anna friz

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. | #

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. | #

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. | #

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. | #

Sunday, December 4, 2011, 23h (GMT+1)

I’ll be performing live in the studios of ORF Kunstradio, the long-running radio art program heard weekly on Ö1, the cultural channel of Austria’s national public radio. The live stream will connect from the home page here, and the show will be documented and streamable afterwards from the show page here.

It’s a brand new series of studies on radio and timekeeping, called Tuner:

A radio receiver, designed for mass production and consumption, invites a small narrative reflecting some aspect of radio’s changing cultural reference over the past century: I am the future, I am mobile, I am young, I am a connection with the world, I am a safety precaution, I am cheap, I am common, I am invisible, I am obsolete. Likewise, the graphic design of each dial represents an ideology of the radio spectrum, proposing time in frequency, and space in territory. Some dials are linear, filled with the names of cities, while other dials are perfectly round, referencing radar and precisely regulated atomic time.

Tuner is a suite of short pieces, performed live, which uses the graphical design of radio dials as music and event scores. Radios have been used as instruments and played in works such as George Brecht’s “Candle Piece for Radios” (1959), and offer a strong element of indeterminacy to brief performative moments. What will a radio reveal when used to generate the score itself?

Acting as frame and theme for this round of Tuner pieces is a sample from WWV,  a station devoted to broadcasting time signals since 1923, and Coordinated Universal Time (Greenwich Mean) since 1967. Based in Fort Collins Colorado, near the laboratories that maintain the U.S. national standards of time and frequencies, WWV currently broadcasts time according to a cesium atomic clock, or time as dictated by the regular decay of the isotope cesium-133.

This time around I have chosen to interpret the dials or tuner plates of one vacuum tube radio (1953) and two transistor radios (mid 1960s) as scores. Not accidentally, these radios are products of the post-war economy, whose design promises precision, safety, and a little technical sophistication for the domestic sphere. The pieces I will perform based on these dials are improvised studies contributing to a larger body of work on radio and timekeeping, so for this set of works I read and interpret the radio dials as referring to frequency, or, the rate of something happening.

But even against the precision of atomic time, events wander away from regularity, and musicality is hiding both in the accompanying tones and in the landscape of static which threaten to consume all sonic details at any time. How to read the radio dial? Someone is counting, someone is keeping score: something happens, and then something happens.

I won’t be using the beautiful Hallicrafters radio dial (shown above) in this set of pieces–but it’s my next project in the series. I love the shortwave radios with the names of cities and countries; I especially love the incongruence of “USSR” and “Edmonton” placed cheek to cheek on the dial. That dial is a symphony of craziness to decode, though, and I’m maybe not up for doing that one live yet. I’ve opted instead for simpler numeric dials for the first time out, but chosen ones which are still demonstrative of Cold War/atomic era wireless architecture.

This work supported by a post-doctoral fellowship from Fonds de recherche sur la société et la culture Québec.

No Comments | In: news, performances, transmission | tags: anna friz, atomic time, Kunstradio, radio art, radio+timekeeping, shameless self-promotion, Tuner. | #

photo: Yannick Grandmot

I’ve had the great pleasure to be working with Dana Gingras and her dance company Animals of Distinction on a new piece called Heart as Arena.

Here’s a little teaser of what we’re up to:

How far is far away? Wireless transmission is a paradox of intimacy and distance. In “Out of the Dark: Notes on the Nobodies of Radio Art” (1992), Gregory Whitehead writes that radio involves “staging an intricate game of position, a game that unfolds among far-flung bodies, for the most part unknown to each other”. For Heart as Arena, this game of position involves bodies and radios playing on stage, bodies in the audience, signals passing through the theatre from local or distant stations as well as mobile phones and wireless systems on all bands, the built environment of the city and its electrical currents. Using a multi-channel micro-watt radio system, radio becomes a frame for a series of relationships, near and far, where visible gestures meet invisible electro-magnetic interactions;  a circuit built, played with, and played within.

We are immersed daily in a welter of signal, so tonight our interest centers on resonant bodies traversing the volatile nocturnal radio landscape in search of elusive union, tuning in to songs full of desire for love and comfort, the most mortal dreams of all. Bodies serve as antennas, and receivers become transmitters. What we find is that there is no such thing as dead air: the radio landscape is alive though connections are fragile and prone to interference, urgently vibrating with activity, temporary but resonantly human.

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

Now Showing: Oct 4,5,6,7,8  2011  Buy Tickets @ The Cultch, 1895 Venables Street Vancouver, BC  Box Office: 604-251-1363

As you may guess, there are lots of radios in this show, beautiful transistors from the mid-’60s to the late-’70s. A veritable landscape of radios, as well as a landscape of radio sound. I’ll post more photos once we arrive in Vancouver. For me this is a wonderful opportunity to extend the work with multi-channel radio sculpture into a theatre setting, so radios act as environment, sculpture, and scenography; while the material conditions of radiophonic communication have been physicalized in the choreography.

For those not in Vancouver, fear not! Heart as Arena will be touring to many Canadian cities in the next year, including Ottawa (National Arts Centre), Montréal (L’Agora de la danse), Edmonton, Lennoxville, Quebec City, and hopefully points beyond.

Check out some press: preview here, and review here.

No Comments | In: news, performances, sound design | tags: animals of distinction, anna friz, dana gingras, heart as arena, radio art, shameless self-promotion. | #

I am super pleased to join in the stream from cOL-mE (co-located media expedition), Bratislava, who are part of a group of artist collectives working on the Time Inventors’ Kabinet. By the time you read this, the stream will already have played my piece For the time being and moved on to other interesting works, but do tune in from September 6-11, 2011 for daily casts, including people like my good friend and collaborator Peter Courtemanche in Vancouver. The TIK art-radio is streaming an art-radio program scheduled according to wind time, that is to say, according to the behaviour of the wind rather than the rotation of the earth in relationship to the sun or the moon:

 TIK is a project, an interest into ecology and media art, a collaborative experiment with time …
taking an ecological approach to observing patterns in time and time control systems…
the creative tools we build to generate new audio and visual artworks and mediate a creative discourse on ecological time …
an ‘horloge a vent'(wind clock), an imaginary time keeping device regulated by the irregular movement of the wind …
workshops, art radio sessions, public access digital media archive, public presentations, conferences and exhibitions, a critical publication … ‘re-inventing ecological time’… 

In addition to wind time being a wonderfully irregular and changeable measurement of time, the TIK project makes some really poetic proposals, such as the possibility that people thousands of kilometres apart geographically might share the same wind time zone, or the idea that when the wind is still, time stops. 

I was really excited to discover this project, as it fits so nicely with the research I’ve undertaken since last year on radio and timekeeping. I’m interested to understand the role radio played in the atomization of time, and wonder how the same medium can be implicated in forms of micro-local time. For the time being was the first piece from what promises to be a series of works for broadcast, narrowcast, live performance, and installation.

Meanwhile, For the time being aired on a recent Kunstradio show on August 28 (but remains online, so you can still check it out). Also included: a mix of Respire for broadcast, and two pieces from the Short Horizon series. I’ll be heading over to Vienna to do a live show in December this year, so stay tuned for that too.

No Comments | In: news, performances, transmission | tags: anna friz, cOL-mE, radio art, shameless self-promotion, TIK, wind time. | #

This Sunday on ORF Kunstradio, the long-running program on Austrian public radio devoted to radio art and experimentation on-air, online, and on-site, I’m very pleased to have the opportunity to curate a program of recent works by some very talented artists.

Tune in or stream in Sunday August 21 from 23h CEDT (GMT +2, with daylight savings time) and hear the likes of these:

Martine H. Crispo presents a live set from her show Chaud pour le mont-stone, heard on CKUT FM in Montreal

Stephen Kelly and Eleanor King let us eavesdrop on a radio installation entitled Radio Roam

Andrea-Jane Cornell explores the world of recorded telephone conversations

Tomas Phillips and s* consider the insides and outsides of a body in motion

and Debashis Sinha retells the experience of the Buddha under the bodhi tree.

Sunday August 28 I’ll be back on Kunstradio doing a solo show with some early material from an ongoing series on radio and timekeeping. I will be re-airing For the time being (2010), as well as some other rhythmic sketches of this and that.

No Comments | In: news, transmission | tags: anna friz, Kunstradio, radio art, transmission art. | #

Yup, I made the move to the Chicagoland, where towers loom and their antennas have girth. I’ll be based in here for the next two years, working on my post-doctoral fellowship at the School of the Art Institute, Sound department, thanks to the generous funding of the Fonds de recherche sur la société et la culture Québec (FQRSC). Still waiting to defend the dissertation, but it won’t be long now. Dr. Itinerant Friz will soon be on the case.

I’ll be getting out and about this summer, too, as part of my research will take me to ORF Kunstradio to develop some new pieces. (Actually I’m just going for the wine and the cake–ssshhhh.)

No Comments | In: news, research | tags: anna friz, radio art, SAIC, touring the 401 with all my shit in a truck. | #