Sound at SEM 2014

Hot on the heels of the American Musicological Society and Society for Music Theory’s joint annual meeting in Milwaukee, the Society for Ethnomusicology will hold its 59th Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh, November 13-16, 2014, hosted by the University of Pittsburgh. SEM is arguably one of the conferences most hospitable  to sound studies, and several panels feature strong papers.

On Wednesday, Nov. 12, the “Music and Labor” pre-conference symposium features some fascinating papers of interest to sound scholars and includes a keynote address by Dr. Marcus Rediker, Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh. With panels titled “(Re) Conceptualizing Music and Labor,” “The Labor of Music in Transitioning Economies,” “Art as Work: Defying Capitalist Hegemony and National Narrative through Musical Activism and Creative Adaptation,” and “Transformation of Music Labor Regimes in Socialist and Post-Socialist Southeastern Europe,” even the papers that aren’t especially sound studies-related have the potential to demonstrate deft interdisciplinary approaches that would be applicable (and fruitful) in sound studies research.

One of the first sound studies events of the conference program is the annual meeting of the Sound Studies Special Interest Group. Dr. Allen Roda, Jane and Morgan Whitney Research Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and I are currently co-chairs of the SIG; anyone interested in sound studies will not want to miss our meeting on Thursday, November 13 at 12:30-1:30 PM in the Duquesne Room. This year’s meeting will mark the SIG’s 6th anniversary since it was formed in 2009. The group now has over 100 members and is represented on several panels at the 2014 conference in Pittsburgh. One co-chair seat will become vacant this year, and the group will hold elections to fill this position at the meeting; we also plan to discuss plans for more visibility online and among the academic community.

Before the meeting, come early to the 8:00-10:30 AM session in that same room to catch Molly McBride’s paper, “The Sounds of Humor: Listening to Gender in Early Barn Dance Radio,” or see a whole sound studies panel titled “Auditory Histories of the Indian Ocean: Hearing the Soundworlds of the Past” in the Alleghany Room.

"The Cathedral of Learning at UPitt" by Flickr user Carlos Hernandez, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

“The Cathedral of Learning at UPitt” by Flickr user Carlos Hernandez, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

If you can’t make those early panels on the first day, the convention boasts numerous, high-quality sound studies sessions, many of which convene simultaneously. There have been several sound studies-related panels and individual papers at past meetings, but the number of high-quality papers is certainly trending in favor of more sound studies.

Also, the last several annual meetings have featured a soundwalk hosted by the Sound Studies SIG. This year is no different; however, rather than having a guided walk around the host city, this year’s soundwalk will be self-guided. Using the Twitter hashtag #semsoundwalk, participants will listen to Pittsburgh, the acoustic environment of the conference itself, the coffee shop where they stop for refreshment, or wherever they happen to find themselves between 1:15 – 6:00PM on Friday, Nov. 14. Be sure to follow the hashtag – even if you’re not in Pittsburgh – to “listen” along with conference participants.

I am delighted to see that this year’s conference unites the SEM’s commitment to the study of world musics and cultures and sound studies, particularly in panels such as “Auditory Histories of the Indian Ocean: Hearing the Soundworlds of the Past,” “Contemplating Voice in Cross-Cultural Perspective,” and “Regulating Space, Regulating Sound: Musical Practice and Institutional Mediation in São Paulo, Brazil.” This year also highlights the SEM’s strong interdisciplinary bent and makes even more room at the epistemological table for the examination of technoculture and its implications for sound studies and the larger ethnomusicological community.

Because of the sheer volume of sound studies activities, rather than listing my “picks” for the conference, I’ve listed most of the relevant papers and sessions, leaving the hard decision up to you. In fact, there are so many genuine sound studies panels and papers (or papers on closely related topics) its easy to see why the blurry line that demarcates “sound studies” from “music studies” seems blurriest at SEM. For those who cannot attend the conference, some of this year’s panels will be live-streamed. The Special Interest Groups for Sound Studies and Ecomusicology are also co-hosting a roundtable on Saturday morning. For more information about the conference and to catch the live-streamed sessions, visit the conference website at http://www.indiana.edu/~semhome/2014/.

Michael Austin is Assistant Professor of Media, Journalism, and Film and coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Studies Program in the School of Communications at Howard University where he teaches courses in music production, sound design for film and audio production. He holds a Ph.D. in Humanities – Aesthetic Studies (with a specialization in Arts and Technology) from the University of Texas at Dallas and music degrees from UT-San Antonio and UT-Austin. He is also affiliated with the Laboratoire Musique et Informatique de Marseille, an audio/music technology and informatics lab in Marseille, France, and is co-chair of the Society for Ethnomusiciology’s Special Interest Group for Sound Studies.

Featured image: “Musician” by Flickr user Joanna, CC BY-NC 2.0

"Cathedral of learning/Stephen Foster Memorial - Painted by Light" by Flickr user Sriram Bala, CC BY-NC 2.0

“Cathedral of learning/Stephen Foster Memorial – Painted by Light” by Flickr user Sriram Bala, CC BY-NC 2.0

WEDNESDAY, November 12

8:00 am – 8:00 pm

Ballroom 3, Wyndham Grand Pittsburgh Downtown Hotel
Pre-Conference Symposium: “Music and Labor”

THURSDAY, November 13

8:30 – 10:30 am

Duquesne Room
“The Sounds of Humor: Listening to Gender on Early Barn Dance Radio,” Molly McBride, Memorial University of Newfoundland

Alleghany Room
Session: Auditory Histories of the Indian Ocean: Hearing the Soundworlds of the Past
“Wonders and Strange Things: Practices of Auditory History before Recorded Sound,” Katherine Butler Schofield, King’s College London
“Notes in the Margins: Sumatran Religious Hybridity and the Efficacy of Sound, “ Julia Byl, King’s College London
“Contact, Contestation and Compromise: Sound and Space in 19th-Century Singapore,” Jenny McCallum, King’s College London
“A ‘Wayang of the Orang Puteh’?: Theatres, Music Halls and Audiences in High-Imperial, Calcutta, Madras, Penang and Singapore,” David Lunn, King’s College London

10:45am -12:15 pm

Sterling 3 Room
“Sounding Neoliberalism in the Richmond City Jail,” Andrew C. McGraw, University of Richmond

Heinz Room
“The Color of Sound: Timbre in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man,” Sydney A. Boyd, Rice University

12:30 – 1:30 pm

Duquesne Room
Special Interest Group for Sound Studies

1:45 – 3:45 pm

Sterlings 1 Room
“Radio Archives and the Art of Persuasion: Preserving Social Hierarchies in the Airwaves of Lima” Carlos Odria, Florida State University

Ft. Pitt Room
Session: Mediated Musics, Mediated Lives
“Uploading Matepe: The Role of Online Learning Communities and the Desire to Connect to Northeastern Zimbabwe,” Jocelyn A. Moon, University of Washington; Zachary Moon, Independent Scholar
“Staging Overcoming: Disability, Meritocracy, and the Envoicing of Dreams,” William Cheng, Dartmouth University
“As Time Goes By: Car Radio and Spatiotemporal Manipulations of the Travel Experience in 20th-Century America,” Sarah Messbauer, University of California, Davis
“’How Can We Live in a Country Like This?’ Music, Talk Radio, and Moral Anxiety,” Karl Haas, Boston University

Sterling 3 Room
Session: Oxide and Memory: Tape Culture and the Communal Archive
Oxide and Memory: Tape Culture and the Communal Archive
“Magnetic Tape, Materiality, and the Interpretation of Non-Commercial Cassette and Reel-to-Reel Recordings from Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula,” Laura Risk, McGill University
“Family Sense and Family Sound: Home Recordings and Greek-American Identity,” Panayotis League, Harvard University
“The Memory of Media: Autoarchivization and Empowerment in 1970s Jazz,” Michael C. Heller, University of Massachusetts, Boston
“Reimagining the Community Sound Archive: Cultural Memory and the Case for ‘Slow’ Archiving in a Gaspesian Village,” Glenn Patterson, Memorial University of Newfoundland

4:00 – 5:30 pm

Sterlings 1 Room
Panel: Contemplating Voice in Cross-Cultural Perspective
“The Gravest of Female Voices: Women and the Alto in Sacred Harp,” Sarah E. Kahre, Florida State University
“Re-sounding Waljinah: Aging and the Voice in Indonesia,” Russ P. Skelchy, University of California, Riverside
“Katajjaq: Between Vocal Games, Place and Identity,” Raj S. Singh, York University

Sterlings 3 Room
Session: Rumors, Sound Leakages and Individual Tales: Disruptive Listening in Zones of Conflict
“From the Struggle for Citizenship to the Fragmentation of Justice: Reflections on the Place of Dinka Songs in South Sudan’s Transitional Justice Process,” Angela Impey, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London
“Internet Rumors and the Changing Sounds of Uyghur Religiosity: The Case of the Snake Monkey Woman,” Rachel Harris, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London
“The Cantor and the Muezzin’s Duet at the Western Wall: Contesting Sound Spaces on the Frayed Seams of the Israel-Palestine Conflict,” Abigail Wood, University of Haifa

Heinz Room
Session: Historiography, Historicity, and Biography
“A Sonic Historiography of Early Sample-Based Hip-Hop Recordings,” Patrick Rivers, University of New Haven
“Biography as Methodology in the Study of Okinawan Folk Song,” Kirk A. King, University of British Columbia
“Sounding the Silent Image: Uilleann Piper as Ethnographic Object in Early Hollywood Film,” Ivan Goff, New York University

Untitled by Flickr user David Kent, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Untitled by Flickr user David Kent, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

FRIDAY, November 14

7:00 – 8:00 am

Special Interest Group for Voice Studies

8:30 – 10:30 am

Commonwealth 1-2 Room, live streaming
Session: Sound Networks: Socio-Political Identity, Engagement, and Mobilization through Music in Cyberspace and Independent Media
*Sponsored by the Popular Music Section and Special Interest Group for Sound Studies
“Technological Factors Conditioning the Socio-Political Power of Music in Cyberspace,” Michael Frishkopf, University of Alberta
“Cyber-Mobilization, Informational Intimacy, and Musical Frames in Ukraine’s EuroMaidan Protests,” Adriana Helbig, University of Pittsburgh
“Countering Spirals of Silence: Protest Music and the Anonymity of Cyberspace in the Japanese Antinuclear Movement,” Noriko Manabe, Princeton University
“Living (and Dying) the Rock and Roll Dream: Alternative Media and the Politics of ‘Making It’ as an Iranian Underground Musician,” Farzaneh Hemmasi, University of Toronto

Sterling 1 Room
Session: Affective Environments and the Bioregional Soundscape
*Sponsored by the Special Interest Group for Ecomusicology
“’Landscape is Not Just What Your Eyes See’: Battery Radio, the Technological Soundscape, and Sonically Knowing the Battery, Kate Galloway, Memorial University of Newfoundland
“Re-sounding Caribou: Musical Posthumanism in Being Caribou,” Erin Scheffer, University of Toronto
“Cold, Crisp, and Dry: Inuit and Southern Concepts of the Northern Soundscape,” Jeffrey van den Scott, Northwestern University
Discussant, Nancy Guy, University of California, San Diego

Duquesne Room
“The Sound of Affective Fact,” Matthew Sumera, University of Minnesota

1:15 – 6:30 pm

Soundwalk: A Sonic Environmental Survey of the SEM Annual Meeting
*Sponsored by the Special Interest Groups for Sound Studies and Ecomusicology. Follow the walk on Twitter: #semsoundwalk
(Meet in Wyndham Grand main lobby at 1:15pm. Reconvene in lobby at 6:00)

1:45 – 3:45 pm

Smithfield Room
Session: Strident Voices: Material and Political Alignments
*Sponsored by the Special Interest Group for Voice Studies
“Registering Protest: Voice, Precarity, and Assertion in Crisis Portugal,”Lila Ellen Gray, University of Amsterdam
“Quiet, Racialized Vocality at Fisk University,” Marti Newland, Columbia University
“’The Rough Voice of Tenderness’: Chavela Vargas and Mexican Song,” Kelley Tatro, North Central College
Discussant: Amanda Weidman, Bryn Mawr College

4:00 – 5:30 pm

Heinz Room
Session: Celebratory Sounds and the Politics of Engagement
“Creating Zakopower in Postsocialist Poland,” Louise J. Wrazen, York University
“Merry-Making and Loyalty to the Movement: Conviviality as a Core Parameter of Traditionalism in Aysén, Chile,” Gregory J. Robinson, George Mason University
“Sounding the Carnivalesque: Changing Identities for a Sonic Icon of the Popular,” Michael S. O’Brien, College of Charleston

"Musical Mystery" by Flickr user Robert Wilhoit, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

“Musical Mystery” by Flickr user Robert Wilhoit, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

SATURDAY, November 15

8:30 – 10:30 am

Sterlings 1 Room
Roundtable: Sound Studies, Ecomusicology, and Post-Humanism In/For/With Ethnomusicology
*Sponsored by the Special Interests Groups for Ecomusicology and for Sound Studies
P. Allen Roda, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Jennifer Post, University of Arizona
Mark Pedelty, University of Minnesota
Michael Silvers, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Ben Tausig, Stony Brook University
Zeynep Bulut, King’s College London

10:45 am – 12:15 pm

Benedum Room, live streaming
Musical Instruments, Material Cultures, and Sound Ecologies
“Bulgarian Acoustemological Tales: Narrativity, Agrarian Ecology, and the Kaval’s Voice,” Donna A. Buchanan, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Sterling 1 Room
Session: Theorizing Sound
“Water Sounds: Distance Swimmers and Ecomusicology,” Niko Higgins, Columbia University
“Telephone, Vacuum Cleaner, Couch: Senses and Sounds of the Everyday in Postwar Japan,” Miki Kaneda, Boston University
Discussant: Benjamin Tausig, Stony Brook University

SUNDAY, November 16

8:30 – 10:30 am

Birmingham Room
Session: Regulating Space, Regulating Sound: Musical Practice and Institutional Mediation in São Paulo, Brazil
*Sponsored by the Latin American and Caribbean Section
“Music under Control? São Paulo’s Anti-Noise Agency in Action,” Leonardo Cardoso, University of Texas at Austin
“Music Producers in São Paulo’s Cultural Policy Worlds,” Daniel Gough, University of Chicago
“’Small Universes’: The Creation of Social Intimacy through Aesthetic Infrastructures in São Paulo’s Underground,” Shannon Garland, Columbia University
Discussant, Morgan Lurker, Reed College

Heinz Room
“Hear What You Want: Sonic Politics, Blackness, and Racism-Canceling Headphones,” Alex Blue, University of California, Santa Barbara

Alleghany Room
“Sound and Silence in Festivals of the French Revolution: Sonic Analysis in History,” Rebecca D. Geoffroy-Schwinden, Duke University

10:45 am – 12:15 pm

Liberty Room
Session: Sounding Nations
“Building the Future through the Past: The Revival Movement in Iranian Classical Music and the Reconstruction of National Identity in the 1960s and the 1970s,” Hadi Milanloo, Memorial University of Newfoundland
“Sounding Citizenship in Southern Africa: Malawian Musicians and the Social Worlds of Recording Studios and Music Education Centers,” Richard M. Deja, University of Illinois
“Unity in (Spite of) Diversity: Tensions and Contradictions in Performing Surinamese National Identity,” Corinna S. Campbell, Williams College

"Music" by Flickr user Rich McPeek, CC BY-NC 2.0

“Music” by Flickr user Rich McPeek, CC BY-NC 2.0

Someplaces: Radio Art, Transmission Ecology and Chicago’s Radius

Magnavox_AM2

This week Sounding Out! is proud to present the first post in Radio Art Reflections, a three part series curated by radio artist and senior radio lecturer at Canterbury Christ Church University Magz Hall. Focusing on innovative approaches to radio art, the series will bring together three leading practitioners who have been researching the field from Canada, Australia and the U.K.

We begin with a fascinating exploration of “transmission ecologies” in recent works in Chicago, Iceland and elsewhere, written by Canadian sound and radio artist Anna Friz — one of the most exciting radio artists working today — who discusses how transmission art has shaped her practice.

— Special Editor Neil Verma

From the early avant-garde Futurists to present-day, utopian dreams litter the history of art meeting technology. When it comes to radio and wireless, these often include the dreams that each new technology will conquer space and time; that the overcoming of distance will enable the symbiosis of human with machine and the union of self with other, while the overcoming of time will bring about a simultaneity of experience. For many radio and transmission artists (myself included), our work with so-called “trailing edge” media seeks to critically engage these myths, positing wireless transmissions instead as time-based, site-specific encounters between people and devices over distances small or large, where the materiality of the electro-magnetic spectrum is experienced within a constantly shifting transmission ecology in which we all, people and devices, function.

If one hallmark of radio art is the desire to appropriate broadcasting by rethinking and re-using technologies of transmission and reception in service of crafting new mythologies and futures for the medium. Artists have long questioned the policies and norms established by state and market around radio broadcasting which delimit experimentation and autonomous practices. Bertolt Brecht‘s call in 1932 for radio to exceed its one-to-many broadcast format in favor of a democratized, transceptive (or many-to-many) medium still resonates with contemporary artists and activists alike. What else could radio become, we ask, if not only a disseminator of information and entertainment, acoustic or digital? If radio so far has largely acted as an accomplice in the industrialization of communications, artistic appropriations of radio can destabilize this process with renewed explorations of radio and electromagnetic phenomena, constructions of temporary networks small or large, and radical explorations of broadcast beyond the confines of programming and format norms.

My first transmitter, built on the Tetsuo Kogawa model, as modified by Bobbi Kozinuk, 1998;

My first transmitter, built on the Tetsuo Kogawa model, as modified by Bobbi Kozinuk, 1998;

Curators, producers and art historians typically describe radio art as the use of radio as an artistic medium, which is to say, art created specifically for the technical and cultural circumstances of broadcast, and which considers these circumstances as artistic material. Today these circumstances have exceeded terrestrial broadcast to include satellite, online, and on-demand forms; similarly radio art has also expanded to include sprawling telematic art exchanges, online podcast series, and unlicensed temporary interventions into the radio dial. As a further reclamation of radio as a medium, many artists pull radio out of the studio to create installations, performance works and public actions which consider not just the act of transmission or the creation of artistic content, but also the material aspects of the electro-magnetic spectrum, and the circuits of people and devices which activate and reveal them.

Japanese media theorist and artist Tetsuo Kogawa describes broadcast radio art as art radio, where art is the content of a transmission. By contrast, radio art involves directly playing with electro-magnetic waves as the artistic medium. Galen Joseph-Hunter of Wave Farm further expands Kogawa’s formulation of radio art with the term transmission art, so as to include audio visual broadcast media and artistic activities across the entire electro-magnetic spectrum, such as work with Very Low Frequency (VLF) and Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) waves, or high frequency wireless networks. These definitions of radio and transmission art emphasize that radio is not a container for content, but is defined as relationships between people and things, occurring in the context of the electro-magnetic spectrum within a transmission ecology.

I apply the term transmission ecology in reference to both the symbolic spaces of cultural production such as a radio station, and to the invisible but very material space of dynamic electromagnetic interactions, both of which feature the collaboration between people and things. Transmission ecology asks more than “who owns the airwaves” by questioning the shifting relationships between all actors in the environment, from human to device to localized weather system to nearby star, and thus is not defined by homeostasis but by constant change. These relationships also support a theory of technology where people are not the absolute controllers of things, but where a push and pull of collaboration occurs within complex material and cultural environments.

Photo of Respire by Anna Friz, a large installation of radios from Nuit Blanche Toronto, 2009. 

Photo of Respire by Anna Friz, a large installation of radios from Nuit Blanche Toronto, 2009.

All activities in the electro-magnetic spectrum form ecologies in relation to one another conceptually, performatively, and materially. Consider the Radia network, an international alliance of independent radio stations who share radio art programming as an alternate transmission ecology within the broader culture of private broadcast radio stations. Another kind of ecology is formed by radio receivers all playing the same station diffused across countless cars and households, as they function in relation to other kinds of wireless devices and electronic systems nearby. Such a muster of receivers can be physically brought together, for instance, in a multi-channel radio installation, to reveal the complex relationships among devices, as each receiver also becomes a sender by electronically effecting its neighbor. A mobile phone receiving wireless internet likewise functions within the instability inherent in the surrounding transmission ecology shaped by all aspects of the built environment, such as the electrical grid and other urban infrastructure, as well as weather or time of day or solar flares. Human bodies and devices alike register the invisible electromagnetic activity that surrounds us as physical, measurable, and affective.

With this in mind consider radio art as occupying “radio space,” a continuous, available, fluctuating area described by the reach of signals within overlapping fields of influence and the space of imagination that invisible territory enables. The extrasensory nature of radio space allows for a productive slippage between real material signals and audible imaginary landscapes. Many radio art and transmission art works specifically draw attention to the transmission ecology in order to question the naturalization of mainstream communications systems, the normalization of practices within those systems, and the pervasiveness of electrical infrastructure, proposing alternate narratives and experiences.

So what is some of this work like? In the past year I have had the pleasure to work with Chicago-based Radius, an experimental radio-based platform which curates monthly episodes broadcast locally using the Audio Relay Unit, an unlicensed autonomous low-watt FM radio transmitter system developed in 2002 by Temporary Services and the Intermod Series. Radius neatly unites radio and transmission art by embracing the production of artistic content for broadcast, sampling existing content for artistic expression, and artistic use of the electro-magnetic spectrum generally. Radius functions as an intermittent exhibition space and as an intervention into the predictable daily grind of the FM dial. Artists compose their pieces specifically for the interference-prone radio space where their work may only be heard in fragments, as the instability and fluctuations of the relatively small Radius signal in relation to the big commercial stations broadcasting from downtown all form the context for experiencing the radio art works. Radius broadcasts one episode per month, on a schedule determined by the artist, with pieces varying in length and repetition, and some following a strict schedule related to cosmic or social timing.

Friz_Transmission_from_skaftfell1

Photo of my private transmitter + antenna pointing out the window in Seydisfjördur, Iceland

Recently I crafted an episode for Radius while on an artist residency in Seydisfjördur, Iceland. The town was the site of the first trans-Atlantic telegraph link between Europe and Iceland in 1906, which was also the year that Reginald Fessenden first broadcast a human voice over radio from his workshop in Brant Rock, Massachusetts. Iceland is remote enough that the electro-magnetic ‘pollution’ from human signal activity is notably absent, and located far enough to the north that in October the light disappears rapidly, so that each day loses eight minutes of daylight. The piece was called Radiotelegraph, a beacon crafted from spoken morse code and sampled signals, then sent from north to south, simulcast on my own low-watt FM transmitter in Seydisfjördur at sundown each day as well as on Radius in Chicago. The transmission marked time passing, beginning earlier each day as it followed the path of the sun. My intention was not to overcome but to experience and recuperate distance through the relation of a remote radio outpost to another minor outpost further south within a metropolis; to hear distance and feel it; to understand that distance, however finite, is a necessary condition for communication and relationship, and that distance is the key ingredient of situated, time-based, spatialized sonic experiences.

Here is the Radius episode featuring Radiotelegraph:

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Power station across the parking lot from the Radius studio at MANA Contemporary, Chicago

Power station across the parking lot from the Radius studio at MANA Contemporary, Chicago

As part of a recent yearly theme on “Grids” Radius tackled the electro-magnetic field space of the city by inviting four artists to create new works to be performed near power stations. In his piece electrosmog, Canadian artist Kristen Roos utilized a high frequency receiver to sonify signal activity in the 800 MHz – 2.5 GHz range, which includes mobile phones, wireless phones, wifi, and microwaves. His site-specific performance took place overlooking the Fisk Generating Station in Chicago, and included microwave ovens and micro-watt transmission to a sound system made of radio receivers. Thus the work was site-specific to both the transmission ecology of urban Chicago and the field effects of the electrical grid, mixing material signals with a speculative approach as to what the cumulative effects of living in this built environment characterized by centralized power could be. In Roos’ work, radio space contextualized and revealed the real–though naturalized and often invisible–relationships between people, things, and systems, where a microwave oven gestured at both danger and musicality.

Listen to the Roos piece here:

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Kristen Roos' set up for his Grids performance

Kristen Roos’ set up for his Grids performance

These radio art works enact places in radiophonic space, and experiment with transmission to question the status quo of how the airwaves are controlled and used. As radio trickster Gregory Whitehead notes, it is position, not sound, that matters most with regard to radio. Artists remain committed to making radiophonic someplaces, however temporarily constructed, inhabited by interpenetrating and overlapping fields and bodies.

Featured Image: Jeff Kolar with Radius’ mobile transmitter, the Audio Relay Unit, on the shore of Lake Michigan. Used with permission.

Anna Friz is a Canadian sound and radio artist who specializes in multi-channel transmission systems for installation, performance, and broadcast. Anna holds a Ph.D. in Communication and Culture from York University, Toronto, and recently completed a post-doctoral fellowship in the Sound Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has performed and exhibited widely across North America, South America, and Europe, and her radio art/works have been heard on the airwaves of more than 25 countries. She is a steering member of the artist collective Skálar |Sound Art | Experimental Music based in Iceland.

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