anna friz

Curated by the essential Indexical, I’m performing live this Saturday February 3, 2018  8 pm  

Radius Gallery, 1050 River Street #127, Santa Cruz, California

I’m sharing the stage with Eoin Callery, who will be doing an installed performance with strings (as in the strings themselves) and an electric guitar using automated filters to create an evolving scape from sonic textures and drones.

My live solo set is themed around the idea of beacons:

An audible radio signal picked out of an ocean of static serves as a beacon, a lighthouse, a weather station, a warning: here be rocks, here be shallows, here be treacherous tides. A signal anyone might hear, but also imagined by and especially made for the listener who finds it. A performance considering the radio beacon, using radiophonic instruments and transmitters, cottage-built electronics, and recordings/photo montage from recent fieldwork in Iceland and Chile.

I’m particularly interested in ubiquitous but perhaps minor audible beacons, such as dog barks and terrestrial morse code flyover signals. And the idea of an opaque environment, that is to say, the visual and audible static from which such beacons emerge.

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Echophone

Installation consisting of four parts (2017)

Commissioned by the mighty Radius for the Museum of Arts and Design, for the exhibition Sonic Arcade: Shaping Space with Sound
September 14, 2017 – February 25, 2018
2 Columbus Circle, New York, NY, 10019

Echophone is the first of a new Radius series entitled BEACON. BEACON invites commissioned artists to investigate the idea of radio as a signal from afar.

Two women rent a room in the Pabst Grand Circle Hotel in New York City in late 1947. Their belongings seem to be comprised entirely of a large number of aluminum postal boxes of the sort used to mail laundry; three bellhops are needed to transport it all up to their room. The women stay for one week, pay in advance, and are not seen during their stay. Over several nights the neighboring rooms complain of strange hums and sounds heard through the walls, disturbing their sleep. Three hotel guests complain of the sudden onset of severe migraine headaches, and request a doctor. The dumbwaiter in the hotel breaks down and is stuck between two floors.

After one week, the hotel staff find the room unlocked and empty. The women are gone, as are their boxes, and the maids discover wires and electronic components on the table and the floor of the room. The dumbwaiter is never repaired.

Four aluminum boxes re-appear at MAD this year. Careful inspection reveals that they are radiophonic, each transmitting a single signal to either AM or FM bands. Perhaps they were sent out as probes, recording what they encounter, and then transmitting their findings. The probes have returned as beacons, measuring distance and indicating time passed or times parallel. Four presents from the past.

Responding to the idea that radio measures and allows for relationships over distance and time, Echophone is a radio based installation that reveals itself to visitors as they explore the Museum of Arts and Design, searching for and tuning into transmissions from beacons which are placed throughout its interior. Radios and headphones can be checked out from the admissions desk to experience this piece. Each individual beacon can only be heard in close proximity to its physical location, and are tuned variably to 107.9FM, 1600AM, or 1620AM.

The installation consists of four beacons and two vintage radios with headsets.

Custom electronics for the project by Ryan Page.

Echophone was developed with support from the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Arts Research Institute of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

No Comments | In: installation, news | tags: anna friz, Echophone, MAD, radio art, Radio beacon, Radius Beacon, Radius Episode 81, Sonic Arcade, transmission art. | #