anna friz

Jeff Kolar and I will be performing new work together tonight for the hybrid radio project ∏-node at the 2014 CTM Festival. Tonight’s show is co-organized by Salon Bruit and senderberlin.org.

∏-node is an experimental platform for hybrid Web/FM radiophonic composition. As a multi-dimensional radio infrastructure platform, ∏-node explores the narrative, participative, and imaginary possibilities of radio through the use of both historic and new, digital technologies.

CTM Festival is an international festival dedicated to contemporary electronic, digital and experimental music, as well as the diverse range of artistic activities in the context of sound and club cultures here in Berlin. Since 1999 it takes place concurrently and cooperatively with transmediale – international festival for art and digital culture, Berlin.

Listen:
p-node radio stream

When:
January 29, 2014
12:00 AM – 2:00 AM GMT +1

Where:
Where is Jesus Temporary Space
Wrangelstrasse 57, 10997
Kreuzberg, Berlin, Germany

No Comments | In: news, performances, transmission | tags: anna friz, CTM festival, jeff kolar, p-node.org, salon bruit. | #

This week (27.01.2014 – 02.02.2014) our second NRRF B Radio episode Voyage to the Forbidden Planet rebroadcasts on the international independent radio network Radia, devoted to new and forgotten ways of making radio.

Radia is a network of 25 independent, non-commercial stations operating in Europe and beyond:

Campus Paris (Paris, FR) CFRC 101.9 FM (Kingston, CA) CKUT (Montréal, CA) Curious Broadcast (Dublin, IR) JET FM (Nantes, FR) Kanal 103 (Skopje, MK) Orange 94.0 (Vienna, AT) Radio Campus (Brussels, BE) Radio Corax (Halle, DE) Radio Grenouille (Marseille, FR) Radio Helsinki (Graz, AT) Radio Nova (Oslo, NO) Radio One 91 FM (Dunedin, NZ) Radio Panik (Brussels, BE) Radio Papesse (Firenze, IT) Radio Student (Ljubljana, SI) radio x (Frankfurt/Main, DE) Rádio Zero (Lisboa, PT) RadioWORM (Rotterdam, NL) Reboot.fm (Berlin, DE) Resonance104.4fm (London, UK) Soundart Radio (Dartington, UK) TEA FM (Zaragoza, ES) Wave Farm WGXC 90.7-FM (New York, USA) XL Air (Brussels, BE).

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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. | #

REuse CITY: REuse RADIO is a project of radioCONA, in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

In January I am co-curating and creating new works for radioCONA, during my residency at KC Tobačna 001. We have a temporary city-wide FM frequency where we’ll be broadcasting January 15-20, 2014, as well as streaming on the internets. radioCona broadcasts at FM 88.8MHz and online every night starting around 7:15 p.m. from Wednesday 15 January until Monday 20 January 2014. Curators of the FM exhibition: Anna Friz, Irena Pivka, Jasmina Založnik, Brane Zorman

Here is what it’s all about, plus the line up of events:

radioCona REuseCITY: REuseRADIO is a research/exhibition project that takes place across an FM frequency, a gallery, and urban space. It focuses on parallel possible uses of the city and radio frequencies. REuseCITY: REuseRADIO brings together and presents a selection of works combining the medium of radio or sound with a certain site or place, with a special focus on nighttime. At such time the landscape becomes more ambiguous and porous to the imagination, which is underscored by nocturnal broadcasting.
The exhibition listens to the environment to uncover its hidden potential, drawing attention to its fluid and mutable nature and to how one perceives instabilities in the environment. The participating artists respond and play with contingency by marking their locations, using transmission technologies to reframe space. The selection and presentation of their diverse sonoric poetics seek to unveil the patterns embedded in an environment, our ingrained ways of perceiving the city and electromagnetic territories, and to incise them, transform them, and open them up to unexplored possibilities.

radioCona REuseCITY: REuseRADIO is a collaborative work with the Canadian artist Anna Friz, who has been creating new installation, performance, and broadcast works under the title City at Night during her two-month residency in Ljubljana. She frames the city at night as “a space of potential: filled with pleasure and danger, subversion, reclamation, and escape; described by its transformation from the quotidian arena of day into sites of shadow, ambiguity, and reverie. The nocturnal world of radio is a similarly charged space of potential, relieved of the routines of the working day. Electro-magnetic activity is the invisible print of the city, with overlapping fields of activity passing through the built environment. Signals converge and the city is imagined and made. City at Night seeks to rethink and reframe the urban through its nocturnal signals and through incursions across the social spaces and empty places of the city after dark.

The exhibition brings together Slovenian and international artists working in radio art. Artists from the region were invited to take part in a workshop organized in collaboration with Anna Friz, to explore possible approaches to examining nocturnal cityscapes through the use of radio technologies. New sonic productions were developed at the workshop. Thus in addition to presenting the curators’ selection of existing radio art works, the exhibition also serves to premiere new works made at the workshop by Marko Batista, Simon Macuh, OR oiesis, Maria Papadomanolaki, Lea Promaja, Mikro, Vasja Progar, and Brane Zorman.

—Irena Pivka, Jasmina Založnik

EVENTS:
Wednesday 15 January, 19:15
radioCONA begins 5 nights of broadcasts, heard on 88.8FM in Ljubljana.

Thursday 16 January, 7:16
Opening of the exhibition City at Night at the KC Tobačna 001 Cultural Center, Ljubljana.
20:00: performance by Anna Friz.
22:30: City at Night on two frequencies: tune in on two radios to listen to radioCona 88.8FM, and Radio Študent 89.3 MHz. Anna Friz and Brane Zorman create a live mix for two frequencies.
City at Night exhibition continues at Tobačna 001 from 16-25 January, 2014.

Friday 17 January, 19.17
Art’s Birthday retransmission party with cake! Tobačna 001, radioCona, ORF Kunstradio, Vienna, and international partners. Translocal performance between Anna Friz, Ljubljana and Maja Osojnik, Vienna; with lots of local guests.

Saturday 18 January at 12:00
In-situ performance in Ljubljana and on radioCona: Kathy Kennedy Hmmm, in collaboration with the Slovenian Choir of Architects

Sunday 19 January at 19.19
Tivoli Park, Ljubljana and radioCona, listening in-situ: Brane Zorman Field Frequency Flux

Wednesday 15 and Friday 17 January from 19:15 to 22:00
Taxi listening hub: apply at: cona.institute@gmail.com

Monday 20 January
19:20: lectures and performances at Tobačna 001 and heard on radioCona
Jeff Kolar: ALERT! Transmission, Playback and Remix
Volkmar Klien: Sounds and Their Consonances
20:30: performances: Jeff Kolar: GSM Buzz; Volkmar Klien: Zeugnisse vergangener Lebensformen

Wednesday 22 January, 19:00
Tobačna 001, listening session with sound works selected by Anna Friz

The Cona project and program are supported by Municipality of Ljubljana

Produced by CONA, Co-produced by MGML

Financially supported by: The Canada Council for the Arts, Avtrijski kulturni forum Ljubljana, in collaboration with: OU Transmitters and Connections RTV SLO.

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I have a new radio art/work premiering this weekend: Collecting Clocks and Losing Time, made in 5.1 and stereo (2012-2013),  44:00. It premieres on Sunday, 8. December, 2013, at 23:03 CET or GMT +1, on ORF Kunstradio, Vienna, Austria. If you’re in Austria, tune in live to Ö1 on the radio to hear it in 5.1 or stereo, or stream from their website. You can also listen to the archived (but lower-quality) mp3 stream on Kunstradio any time after.

Developed as part of a suite of iterations about radio and timekeeping (includes the broadcast and performance work For the time being (2010), the compositions Measure the time taken (2012), and the installations 5 Times (less a hundred) (2012), and Studio Time (2013).

The first version of Collecting Clocks and Losing Time premiered at the Tsonami Festival de Arte Sonoro in Valparaiso, Chile, on November 26, 2012, and was then performed in 8 channels at the Deep Wireless Festival of Radio and Transmission Art in Toronto, May 2013. The present 5.1 version of the piece, which premieres on ORF Kunstradio, is the final version of this cycle.

Here’s the description, which, though cryptic, is really what it’s all about:

An aural expedition across zones of hard and soft time, to where cuckoos nest and errant robotniks bungle the machinery of atomic time.

Once upon a time there was a house in the countryside which housed a hundred clocks. Once upon a time the clocks in every home ran on their own time, and all the trains and hotels and shops counted their own time. One day time was made universal, divided into zones, and propagated around the globe. One day microwaves were fired at a cesium-12 isotope, and the rate of electron loss dictated the most standard time of all. Still there were digital devices that did not understand which time zone they lived in. Still the clocks slowed, dragging the seconds and minutes and hours behind them. Still everyone was late.

My father collected cuckoo clocks, which I inherited when he died. He left 5 clocks behind. Once upon a time there were 26. I have come to learn that there are much larger clock collections than this. I have also learned that coordinated universal time is a legend told among the cuckoos in the clock forest on a rainy night.

Recorded in Vancouver and Chicago.
Mixed in 5.1 at Ö1 studios, Vienna, Austria.  Martin Leitner, teknik.

No Comments | In: news, transmission | tags: anna friz, atomic time, Collecting Clocks and Losing Time, cuckoo clock art, ORF Kunstradio, radio and timekeeping, radio art, UTC. | #

One night train from Berlin to Slovenia later… I’ve arrived in Ljubljana, and moved into to the artist residence at Tobačna 001, a cosy little apartment upstairs in the cultural centre run by the City Museum of Ljubljana on the sprawling grounds of an old tobacco factory. I’ll be here for two months, and working together with the artist-run group CONA (CONA Institute for Contemporary Arts Processing) to make “temporary radio for contemporary art”. A central project for CONA in 2013-2014 is REuse MESTO: REuse RADIO, and my contribution is to explore the potential in nighttime transmissions across urban space, under the title of City at Night:

With the advent of urban illumination and electricity, the city at night is a place of potential: filled with pleasure and danger, subversion, reclamation, and escape. The city at night is described by its transformation from the quotidian arena of day into sites of shadow and ambiguity, where some acts are hidden, while others take place under the scrutiny of precisely circumscribed light. The nocturnal world of radio is a similarly charged space of potential and possibility. Electro-magnetic activity is also the invisible print of the city, with overlapping fields of activity passing through the built environment. Signals converge and the city is imagined and made. 

Many people remember tuning in to radio to hear a free-form overnight program, where the DJ had full choice on what to play, and was released from the strictures of programmed songs and advertisements after hours. Making radio for those not represented by the daily routine, but for those up late, working late, unusually awake–the invisible interaction between terrestrial, live broadcast and the city mostly asleep. Now most radio stations rely on automation over night, rebroadcasting music and talk radio imbued with the mood of day time, not the changeable atmospheres of night. But like the brick and concrete city which is transformed by different practices between day and night, nighttime radio is another kind of urban space to be reclaimed, rethought. What ambiguous relationships, what liminal territories, what reverie might be encountered and engaged after dark?

City at Night seeks to rethink and reframe urban spaces through its nocturnal signals, through incursions across the city after dark, from social spaces to empty places, resulting in live night radio performance, compositions, interventions and an ongoing installation. The gallery space associated with the Tobačna 001 residency will be turned into an open studio with an evolving radio installation, a hub which will function as a radio ‘station’ from which to broadcast and stream overnight from January 16-26 when a licensed city-wide FM frequency is available for use as radioCONA, and a space in which to hold performance or performance/lectures related to the topic of reusing and repurposing nighttime radio and the city.

All broadcasting will take place after dark and overnight, and I am particularly looking forward to programming some long-form and generative works for broadcast which can reflect the liminality of listening, night, and urban activity.

Most immediately, I will be holding a public lecture here next week, December 9, 2013, on the topic of REuse RADIO— an overview of radio and transmission art, my own artistic practices in the electro-magnetic spectrum, and some listening to works. December 10-11, 2013 I convene a working group of local artists emerging and established, so that we can embark on the process of creating transmission works to air or perform or present in January during the broadcast week of radioCONA.

My travel to Ljubljana is made possible by the Canada Council for the Arts, Media Arts division.

No Comments | In: news, research, transmission | tags: anna friz, CONA, radio art, radio art in Ljubljana, radioCONA, REuse MESTO: REuse RADIO, shameless self-promotion, Tobacna 001, transmission art. | #

After a week of broadcasting my new work Radiotelegraph as a beacon here in Seyðisfjörður, East Iceland (see “action shot” of broadcast taking place above) and in Chicago Illinois on the Radius platform, I was super pleased to be interviewed by radio wizard Gregory Whitehead over at Desperado Philosophy/ netartery. Click on over for more photos, ruminations, and explanations as to what the performative telegraphy is all about!

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No Comments | In: news, transmission | tags: anna friz, konrad korabiewski, Night Fall, Radiotelegraph, skaftfell center for visual arts. | #

For the month of October, I have a new piece up created especially for Radius. I’m halfway through my two month residency at the Skaftfell Center for Visual Art in the small town of Seyðisfjörður on the east coast of Iceland, and the piece involves radiotelegraphy in spoken morse code. Seyðisfjörður is located in a deep fjord off the Atlantic Ocean just shy of the Arctic Circle, and was the site of the first telegraph cable connection between Iceland and Europe in 1906. 1906 was also the year of the first audio transmission of the human voice by wireless means undertaken by Reginald Fessenden on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean at Brant Rock, Massachusetts.

Radiotelegraph is a beacon simulcast by a private low-watt transmitter in Seyðisfjörður (on 107.1 FM) and by Radius Chicago (88.9 FM) at sundown Seyðisfjörður time, for a period of five days in October. The beacon signals the descent of the sun into the northern night. Voice, electronics, and radio signals, all recorded and mixed at Hóll, Seyðisfjörður.

Seyðisfjörður broadcasts (GMT 0):

October 7: 17:59;  October 8: 17:56;  October 9: 17:52;  October 10: 17:48;  October 11: 17:45

Chicago broadcasts (GMT -5):

October 7: 12:59;  October 8: 12:56;  October 9: 12:52;  October 10: 12:48;  October 11: 12:45

Radius is an experimental radio broadcast platform based in Chicago Illinois.

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Anna Friz + Eric Leonardson @ MEGAPOLIS Audio Festival from MEGAPOLIS Festival on Vimeo.

Eric Leonardson and I played a concert at Union Docs, Brooklyn, in April 2013, in advance of the Megapolis Festival in NYC. The festival folk have just cut together some footage with our talkback session after the concert, check it out! Eric played the Springboard, his self-constructed instrument, and I played various electronics and free reed instruments. The sound system included a two-channel radio array of about 100 radios suspended around the space.

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