anna friz

PAJ: A Journal of Performance Art (MIT Press)  invited free103point9.org to contribute a special section on transmission arts. A few of us free103 regulars weighed in on the topic for issue 93, published September 2009– with Joe Milutis, myself, and Tom Roe writing about the past, present, and future of transmission art, respectively. My piece, “Transmission Art in the Present Tense” considers the much-cited legacy of Brecht in light of the emerging craft of transmission.  Other contributions include Brett Ian Balogh’s FM interface-in-progress, and Lex Bhagat’s “Instructions for How to Listen to Radio”. 

The transmission arts section is readable for free online, and includes some audio and projects in full colour. click here to read it all.

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 Mid-August means back to work for a couple of weeks of workshopping with Public Recordings and dancemaker and director Ame Henderson on her Faction project. Through a residency at the Theatre Centre in Toronto, Faction is a piece in development over the course of three years (2008-2010). I’m doing some interesting sound design/sound choreography using micro-cassette recorders, and other kinds of magnetic tape tricks. Here’s the official blurb:

“Public Recordings are very pleased to be a new resident company at the Theatre Centre with the project Faction, a collaboration with writer Bobby Theodore, sound artist Anna Friz, designer Trevor Schwellnus and the performers Joe Cobden, Frank Cox-O’Connell and Brendan Gall.

Faction is a work that explores the murky territory between truth and fiction, and choreographed and unrehearsed movement. Using personal stories as the starting point, the work interrogates the relationship between artifice and authenticity in a theatrical event.”

The piece should be premiering in the fall of 2010, details to come!

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Thursday 30 July, 7PM  (show 7:30)

Mercer Union (Toronto)

Music in Alternative Spaces: Eric Woodley and Anna Friz 

In this collaboration, Woodley and Friz explore phenomenologies of recording, radio, and electricity, and the materiality of the transmission environment. Resonance becomes palpable in the meeting of historical recorded material and a multi-channel micro-watt radio intervention involving a broadcast to a number of radios within Mercer Union and surrounding environment. No such thing as dead air but an open channel instead: alive, fragile, prone to interference and decay, and resonant with activity, however local or temporary, however human. 

Using one, two, or three turntables, Eric Woodley works with the history of recorded sound as pressed into vinyl. He gives preference to these sounds as discrete entities, an audio equivalent to the approach Canadian visual artist Greg Curnoe used in his collages of the 60’s. Usually these audio collages are improvised during live broadcasts of his long running show The Lost and Found on CKLN-FM in Toronto. Woodley has also written music for many films including Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and his brother Aaron Woodley’s Rhinoceros Eyes, Toronto Stories and Tennessee. 

Since 1998 Anna Friz has created self-reflexive radio art/works for international broadcast, installation or performance, where radio is the source, subject, and medium of the work. She also creates dynamic, atmospheric sound works for theatre, dance, and solo performance that are equally able to reflect upon public media culture or to reveal interior landscapes. 

Mercer Union 
A Centre for Contemporary Art 
1286 Bloor Street West 
(1 block east of Lansdowne TTC station) 
Toronto ON M6H 1N9 Canada 
416.536.1519 
info@mercerunion.org 
www.mercerunion.org

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I had the great pleasure to become a beast of the night last weekend, for this fun event: 

Saturday, June 27, 2009, in the window of La Centrale Galerie/Powerhouse, on St-Laurent Boulevard, in Montréal: watch and listen for Les bêtes nocturnes!

Sound artists project out on St Laurent the sounds that shift our quotidian experiences: they are repetitive, electronic, random, strange, and yet so distinctively animalistic. It’s dark in there but if you look closely, you might catch a glimpse of those rare mutated creatures of the night, through the window of the gallery-become-zoo.

The best time to hear the beasts is after sunset (10pm), before sunrise (5am). Bring your lawn chair and binoculars. Anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, and field recorders are welcome to this rare opportunity to witness animals improvising with lo-fi poetics.

Sound beasts :

Magali Babin, Myléna Bergeron, Martine H. Crispo, Nicolas Dion, Chantal, Dumas, Nikki Forrest, Anna Friz, Jackie Gallant, Anne Françoise Jacques, Martin Tétreault, Nancy Tobin.

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I’ll be back in the business of hanging radios in a week: going out west to perform Respire at the Surrey Arts Centre for their Sound Thinking 2009 symposium (Feb 28), then journeying on up to Kamloops and the Thompson Rivers University for a little presentation and performance there (March 2-4), hosted by Ashok Mathur, Canada Research Chair and Director for the Centre for Innovation in Culture and the Arts in Canada. After that it’s back down south to California, to do a peformance and lecture at the Centre for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University (March 10).

There will be ladders. There will be batteries.

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