anna friz

photo by Julie Shapiro

Who’s Art? Oh, THAT art.

“Art’s Birthday” is an annual event first proposed in 1963 by French artist Robert Filliou. One million and fifty years ago today, 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. Each year the Eternal Network evolves to include new partners – working with the ideas of exchange and telecommunications-art.

This year it’s the 1,000,050th birthday of art, and I’m getting back into party mode here in Chicago.

First off, running a stream together with absolute value of noise of our newly recomposed generative piece Somewhere a voice is calling. We have rethought the piece as a composition and stream, now made with new material, though the concept remains the same: an exploration of the first broadcasts of the human voice into the transmission ecology over radio by Reginald Fessenden and others beginning in 1906.

Stream runs January 16-18, 2013, and you can listen in here.

Meanwhile, live and fueled by too much sugar, I’ll be hanging out today at the Experimental Sound Studio, which hosts the radio collaboration NRRF Radio in the Audible Gallery from 2pm to 8pm, January 17 (GMT -6).  5925 N. Ravenswood, Chicago.

Transmitting to the neighbourhood and the world via FM and stream LISTEN LIVE HERE.

We’ll be listening and exchanging with any and all birthday streams circulating internationally, and do our best to infiltrate available bands with tenacious earworms and parasitic refrains, powered of course by lurid birthday cake. Glue Banta, Jonny Farrow, Anna Friz, Stephen Germana, Jeff Kolar, Peter Speer, and guests bring the noise.

Drop in, tune in, eat cake. Happy Art’s Birthday! The End is just pretend!

No Comments | In: news, performances, transmission | tags: absolute value of noise, anna friz, art's birthday, eternal network, experimental sound studio, jeff kolar, jonny farrow, lurid cake, NRRF Radio, peter speer, stephen germana. | #

Radios set up for my performance at the opening at the Tsonami Festival de Arte Sonoro, Valparaiso Chile, November 27, 2012.  The venue was an old prison transformed into a cultural centre; here the steep hills of Valpo are visible in the background. I had simply the most wonderful time at this festival of any event in recent memory–the organization really emphasized the social side of holding a festival in addition to top-notch works being presented. And I love love love Valparaiso! You can’t tell from these photos, but it was glorious summer weather, and that Pacific breeze blowing up the hills every day was nothing short of intoxicating.

This and all following photos credited to Nelson Campos.

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

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. | #

October 30-November 4, 2012, I’m here on-site at the radio art radio station set up by Mobile Radio at the 30th São Paulo Bienal. Mobile Radio, aka Knut Aufermann and Sarah Washington, are here for 14 weeks bringing the radio art to the people, and opening the airwaves for an international exchange of radio art, featuring lots of local talent from here in Brasil.

I’m reviving Filibuster, an old show title from back in the day at CiTR Vancouver (in celebration of CiTR‘s 75th anniversary!) which will be a free-form live show full of new stuff, old tales, various collaborations, and generally friendly noise. Also getting up to some new shenanigans modulating and manipulating coordinated universal time under the title Zero Hour. Atomic time will be overcome!

Tune in to my shows (all times São Paulo time, GMT -3)

October 30: 15h – 16h30

First installment of Filibuster— a retrospective of older pieces, including Vacant City Radio (2005) and Silence Descends (1999, works by yours truly, Joelle Ciona, Peter Courtemanche, Sean Chappelle, Eileen Kage and Bill Mullan).

October 31: 13h – 14h

The first installment of Zero Hour:

November 1: 16h – 18h

Today was cuckoo clocks a-go-go on Zero Hour, followed by Filibuster, which included rebroadcast of Dancing Walls Stir the Prairie, created together with Eric Leonardson in 2007. Also, a new installment of the M.O.L.E.C.A.S.T., BSP edition…. Uncover at the Exhibition, Level 1.

November 2: 15h – 15h30, 15h30 – 18h with Tonic Train live in studio

First, another installment of the Zero Hour–30 minutes of manipulated clock time.

Then another episdoe of Filibuster, beginning with several pieces by Central Dispatch (2002), all recorded on the day that Brazil won the World Cup Football, final score 2-0; followed by speculative conversation regarding Atlantis, ley lines, the 13th Node, Tesla, the coming Armageddon, the quickening of time, the reversal of the Earth’s rotation, and whale radio; followed by a live set of yours truly and Tonic Train.

The Zero Hour runs overnight, 19h Nov 2 until 12h Nov 3.

November 3: 13h – 14h

Filibuster features the M.O.L.E.C.A.S.T BSP.: Undercover at the Exhibition, Level 2.

November 4: 12h – 12h30

Filibuster features the final M.O.L.E.C.A.S.T. BSP: Uncover at the Exhibition, Level 3.

Tune in at mobile-radio.net

Shows archived here

Mobile Radio BSP runs 24/7 until December 9, so keep your browser locked to the signal!

No Comments | In: news, performances, transmission | tags: anna friz, filibuster radio show, mobile radio bsp, radio art, shameless self-promotion, tonic train, zero hour. | #

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?. | #

I have the honour of giving the keynote speech at the gala evening of the National Campus/Community Radio Conference, the yearly gathering for the National Campus and Community Radio Association here in Canada. Takes place June 15, 2012, in Kingston, Ontario, hosted by the mighty CFRC 101.9FM, who are also celebrating their 90th anniversary of radiophonic activity. I’ll be talking about resonant versus radiant paradigms for radio, illustrated by speculations and curiousities regarding the Radio of the Future, including the search for extraterrestrial life, whales, and some little people stuck inside the black box. You know, my usual pet topics.  I’m also sitting on a panel about radio art from 15h-17h, with Darren Copeland of New Adventures in Sound Art and Montréal artist Andrea-Jane Cornell.

Then I’m zooming off to London, England for the Supersonix Conference, hosted by the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts Europe, and Exhibition Road Cultural Group, June 21-23, 2012. I’ll be giving a paper entitled “A Noisy Field of Relations: Radiophonic art and vital materialism”.

No Comments | In: conferences | tags: anna friz, conference hob-nobbing, NCRC, radio art, shameless self-promotion, sound art, Supersonix. | #

We’re remounting Heart As Arena, a new dance work by Dana Gingras/Animals of Distinction, with radio installation and sound composition/design by yours truly.

May 10, 11, 12, 2012 at the NAC Studio at Canada’s National Art Centre in Ottawa

and May 29, 30, 31, 2012 at Agora de la danse, as part of the Festival TransAmériques in Montreal

Heart as Arena is a multimedia work for five performers, explores ideas of receptivity, transmission and the secret language of electricity that animates heart, mind and muscle.

Low-watt radio transmitters broadcast a fragile stream of love songs, snatches of static, and the deep silence of space.  A constellation of radios hovers above the dancers, creating a living array of sound. The transmissions create a physical soundscape that is constantly acted on and disrupted by the slipping frequencies and electrical fields created by the dancers’ moving bodies. Bellini’s Norma, the canonical opera of desire, love and loss, acts as the emotional centre of the piece, emerging and disappearing throughout the piece like a distant station heard on late night radio.

This choreography explores the heart as an arena of electrical and emotional force fields; the attraction and repulsion of bodies in motion; physically demanding expressions of need and want; the electrical interplay at the base of our emotions; the firing and silencing of the very neurons that create our experiences of falling in or out of love.

The work features performers Sarah Doucet (Toronto), Shay Kuebler (Vancouver), Amber Funk Barton (Vancouver), Masaharu Imazu (Montreal/Japan) and Dana Gingras (Vancouver/Montreal). Creative collaborators include sound artist Anna Friz (Chicago), lighting artist Mikko Hynninen (Finland), dramaturge Ruth Little (England), with additional dramaturgy by Daniel Canty (Montreal).

No Comments | In: news, sound design | tags: animals of distinction, anna friz, dana gingras, FTA 2012, heart as arena, NAC Dance 2012, shameless self-promotion, sound design. | #

The original adventures of the little people in the radio (starring Pirate Jenny) continue to circulate…. the new mix I made last year of my 2002 radio work The Clandestine Transmissions of Pirate Jenny is currently featured over on Le Tétraèdre, a weekly experimental radio program on Radio Panik 105.4 FM in Bruxelles. Live to air Wednesday 23, as show #17d. February 23h GMT +1, but since that was yesterday, you can also listen here.

I also recently completed an interview with Etienne Noiseau of the excellent French radio art site Syntone, read it (en français) here.

UPDATE:

Vacant City Radio was featured on CKUT Montreal’s ESL program, as part of a show on transmission which also includes interviews with ham radio ops. Aired in Montreal February 28, 2012, 23h. Listen to the podcast or download here.

No Comments | In: news, transmission | tags: anna friz, CKUT, Le Tétraèdre, Pirate Jenny, radio art, Radio Panik, shameless self-promotion, Syntone, vacant city radio. | #