reflections on volatile political and industrial times via field recordings from copper and lithium mining areas northern Chile, cottage electronics, sampled media and radio, and voice. Live performance at esc medien kunst labor by Anna Friz, with sounds of public uprising in Chile shared by Rodrigo Ríos Zunino. First broadcast for Art’s Birthday 2020; rebroadcast on Radio Tsonami, Valparaíso for Chile’s 2020 election.
On the 100th anniversary of the first global entertainment broadcast, Radioee.net and online radio stations from across the world present Wireless, a 24-hr translingual radio broadcast about planetary wireless communication.
NRRF Bb Radio: The development of planetary radio practices and systems also brought the insight that Earth is continually bathed in radio signals emanating from points across the universe, from ‘nearby’ within our solar system or from vast distances in space and time. Departing from Velimir Khlebnikov’s poetic observation in 1920 that “even starlight is a wireless signal”, the NRRF collective eavesdrops on the radiophony coming our way, and encounters fast radio bursts, long waves, and even the loneliest wave of all.
NRRF is an intermittent collaborative effort to make unlicensed neighborhood radio art. Earlier projects include a series of clandestine FM broadcasts in Chicago, Montréal and beyond with a rotating group of collaborators. Since 2012 NRRF features Jonny Farrow, Anna Friz, Stephen Germana, Jeff Kolar, and Peter Speer. It’s live radio expanded and improvised from various geographical locations, with the current group collaborating from Vermont, Florida, North Carolina, Chicago and Santa Cruz. The core group of performers play everything from traditional instruments to home built electronics, sample wildly, speculate broadly, and have been known to sing. @JonnyFarrow, @peter.speer, @jeffkolar, @wave_farm, @free103point9, @wgxc
On August 27, 1920, “The crazy people on the roof” (Radio Argentina
Society initiators Enrique Susini, César Guerrico, Miguel Mugica, Luis
Romero and Ignacio Gómez) installed a smuggled Marconi transmitter on
the rooftop terrace of the Teatro Coliseo in downtown Buenos Aires. This
broadcast of Wagner’s “Parsifal” marked the first radio broadcast in
Argentina and the first mass public entertainment broadcast in the
world.
On August 27, 2020, Midnight to Midnight Argentina Time, Wireless explores radio pasts and futures, from technology to entertainment. Everything wireless runs on radio, radio waves are the medium of wireless internet. Through translingual dialogue, music and sound, Wireless will consider the various modalities of this evolving planetary condition–spectrum, networks, telecommunications, infrastructure, urban acrobatics, physics, entertainment and education. Each partner radio will rebroadcast the marathon stream, leading to an amplification of radio investigation, entertainment, and solidarity.
radioee.net is an online, nomadic, multilingual radio station. They host 24-hr broadcast events on mobility and movement. They take up topics of transportation, migration, and climate transformation, transmitting local voices, music, and sound to create an audio portrait of a place in time.
Live Broadcast on π-node (Paris and Mulhouse, France on DAB), Resonance Extra (Brighton, Bristol, Cambridge, London and Norwich, UK on DAB), Sound Arts (Dartington, UK on FM), and WGXC (Green and Columbia counties, New York on FM), Radio Tsonami (Valparaíso, CL online); Thursdays at 19:00-20:00 GMT (0). Rebroadcast on FM by Radio ARA, Luxembourg, Jet FM, Nantes, France, Radio Orange in Vienna, Austria and Radio Panik in Bruxelles, Belgium. One-off rebroadcasts on Radio Corax, Halle (Saale) Germany and others.
Worker-artists convene a hive broadcast of indiscriminately gathered sound-pollen, transmitting codified messages to kindred folk.
Each week a potent gang of sound artists are at play, exploring whatever is on their minds. Style guide: Anything goes
Each node streams live to Mobile Radio while listening to the complete live stream that goes out to our broadcast partners. Due to inevitable online delays of 10-20 seconds, all participant artists are hearing a delayed version of the group mix as they play together, effectively improvising with an as-yet unheard future.
April 16, 2020: Episode 2: “Oil and Vinegar”; artists Knut Aufermann & Sarah Washington (Ürzig), Katharina Bihler &Stefan Scheib,(Saarbrücken), Frauke Berg (Düsseldorf),DinahBird (Paris), dieb13 & Billy Roisz (Vienna), Anna Friz (Santa Cruz), and Ralf Schreiber (Cologne).
April 23, 2020: Episode 3: “Wormhole Variations”; artists Knut Aufermann & Sarah Washington (Ürzig), Xentos Fray Bentos (Broughton), Katharina Bihler &Stefan Scheib(Saarbrücken), Frauke Berg (Düsseldorf), DinahBird (Paris), dieb13 & Billy Roisz (Vienna), Anna Friz (Santa Cruz), and Ralf Schreiber (Cologne)
April 30, 2020:Episode 4: “Transcendental Trepidation”; artists Knut Aufermann & Sarah Washington (Ürzig), Xentos Fray Bentos (Broughton), Katharina Bihler &Stefan Scheib(Saarbrücken), Frauke Berg (Düsseldorf), DinahBird (Paris), dieb13 & Billy Roisz (Vienna), Anna Friz (Santa Cruz), and Ralf Schreiber (Cologne)
May 7, 2020: Episode 5: “Mission Compossible”; artists Knut Aufermann & Sarah Washington (Ürzig), Xentos Fray Bentos (Broughton), Katharina Bihler &Stefan Scheib(Saarbrücken), Frauke Berg (Düsseldorf), DinahBird (Paris), dieb13 & Billy Roisz (Vienna), Anna Friz (Santa Cruz), and Ralf Schreiber (Cologne)
May 14, 2020: Episode 6: “Weltschmerz Heimat”; artists Knut Aufermann & Sarah Washington (Ürzig), Xentos Fray Bentos (Broughton), Katharina Bihler & Stefan Scheib(Saarbrücken), Frauke Berg (Düsseldorf), DinahBird (Paris), dieb13 & Billy Roisz (Vienna), Anna Friz (Santa Cruz), and Ralf Schreiber (Cologne)
May 21, 2020: Episode 7: “300 Trillion Times Less Dense”; artists Knut Aufermann & Sarah Washington (Ürzig), Xentos Fray Bentos (Broughton), Katharina Bihler & Stefan Scheib(Saarbrücken), Frauke Berg (Düsseldorf), DinahBird (Paris), dieb13 & Billy Roisz (Vienna), Anna Friz (Santa Cruz), and Ralf Schreiber (Cologne)
May 28, 2020: Episode 8: “We Got Der Funk”; artists Knut Aufermann & Sarah Washington (Ürzig), Xentos Fray Bentos (Broughton), Katharina Bihler & Stefan Scheib(Saarbrücken), Frauke Berg (Düsseldorf), DinahBird (Paris), dieb13 & Billy Roisz (Vienna), Anna Friz (Santa Cruz), and Ralf Schreiber (Cologne)
June 4, 2020: Episode 9: “Rhapsody in Why?”; artists Knut Aufermann & Sarah Washington (Ürzig), Xentos Fray Bentos (Broughton), Katharina Bihler & Stefan Scheib(Saarbrücken), Frauke Berg (Düsseldorf), DinahBird (Paris), dieb13 & Billy Roisz (Vienna), Anna Friz (Santa Cruz), and Ralf Schreiber (Cologne)
June 11, 2020: Episode 10: “Stand Down Racist”; artists Knut Aufermann & Sarah Washington (Ürzig), Xentos Fray Bentos (Broughton), Katharina Bihler & Stefan Scheib(Saarbrücken), Frauke Berg (Düsseldorf), DinahBird (Paris), dieb13 & Billy Roisz (Vienna), Anna Friz (Santa Cruz), and Ralf Schreiber (Cologne)
June 18, 2020: Episode 11: “Fast Radio Bursts”; artists Knut Aufermann & Sarah Washington (Ürzig), Xentos Fray Bentos (Broughton), Katharina Bihler & Stefan Scheib(Saarbrücken), Frauke Berg (Düsseldorf), DinahBird (Paris), dieb13 & Billy Roisz (Vienna), Anna Friz (Santa Cruz), and Ralf Schreiber (Cologne)
June 25, 2020: Episode 12: “Last Wave Standing”; artists Knut Aufermann & Sarah Washington (Ürzig), Xentos Fray Bentos (Broughton), Katharina Bihler & Stefan Scheib(Saarbrücken), Frauke Berg (Düsseldorf), DinahBird & Jean-Philippe Renoult (Paris), dieb13 (Vienna), Anna Friz (Santa Cruz), Lloyd Dunn (Prague), Lucinda Guy (Buckfastleigh).
July 2, 2020: Episode 13: “Indivisible i”; artists Knut Aufermann & Sarah Washington (Ürzig), Xentos Fray Bentos (Broughton), Frauke Berg (Düsseldorf), DinahBird & Jean-Philippe Renoult (Paris), dieb13 (Vienna), Anna Friz (Santa Cruz), Ralf Schreiber (Cologne), Lloyd Dunn (Prague), Lucinda Guy (Buckfastleigh), Hannes Hölzl (Andrian).
July 9, 2020: Episode 14: “More Bows Less Arrows”; artists Knut Aufermann & Sarah Washington (Ürzig), Xentos Fray Bentos (Broughton), DinahBird (Paris), dieb13 & Billy Roisz (Vienna), Lloyd Dunn (Prague), Anna Friz (Vancouver), Ralf Schreiber (Cologne), Rodrigo Ríos Zunino (Valparaíso). Special guest Nástio Mosquito.
July 16, 2020: Episode 15: “Close-Flung”; artists Knut Aufermann & Sarah Washington (Ürzig), Xentos Fray Bentos (Broughton), DinahBird (Paris), Katharina Bihler & Stefan Scheib(Saarbrücken),dieb13 & Billy Roisz (Vienna), Lloyd Dunn (Prague), Anna Friz (Vancouver), Ralf Schreiber (Cologne), Rodrigo Ríos Zunino (Valparaíso).
It’s that time of year, when once again we reach into deep pre-history to celebrate Art’s Birthday. It’s been 1,000,057 years to be precise, since someone dropped a sponge into a bucket of water, and so, art was born. Buiding on Robert Filliou’s Fluxus holiday, a loose and changing cooperation of international artists join in networked exchange locally and around the world. Tune in to the hub of activities.
I’m currently in Graz, Austria, hosted by the inimitable esc medien kunst labor . Tonight we are kicking off the year of the urban cyborg with a Cyborg Radiation Day. I’ll be performing a new piece entitled Changes of State, using field recordings from the Atacama desert, together with protest sounds shared by my collaborator Rodrigo Ríos Zunino from the recent popular uprisings in Chile in response to aggravated social and economic inequality.
While the Chilean uprising was sparked by a hike in public transportation prices, the real issue lies in a massive inequity between social welfare and corporate welfare, where Chile’s extraction economy serves the very wealthy while pillaging the environment and forcing more and more people to fall into poverty. International companies and consortia are deeply implicated in this mess, with Canadian mining companies and investors at the helm. Our ongoing project on mining and its associated infrastructure in the high altitude deserts of Chile is the focus of my time here in Graz, both for Art’s Birthday and with the multi-screen and multi-channel sound installation Salar: Evaporation which will open next week on January 24, 2020 at esc.
Tune in via Radio Helsinki , the free radio here in Graz, and here’s the full line up for tonight from esc!
18.00 Uhr:URBAN CYBORGS, Opening and greeting words by Reni Hofmüller and Ilse Weber, presentation of the project URBAN CYBORGS and start of radio transmission including Radio Cyborg TransmitterRCT
21.15 Uhr:The sound of artspace, Seppo Gründler live in Graz, then: Presents to art, Onlinearchive Ö1 Kunstradio, Moderation: Reni Hofmüller
21.40 Uhr:Changes of State, Anna Friz, Radioperformance, live from Graz
22.00 Uhr:Die Loslösung des Plans, Lale Rodgarkia-Dara, live from Graz
22.30 Uhr:Embodied Radio Device, Absolute Value of Noise and Anna Friz
22.50 Uhr: 30 Minutes of SDR, Enrique Tomas, live from Linz, in collaboration with Dorf TV Linz
23.20 Uhr: denn jede Variable stellt eine konstante Form dar, Adina Camhy, Bettina Landl & Peter Venus; Presents to art, Onlinearchive RADIA, Moderation: Reni Hofmüller
I have a number of radio art works (collaborations all!) in the current edition of Radiophrenia (2019). Tune in May 19-26, 2019 to listen to the full schedule of radio art from around the world.
May 21, 2019 17-17:30 Glasgow time (GMT +1): Embodied Radio Devicecreated by Absolute Value of Noise and Anna Friz
May 23, 2019 2:00-7:00 (GMT +1): Embodied Radio Device (long form for overnight listening).
May 24, 2019 16:00-16:50 (GMT +1): The Joy Channelcreated by Anna Friz and Emmanuel Madan
Radiophrenia is a temporary art radio station organized by Mark Vernon and Barry Burns– a two-week exploration into current trends in sound and transmission arts. Broadcasting live from Glasgow’sCentre for Contemporary Arts, the station aims to promote radio as an art form, encouraging challenging and radical new approaches to the medium.
I have a number of radio art works (collaborations all!) in the current edition of Radiophrenia (2019). Tune in May 19-26, 2019 to listen to the full schedule of radio art from around the world.
Radiophrenia is a temporary art radio station organized by Mark Vernon and Barry Burns– a two-week exploration into current trends in sound and transmission arts. Broadcasting live from Glasgow’sCentre for Contemporary Arts, the station aims to promote radio as an art form, encouraging challenging and radical new approaches to the medium.
May 19, 2019 16-18h Glasgow time: NRRF B-Radio returns, with an all new surreal and labyrinthine episode The Forbidden Planet Awakens! Deconstructing the space opera, the countdown never ends as our intrepid space crew and their ever-practical Mission Control and chronically depressed Ground Control counterparts try to escape the Forbidden Planet.
NRRF is a collaborative effort to make unlicensed neighborhood radio art. B Radio mashes b-list film and pulp fiction 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. For this episode, all members participated remotely, from Abu Dhabi, Wave Farm in Acra NY, Florida, North Carolina, and Radius in Chicago. Many thanks to the Wave Farm and Tom Roe for supporting the piece, which will also be rebroadcast on WGXC Greene and Columbia counties, NY in the coming weeks.
“Art’s Birthday” is an annual event first proposed in 1963 by French artist Robert Filliou. One million years ago on January 17, someone dropped a dry sponge into a bucket of water. And so, art was born. Filliou proposed a public holiday to celebrate the presence of art in our lives. In recent years, the idea has been taken up by a loose network of artists and friends around the world who exchange audiovisual parties, first via the post, telephone, fax, and later internet streams and public radio satellite. Each year the Eternal Networkevolves to include new partners – working with the ideas of exchange and telecommunications art.
This year, I’ve joined Absolute Value of Noise to realize the Embodied Radio Device, a generative radio stream which supposes an Artificial Intelligence that is trying to recreate the sounds of life in its immediate environment – imitating the sounds of insects, birds, frogs, magnetic phenomena, the wind moving through the trees, rain falling, and waves on the ocean. The humans play along with various forms of synthesis. Listen online until January 18, 2019. AI constructed by Absolute Value of Noise, using his Solar Radio outdoor installation which responds to sun exposure and environmental factors, and I’ve provided some accompanying ‘human synthesizer’ and assorted radiophonic/acoustic grit.
Tune in– best accompanied with cake. Happy Art’s Birthday! Remember: the End is just pretend!
The Joy Channel will be broadcast this Friday, November 16, 2018 on Radioee.net. Radioee (Radio Espacio Estacion) is an online, nomadic, and multilingual radio station which hosts intermittent broadcast events internationally. This week they manifest under the theme Auto Piloto, streaming live from self-driven cars in the San Francisco Bay Area to consider audio-/auto-mobility and the future (and futurity) of such tech thinking. Broadcasts will take place in English, Spanish, and Vietnamese.
Tune in to radioee.net Thursday and Friday November 15-16 from 11:00 to 23:00 each day.
The Joy Channel airs from 20:00-21:00 PST (GMT -8) on Friday November 16.
Finally Emmanuel Madan and I are launching The Joy Channel, our foray into the radio of the future which we have worked on over the years (2007-2017) through several iterations, this being the third and final. This radio art piece was supposed to be about the future a century from now, but at some moments I feel like the present has caught up rather quickly to where we imagined we might end up… or rather, the ‘business as usual’ which results in a transformed New North America seems to be rather imminently taking place. But no matter—the theme is still ultimately one of optimism, as we consider the prospect of tele-empathy versus corporate emo-casting.
To listen or purchase your own digital copy of The Joy Channel, head on over to IO SOUND. The Joy Channel will be the first on IO SOUND’s transmission arts sub-label. They are a Vancouver-based label who have some terrific releases in the world of experimental sound and now transmission arts, so do take a moment to peruse their catalogue while you’re there.
Here’s what The Joy Channel is all about:
Over a century from now, business as usual has rendered the nation states of Canada, the United States and Mexico extinct. Approximately 40 million people remain in New North America who are mainly concentrated on the west and east coasts in city-states such as Van and Turnpike, or in the walled-in corporate state strongholds of Fortress Alaska and the Protectorate of Utah. Inland, sparse but emergent communities persist.
In this future, the radio ecology still includes community radio, CB and ham radio as technologies which have survived the social and environmental cataclysms by being relatively easy to salvage, fix, and modify, and therefore remain useful to improvised new societies that tend towards local systems, nomadism and scavenging. But radio in the future is not only a sonic medium: it also becomes a means of transmitting neural information in the form of standardized human emotions (corporate ’emo-casting’), or for tele-empathic communion without devices practiced by dispersed nomadic communities.
We tune across the territories of the future radio to learn of the transforming geopolitics and the emerging EM (empathy modulation) band, from the transmissions of a lone ham radio operator or ‘wavefinder’ to the ongoing conversations of a group of hams radioing across the continent, to corporate shills, pundits, religious figures, the seductive sounds of emocast channels, and among them, something new being felt across the spectrum.
This speculative radio art piece explores tensions between the neurological manipulation of emotions and empathic realization, the interaction between the listeners as active or passive subjects, and the renewed struggle over access to the airwaves.
The Joy Channel was originally commissioned by Radio Tesla, Berlin for RadioVisionen: 250 Jahre Radio in 2007. This release is a completely new version of the work with a new script, characters, and scenario, and was chosen as a finalist for the Phonurgia Nova Awards in the category of Sound and Radiophonic Art in 2017.
Canada Council for the Arts
ORF Kunstradio (Vienna)
Wave Farm, Acra NY
Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin)
PRIM (Montréal)
Oboro (Montréal)
Voices: Sarita Ahooja, Leslie Baker, Alexis Bhagat, Matt Bua, Brian Dewan, Lorrie Edmonds, Danielle Frank, Anna Friz, Gina Grotelueschen, Justin Grotelueschen, Darsha Hannah Hewitt, Ricardo Lira, Emmanuel Madan, Randy Peters, Tom Roe, Victoria Stanton, Vince Tinguely, Rufo Valencia
Special thanks to Galen Joseph-Hunter and Tom Roe (Wave Farm), Stéphane Claude and Claudine Hubert (Oboro), Steve Bates (Hexagram), and tobias c. van Veen (IO SOUND).
Thanks to all those involved with earlier incarnations of this work, especially Martina Groß, Andreas Hagelüken, Séamus O’Donell, Moritz von Rappard and Johannes Wilms (Radio Tesla, 2007) and Elisabeth Zimmermann (ORF Kunstradio, 2009).
